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| "Flowers on Soft Wind" Border |
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| H. Helmy - 2006 |
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To the Poet on the Subject of Flowers
~ a modern Irish translation
Thus, forever toward dark skies
Where quivers topaz seas,
Your evening sets its task for the lilies—
As pessaries of ecstasy!
In our own time, this Sago Palm age
When plants to toil are all disposed,
Such plants will drink in chaste outrage
From your religious prose.
Monsieur De Kerdrel's lily
– The sonnet of 1830 –
Lily that is the Bard's laurel,
With pink and amaranth to follow . . .
Lilies, Lilies there's none to be seen!
Yet in your verse there will be
Like tenderfoot courtesan's sleeves
Those trembling white flowers— the Lilies!
Always, dear chaps, when you bathe,
Your shirt's oxters stained with yellow blots,
Billow in the morning breeze
Above the soiled Forget-Me-Nots.
Love skips the Customs of your lilacs
—Only eyewash for me, really!
And those violets of the woods—
Sugary spittle dark Nymphs spew!
Oh! Poets, if you possessed
Roses - exhaled like breath
Red, upon laurel stems
With a thousand octaves bloating them.
If Banville would make them snow from on high
Blood-stained; in rotation
Blacking the stranger's wild eye
With his malign interpretations!
In your forests and meadows,
Too peaceable photographers,
Your flora is diverse, so so,
As most decanter stoppers.
Always, vegetables of France
Cross-grained, phthisical, absurd
Where Basset-Hound bellies forage through plants
In an ever twilight world.
Always, after dreadful designs,
Blue Lotuses or Helianths,
Prissy prints, saints' lives
Fit for First Communicants!
With Lorreto Window stanzas,
The Asoka Ode concurs,
Butterflies, plump and dazzling
Spoil the Daisies with their turds.
Ancient verdure, old Galloons
Vegetable fancy-wafers,
Snooty flowers of drawing rooms
For Rattlesnakes, no, - but for Cockchafers!
These vegetable dolls that slobber,
From which Grandville makes his frames—
They have surely sucked their colors
From grumpy stars that wear eye-shades.
Yes, spit from your Pan Pipes splats
Makes for some pricey glucoses—
Fried eggs piled-up in old hats:
Lilies, Asokas, Lilacs, Roses!
Oh! White Hunter who runs without socks
Across the pastures in a panic,
You should have – should you not? –
Some grounding in things botanic.
You would make succeed, I fear,
Russet Crickets to Spanish Flies—
Rio golds to blues of Rhine,
Norway's, in brief, to Florida climes.
But, dear chap, art's not now for us;
It's the truth, if we permit this:
Too prodigious Eucalyptus,
Hexameter-long Boa Constrictors.
So there, as if Mahogany can only be
For (even in our own Guianas)
A Helter-Skelter of Chimpanzees
Among vertiginous Lianas.
In short, is a flower Rosemary or Lily,
– Alive or dead be it,
Worth the crap of some fowl of the sea –
Is it worth as much as one candle-drip?
I mean it, and make no mistake,
Even you, sitting in a Bamboo hut
Using brown Persian rugs for drapes
And with the screens always shut.
You would scrawl blossomings
Fit for Oise departments of extravagance.
Poet, these are reasonings
No less absurd than arrogant!
Speak not of Pampas in Spring
Nor that awful revolts laid waste,
But of Tobaccos and Cotton Trees,
Speak of harvests for exotic tastes.
Say, white face that Phoebus tanned—
Just how many Dollars yearly
Has Pedro Velazquez, the Havana man?
Cover in shite the Sorrento Sea!
Where Swans in their thousands go
Let your verses campaign without rest
In order to reclaim the Mangrove
Swamps, replete with pools that snakes infest.
Your quatrain dives through bloody woods
Returning to lay at Mankind's feet
Diverse subjects; white sugar cubes
Various rubbers and coughdrop sweets.
Let us know, through what you do,
If the yellow snow on peaks in the Tropics
Is caused by gluts of insect eggs or due
To Lichens that are microscopic.
We desire it— find Oh! Hunter!
Types of scented Madder plants
Will be made to bloom by Nature
In each and every soldier's pants.
Find on the edge of the sleeping wood
Flowers which resemble noses,
From which golden pomades ooze
On the dark hair of Buffalos.
Find in wild meads where there's bluegrass convulsing
Some silvery pubescences,
Calyxes full of eggs combusting
Cooking within the essences.
Find fleecy thistles whose shorn wool
Ten pop-eyed donkeys strain to spin,
Further, find within the wood
Flowers, like recliners to be sat in.
Find in the depths of steam-coal seams
Flowers nearly precious stones.
Whose pale and cold, hard ovaries
Sprout in tonsils, set like gems.
Serve us Oh! Stuffer!
(This you can do)
Plates of syrupy Lily stew
To corrode our German-Silver spoons.
Someone will speak of "The Great Amour"
– The thief of grave indulgences –
But neither Renan or the cat called Murr
Have seen such huge, blue Thyrsuses.
You quicken in our torpors
Through scent's apoplexy,
Exalt us to candor
More pure than the Maries.
Tradesman, colonist, medium—
Your rhyme will ooze pink or white
Like a blaze of Sodium -
Or rubber trees tapped just right.
From your dark verse, juggler,
White, green and red opticized
Let strange flowers burst
And some electric butterflies.
See, it's hell's own century
And telegraph poles, the dulcet
Lyre of singing steel,
Will be your splendid epaulettes
Give us in verse - The Potato Blight -
And poems more like mystery rites
To be read from Treguier to Paramaribo.
Buy books by Monsieur Figuier; Hachette's has added plates to.
Composed by Arthur Rimbaud (14th July 1871),
rendered into English verse
by Eamonn
Stewart
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