Songs

Le jet d'eau (1889)

Part of a series or song cycle:

Le jet d'eau

Charles Baudelaire

Tes beaux yeux sont las, pauvre amante !

Reste longtemps, sans les rouvrir,

Dans cette pose nonchalante

Où t’a surprise le plaisir.

Dans la cour le jet d’eau qui jase

Et ne se tait ni nuit ni jour,

Entretient doucement l’extase

Où ce soir m’a plongé l’amour.

La gerbe d’eau qui berce

Ses mille fleurs,

Que la lune traverse

De ses pâleurs,

Tombe comme une averse

De larges pleurs.

Ainsi ton âme qu’incendie

L’éclair brûlant des voluptés

S’élance, rapide et hardie,

Vers les vastes cieux enchantés.

Puis, elle s’épanche, mourante,

En un flot de triste langueur,

Qui par une invisible pente

Descend jusqu’au fond de mon cœur.

La gerbe d’eau qui berce ...

O toi, que la nuit rend si belle,

Qu’il m’est doux, penché vers tes seins,

D’écouter la plainte éternelle

Qui sanglote dans les bassins !

Lune, eau sonore, nuit bénie,

Arbres qui frissonnez autour,—

Votre pure mélancolie

Est le miroir de mon amour.

La gerbe d’eau qui berce...

The fountain

English Translation © Richard Stokes

Your beautiful eyes are fatigued, poor lover!

Rest awhile, without opening them anew,

In this careless pose,

Where pleasure surprised you.

The babbling fountain in the courtyard,

Never silent night or day,

Sweetly prolongs the ecstasy

Where love this evening plunged me.

The sheaf of water

Swaying its thousand flowers,

Through which the moon gleams

With its pallid light,

Falls like a shower

Of great tears.

And so your soul, lit

By the searing flash of ecstasy,

Leaps swift and bold

To vast enchanted skies.

And then, dying, spills over

In a wave of sad listlessness,

Down some invisible incline

Into the depths of my heart.

The sheaf of water ...

O you, whom night renders so beautiful,

How sweet, as I lean toward your breasts,

To listen to the eternal lament

Sobbing in the fountain’s basin!

O moon, lapping water, blessed night,

Trees that quiver all around,

Your sheer melancholy

Is the mirror of my love.

The sheaf of water...

Composer

Poet

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Taken from Wikipedia. To view the full article, please click here.

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