To the end of the trail / Richard Hovey [electronic text]

TRANSLATIONS FROM STEPHANE MALLARMÉ

I.
SIGH

(From the French of Mallarmé.)

MY soul toward thy forehead, O calm sister, where An autumn of strewn freckles dreams in the still air, And toward the wandering heaven of thine angel eye Mounts as, in some sad garden where the last leaves die,

Still faithful, a white fountain sighs toward the blue —Toward the softened, pallid, pure October blue That glasses i' the great bowls its languor without end, — And lets the yellow sun o'er waters where the wind Drives tawny throes of leaves that veer and cleave a cold Furrow, in one long ray drag out its sobbing gold.

GIVERNY, August, 1897.

II.
THE FLOWERS

(From the French of Mallarmé.)

FROM the golden avalanches of the ancient Blue, In the first day, and from the stars' eternal snow Thou didst detach of yore great calices to strew Upon the earth, still young and virgin yet of woe;

The tawny gladiolus, with the slim necked swans; The laurel, sacred flower the souls of exiles wear, Vermilion as the seraph's toe whose pureness there Reddens in heaven with the blush of trampled dawns;

The hyacinth, the myrtle worshipped for its hues, And, like the flesh of woman, cruel-sweet, the rose, Herodias in bloom of the fair garden-close, She whom a dew of fierce and glowing blood bedews;

And thou didst make the lilies with their sobbing white That, rolling Over seas of sighs it grazes on, Through the blue incense of horizons of pale light Mounts upward dreamily toward the weeping moon.

Hosanna on the sistrum and where the censer swings! Our Lady, hosanna from the garden where we wait! And let the echo die in heavenly evenings, Looks that are ecstasies, haloes that scintillate!

III.
THE WINDOWS

(From the French of Mallarmé.)

TIRED of the gloomy ward and the rank smell That rises in the curtain's banal white Toward the great Christ that wearies of the wall, The sick man slyly lifts himself upright

And drags his old limbs, less to warm his sores Than see the sunlight on the stones and glue The white hairs and the bones of his thin face Against the windows the sweet sun burns through;

And his lips, feverish, hungry for the sky, — As once they breathed in their delight of old, Flesh virginal and of long since! —now grease With a long bitter kiss the panes' warm gold.

Drunken, he lives — forgets the dreaded priests, The draughts, the clock, the bed where he must die, The cough; and when the evening bleeds i' the tiles, In the horizon, gorged with light, his eye

Sees golden galleys, beautiful as swans, Sleep on a river of purple and perfumes, Cradling the tawny lightning of their lines In a large idlesse laden with old dooms.

So, seized with loathing for hard-hearted man Who wallows in his belly's food and runs Headstrong to seek that filth, to offer it To her that gives suck to his little ones,

I flee, and clutch at every casement whence One turns his back on life and, benedight, Within those panes washed with eternal dews, Gold with the chaste dawn of the Infinite,

Glass me, and see the angel! die, and would fain — Be the glass Art, or light of occult powers!—Would rise and take my dream for diadem To the prime heaven that beauty blossoms in —

But, alas, Down-Here is master; even in this Safe shelter haunts me, makes me sick to die, And the foul vomit of the silly swine Still makes me hold my nose before the sky.

Is there a way, my soul that knows the gall, To smash the glass insulted by the Lie, And to escape with my two plumeless wings, At risk of falling through eternity?