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Tristan Corbière

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Paris by day

See the large red copper disc emblazon the sky,
Enormous saucepan in which the Good Lord above
Brings manna to the boil: left-overs, still called Try-
The-Chef’s-Special, steeped in sweat and peppered with love.

Packed round a brazier the Dossers are milling,
You can vaguely hear their rancid flesh start to burn;
The boozers are there too, tankards up for filling;
One down-and-out shivers as he waits his turn.

You think it’s the sun that’s frying for young and old
These seething greasy meat-scraps, drenched in floods of gold?
No, it’s pigswill for us that the heavens let fall.

While they stand in sunbeams, we’ve our backs to the wall,
Ours the pitch-pot going cold – here it isn’t sunny! –
Our very substance is a bladder full of gall.

Christ, I’d rather have that than their pot of honey.

Tristan Corbière was born in 1845 in Brittany, the son of a sailor who was also a novelist. Always in poor health, Corbière managed to fill his short life (he died in 1875) with travels, practical jokes, irony and poetry. His collection of quirky, wholly original and frequently moving poems, Les Amours jaunes (1873), was published at his own expense; in 1883 Verlaine rescued him from almost certain oblivion by including him in Les Poètes maudits, along with Rimbaud and Mallarmé.

Christopher Pilling’s translation of Les Amours jaunes (These
Jaundiced Loves) was published in 1995 by Peterloo Poets.

Christopher Pilling writes: Apart from the two couplets, the latter written in the copy of Les Amours Jaunes for Le Gad, Tristan’s friend and favourite restaurateur in Roscoff, the following poems were found handwritten in his own copy and must date from 1873 or ’74.

Translated by Christopher Pilling

Page(s) 124

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