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I
Andromache, I'm thinking of you! That little river,
Poor sad mirror where once there shone
The immense majesty of your grief as a widow,
That lying Simoïs your tears made grow,
Suddenly fecundated my fertile memory,
As I went through the new Carrousel.
The old Paris is no more (the shape of a city
Changes quicker, alas! than the heart of a mortal);
I see but in my mind all that camp of huts,
Those heaps of sketchy capitals and shafts,
The grass, great blocks gone green with puddles,
And, gleaming in the windows, confused bric-à-brac.
There a zoo extended once;
There I saw, one morning, at the hour when under clear
Cold skies Work awakes, where the city dumps
Press a dark hurricane into the quiet air,
A swan that had escaped from its cage,
And, scraping the cobbles with webbed feet,
Along the uneven ground dragged its white plumage.
Near a brook dried up the beast opening its beak
Nervously bathed its wings in the dust,
And said, its heart of its fair native lake full:
"When will you come, rain? lightning, when will you thunder?"
I see that miserable one, myth strange and fateful,
Toward the sky sometimes, like the man in Ovid,
Toward the sky cruelly blue and ironic,
Atop its convulsive neck its head stretching avid,
As if it were addressing reproaches to God!
II
Paris is changing! but nothing in my melancholy
Has moved! new palaces, scaffoldings, blocks,
Old suburbs, all for me becomes allegory,
And my dearest memories are heavier than rocks.
Then too before this Louvre one image oppresses:
I'm thinking of my great swan, with its wild gesture,
Like exiles, sublime and ridiculous,
And gnawed by an incessant desire! and then of you,
Andromache, downcast from the arms of a great spouse,
Base livestock, handy to superb Pyrrhus,
Beside an empty tomb in ecstasy bowed;
Widow of Hector, alas! and wife of Helenus!
I'm thinking of the negress, thinning and phthisic,
Trudging through the mud, and looking, eyes haggard,
For the absent coconut-trees of superb Africa
Behind the immense high wall of fog;
Of whoever has lost what again one can meet with
Never, never! of they who quench their thirst with tears
And suck the breast of Pain like a good she-wolf!
Of scrawny orphans drying out like flowers!
So in the forest where my mind makes its exile
An old Memory rings like a full-wound horn!
I'm thinking of sailors marooned on an island,
Of captives, the vanquished... of many others more!
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