J'aime dans le temps - Francis Jammes

[David]

J'aime dans le temps Clara d'Ellébeuse,
l'écolière des anciens pensionnats,
qui allait, les soirs chauds, sous les tilleuls
lire les magazines d'autrefois.

Je n'aime qu'elle, et je sens sur mon coeur
la lumière bleue de sa gorge blanche.
Ou est-elle? Où donc était ce bonheur?
Dans sa chambre claire il entrait des branches.

Elle n'est peut-être pas encore morte
— ou peut-être que nous l'étions tous deux.
La grande cour avait des feuilles mortes
dans le vent froid des fins d'été très vieux.

Te souviens-tu ces plumes de paon,
dans un grand vase, auprès des coquillages? . . .
on apprenait qu'on avait fait naufrage,
on appelait Terre-Neuve: le Banc.

Viens, viens, ma chère Clara d'Ellébeuse:
aimons-nous encore si tu existes.
Le vieux jardin a des vieilles tulipes.
Viens toute nue, ô Clara d'Ellébeuse.

**********

My former love is Clara Ellerslie,
a fellow pupil at my boarding school.
Warm evenings she would sit beneath a tree -
a lime - to read until the air grew cool.

I love only her. The bluish hint
of her white throat still makes my heart go boom.
Where is she, and those happy hours we spent?
Branches reached into her sunny room.

Perhaps now, after all, she is not dead;
perhaps we both were then. That may be so.
A cold wind blew dead leaves around the yard
at summers' endings, all those years ago.

Do you remember an imposing vase
of peacock feathers, next to those neat ranks
of polished shells? And learning that there was
a shipwreck, and Newfoundland was The Banks?

So come, my dearest Clara Ellerslie:
let us love each other if we may.
Old gardens have old tulips to display.
Come quite naked, Clara Ellerslie.

[k-j]

Super. I like the cheeky Anglicization of Clara's surname. "Heart go boom" is fab.

I prefer the original's blue "light" to your "hint". But overall you've sacrificed very little to maintain the rhyme.

"That may be so" reads like filler.

"Imposing" for "grand" = very good.

[David]

Super. I like the cheeky Anglicization of Clara's surname. "Heart go boom" is fab.

Jolly good! I just couldn't face finding rhymes for Ellebeuse.

I prefer the original's blue "light" to your "hint".

Originally I had "tint", but it became "hint" one day and I liked it because it was more (ahem) suggestive.

"That may be so" reads like filler

It absolutely is. It seems impossible to translate those two lines without filler, with "now, after all" being filler too, and that was the best I could do. More seriously, I found myself completely unable to enter into his thoughts here - "Perhaps we were both dead ..." - wha? Is it possible that an Anglophone poet could write that? It seemed to me to be the poetic equivalent of an untranslatable Gallic shrug.

Cheers

David

[k-j]

Yeah, I thought of "tint" too, but it sounds slightly unhealthy - I think "hint" is superior.

Re: ou peut-être que nous l'étions tous deux. It is weird. Don't suppose it could be some French idiom we're not familiar with? More likely you're right and it's a good old Gallic shrug.

[twoleftfeet]

Brilliant!
Did you start out with the intention of making it rhyme, or did it just "happen"?

You should try and get it published, David.

[David]

Merci, mon ami, M. Geoff. I wanted it to rhyme, but it was pretty hard work making it happen. I don't know, where does one send something like this? I thought there might be a poetry in translation forum on the web, but I can't find one.

Cheers

David