Winter’s Near (Translation of Jules Laforgue, "L'hiver qui vient")

A life blockaded! Levantine Telegrams! …
How falls the rain! How falls the night,
A windy night…
Easter, Christmas and New Years,
My factory smokestacks
In smoggy fog …
That never clears!

My, there’s nowhere to sit down
The grass is soaking;
Believe you me, it’s all over
Till next year,
The grass is soaked
The words are rusted,
And the trumpets sound!
And the trumpets cease…

Ah, you storm clouds from the coastal plain
You’ve ruined my last Sunday with rain.

Drizzly
In the rain forest, spider-webs play
Sink under raindrops, are washed away.

Ambassadorial Suns that work in blond embassies
For Farm Shows,
Where have you gone?
This evening, lay helplessly impaled
Lying on its side
Amidst the oaks
On its cloak,
A sun white as pub spittle
Yellow oaks for its litter
Yellow oaks in autumn weather.
And the trumpets sound!...
He returns…
He returns at last!
Talley-Ho! Talley-Ho!
Sad Yesteryears, No more!
To Hell with them all!...
And he lies there, like the remanants
Of a botched tonsillectomy,
Trembling, all alone.

Talley-Ho, we’re away!
Old Winter leads the way;
Such a twisted highway
Without guides, we might go astray!...
Oh! Wheels from antique cars
Traveling trails from Mars
Troops of clouds in danger
Sheparded to transatlantic mangers!...
Faster, faster, our destination’s near.

And tonight,
The wind’s made such a mess of things!
Trashed everything!
Nests and pretty gardens.
My heat and my sleep:
Just echoes of her wrathful sweep.

Still green leaves on all these branches,
Just a pile of dead leaves in the underbrush;
Foliage, leaves, a good gust of wind blows
Them en masse to tepid pools
Or to the fire of the Huntsman’s Lodge
Or to stretchers for ambulances
For soldiers far from France.

‘Tis the season, ‘tis the season,
The rust encroaches on everything,
The rust rusts through their spleens kilometric
And nothing can travel on wires telegraphic.

The trumpets, the trumpets – melancholy trumpets!...
Melancholic!...
They proceed, change scale,
Change scale and music
The sound, they cease, they sound!...
The trumpets, the trumpets!...
They’re gone on the North Wind.

I can’t get their sound out of my head
Their echoes!...
‘Tis the season, ‘tis the season, goodbye sidewalk-cafés!...
This rain has such angelic tranquility,
Goodbye cafés, and goodbye to paintings,
All those paintings by Watteau of idylls
Under the chestnut trees,
It is coughs in high-school corridors
And tea in empty rooms
Tuberculosis saddens our neighbors
Tragedy of great centers.

But, wool and rubber, drugs and dreams,
Wide-spread curtains
Above balconies and ditches
Before the ocean of suburban roofs
Lamps, stamps, tea, pastry,
How do I love thee!...
(Oh, And did I mention,
Besides the sounds of pianos,
The sober, vespereal, weekly mystery
Of the health statistics
In the newspapers?)

No, no! ‘Tis the season, and the planet shudders!
‘Tis autumn, autumn
Let’s finish, with these garments
That time has sewn.
‘Tis the season, all torn! ‘Tis the season!
All the years, all the years,
I am a Chorus
I sing your song.


© Copyright Jerome Raymond Kraus 2006