Of the poem I translated in the last post.
Have I improved it, or not?
Romance, by Arthur Rimbaud
I
You can’t be serious! Not at seventeen;
One night out at the café, you’ve had enough!
Enough pints, lemon-fizz, enough clashing and glare,
out you flee to the path, hung over with spring;
The lindens’ scent fine in the fine June night air,
so sweet, so heady — your eyes close;
the wind spills over with sound (the city’s not far)
and with perfume of vines and of beer.
II
That’s when you glimpse just a scrap of deep blue
Caught between the young shoots of the trees,
Pierced by a faulty star
that in one slight shiver vanishes, so small and pure white…
O June night! Seventeen! You’ll let it go to your head,
the sap rising in you like foam, like champagne,
delirious, intoxicating; rising too, as on fluttering wings,
to your very lips, you feel a buzzing, a kiss…
III
Across each romance your heart has played Crusoe,
been washed ashore, gone back to nature, alone; but now
A girl flashes into the lamplight, then back into the shadow
of Papa’s head towering above the rim of his collar;
She seizes on your frightful innocence, and so, all the while
Putting one tiny foot in front of the other,
she whirls, alert, on booted heel, and in one blow
swats all the tunes right from your lips.
IV
You’re in love. You’re taken — at least for the summer.
You’re in love. You’ll make sonnets — they’ll just make her laugh.
All your friends will run off — you’ll have gone out of style;
till your object, one night, cares to send her reply!
On that night you’ll run back to the blinding cafés,
you’ll be begging for beers and for more lemon-fizz,
You can’t be serious! Not at seventeen,
When the linden-blooms loom over the green paths of spring.
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