What Silk…

 Stéphane Mallarmé

What silk of time’s sweet balm
Where the Chimera tires himself

Is worth the coils and natural cloud

You tend before the mirror’s calm?

The blanks of meditating flags

Stand high along our avenue:

But I’ve your naked tresses too

To bury there my contented eyes.

No! The mouth cannot be sure

Of tasting anything in its bite

Unless your princely lover cares

In that mighty brush of hair

To breathe out, like a diamond,

The cry of Glory stifled there.

                    Crushed by….
 

Crushed by the overwhelming cloud
Depth of basalt and lavas

By even the enslaved echoes

Of a trumpet without power

What sepulchral shipwreck (you

Know it, slobbering there, foam)

Among hulks the supreme one

Flattened the naked mast too

Or that which, furious mistake

Of some noble ill-fate

All the vain abyss spread wide

In the so-white hair’s trailing

Would have drowned miser-like

The childish flank of some Siren.

                    My Books…
 

My books closed again on Paphos’ name,
It delights me to choose with solitary genius

A ruin, by foam-flecks in thousands blessed

Beneath hyacinth, far off, in days of fame.

Let the cold flow with its silence of scythes,

I’ll not ululate here in a ‘no’ that’s empty

If this frolic so white near the ground denies

To each site the honour of false scenery.

My hunger regaled by no fruits here I see

Finds equal taste in their learned deficiency:

Let one burst with human fragrance and flesh!

While my love pokes the fire, foot on cold iron

I brood for a long time perhaps with distress

On the other’s seared breast of an ancient Amazon.

© Translated by A. S. Kline