The Jinx

Stéphane Mallarmé

 
Above the dumbfounded human herd
 the brilliant, savage manes of blue-
 starved beggars leapt, their feet already in our way.
 
A black wind deployed as banner over their march
 whipped it with cold so far into the flesh
 that it hollowed irritable furrows.
 
Always in hope of arriving at the sea,
 they voyaged without bread, or sticks, or urns,
 biting the golden lemon of the bitter ideal.
 
Most grieved their last gasp in the night parades,
 drunk on the joy of seeing their own blood flow,
 O Death the only kiss for speechless mouths!
 
Their unmaking is in the hands of a potent angel,
 his naked sword erect on the horizon:
 a purple clot occludes the grateful breast.
 
They suck on pain as once they milked the dream:
 when they give rhythmic form to carnal tears,
 the people kneel down and their mother rises.
 
These ones are comforted, secure, majestic;
 but a hundred jeered-at brothers dog their steps,
 ignoble martyrs to contorted chance.
 
The same salt tears erode their cheeks,
 they eat of ashes with the same devotion,
 but the fate that guys them is vulgar or comic.
 
They too had power to excite, like drums,
 the servile pity of a dull-voiced race,
 peers of Prometheus without the vulture!
 
No, base and confined to deserts without cisterns,
 they run beneath the scourge of a fractious monarch,
 The Jinx, whose unheard-of laughter knocks them flat.
 
He leaps at lover’s backs, to share the ride!
 The torrent crossed, he dumps you in a pond,
 leaving the two white swimmers blocked in mud.
 
Thanks to him, if someone blows a trumpet,
 children will crack us up in wilful laughter
 when, fist to arse, they ape its fanfare.
 
Thanks to him, if another, none too soon, should deck
 a withered breast with a nubile rose, reviving it,
 some spit will shine upon its damned bouquet.
 
And this dwarf skeleton, topped with a feathered hat,
 in boots, whose armpit has real worms for hair,
 is for them the infinity of vast bitterness.
 
Provoked, will they not prick at the pervert:
 their creaking rapier follows the rays of moonlight
 that snow into its corpse and pass on through.
 
Lacking the pride that glorifies bad fortune
 and sad to avenge the pecking at their bones,
 they covet hate, instead of nursing grudges.
 
They are the laughing stock of fiddle-scrapers,
 of urchins, whores and of the eternal brood
 of ragamuffins dancing when the bottle’s dry.
 
The poets, always up for alms or vengeance,
 not knowing these erased gods are sick,
 say they are boring and without intelligence.
 
“They can run away, having had enough excitement,
 as a virgin horse refuses foam and tempest
 rather than galloping forth in armour.
 
We’ll get the festal champion drunk on incense:
 but they, why don’t we make these minstrels take
 to scarlet rags, howling for us to stop!”
 
When everyone has spat scorn in their faces,
 these heroes, overtired by playful sickness,
 annulled men, praying for thunder in swallowed words
 
go hang themselves from the street lamp, laughably.
 

Translated by Peter Manson