No matter how many times it's quoted, no matter how many times I've read it, or how many nothing-heads love it, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" will always be one of those...
one of those precious....
oh you know what i mean.
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I have a Louis Aragon poem for you...
i await with bated breath !
This is my translation:
Let's both spit both of us
On what we loved
On what we both loved
Shall we for this both of us
Is truly a waltz melody and I imagine
What passes between us that is dark and peerless
Like a dialogue of mirrors abandoned in left luggage somewhere
Foligno perhaps or the Auvergne at La Bourboule
Certain names are charged with distant thunder
Shall we let's both spit on those vast countries
Where little rented cars run around
Shall we for it's essential for something still
Something
To unite us let's spit shall we
Both of us it's a waltz
A sort of convenient sob
Let's spit let's spit little cars
Let's spit that's the password
A waltz of mirrors
A dialogue nowhere
Listen to those vast countries where the wind
Weeps over what we loved
One of them is a horse with its elbows on the ground
Another a dead man waving linen another
The trace of your footsteps I remember a deserted village
On the shoulder of a scorched mountain
I remember your shoulder
I remember your elbow
I remember your linen
I remember your footsteps
I remember a town where there is no horse
I remember your gaze that scorched
My deserted heart a dead man Mazeppa carried by a horse before me like that day in the mountains
Drunkenness sped my trajectory through the martyred oak
That bled prophetically while the daylight faded over blue trucks
I remember so many things
So many evenings
So many bedrooms
So many walks
So many angers
So many halts in worthless places
Where nevertheless awakened the spirit of mystery
Like the cry of a blind child in a frontier station I remember
So I am speaking to the past Laugh away
If you feel like it at the sound of my words
Loved Was Came Caressed Waited
Watched the stairs that creaked
O violence violence I am a man possessed
Waited waited deep well-shafts
I thought I would die of waiting
The silence was sharpening pencils in the street
That coughing taxi moves away to die elsewhere
Waited waited the muffled voices
Outside the door the speech of doors
Hiccup of houses waited
Familiar objects took on in turn
Waited the spectral air
Waited of escaped convicts Waited
Waited in god's name
From a prison of glimmerings and suddenly
No stupid No idiot
The shoe crushed the wool of the carpet
I can scarcely return
Loved loved loved but you cannot know how much
Loved it's in the past
Loved loved loved loved loved
O violence
It's all very funny for those
Who speak of love as if it were the story of a first flirtation
Ah shit on all that pretense
Do you know when it really becomes a story
Love
Do you know
When every breath turns to tragedy
When the colours of the day are what laughter makes them
A tune a shadow of a shadow a name flung out
That everything burns and you know deep down
That everything is burning
And you say Let it all burn
And the sky has the taste of the scattered sand
Love you bastards love for you
Is managing to sleep together
Managing
And afterwards ha ha all of love in that
Afterwards
We manage to talk of what it is to
Sleep together for years
Do you understand
For years
Like sea sails falling
On the deck of a ship loaded with plague victims
In a film I saw recently
One by one
The white rose dies like the red rose
So what is it that moves me to such a pitch
In these last words
The final word perhaps in which
All is heinous heinously irreparable
And tearing apart Word panther Word electric
Chair
The final word of love just imagine that
And the final kiss and the final
Listlessness
And the final sleep Hey it's funny
I was thinking simply of the final night
Ah everything's taking on this abominable meaning
I meant the final moments
The final farewells the final sigh
The final gaze
The horror the horror the horror
For years the horror
Let's spit shall we
On what we loved together
Let's spit on love
On our unmade beds
On our silence and on the stammered words
On the stars were they
Your eyes
On the sun were it
Your teeth
On eternity were it
Your mouth
And on our love
Were it YOUR love
Let's spit shall we
He wrote it in 1929... Right after his suicide attempt.
i have read this several times and it's so dense, so much to uncover i feel like blissfully drowning in it. i loved it, matthew. this writing is inspirational.
thank you.
I'm so happy to hear that! This poem means a lot to me. That's why I translated it. In translating a poem, one becomes very close with the text at hand. When one is close to a poem (the text)before translating it? Well...
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