Les sonnets de Shakespeare. I
The Sonnets of Shakespeare. I
Marie Garnier
AN ESSAY IN INTERPRETATION
[This cahier presents Marie Garnier’s French verse translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, offered as a creative interpretation rather than a literal rendering. The sonnets are presented in sequence, beginning with Sonnet I. Below are representative translations from the collection.]
I
From the most beautiful beings we ask for sons, That the lily of beauty may eternize its glory, And, since the white candor of lilies yields to Time, May white heirs preserve their memory!
You, concentrating your life in the hearth of your eyes, Feed your bright fire with your own substance, And your sweet enemy, your pernicious self, Raises famine in the fields of abundance.
Fresh and tender ornament of the fruitful earth, Sole and brilliant herald of the adorning spring, Why hide your sap within your youthful buds, Wastrel, who squanders himself by playing the miser?
Oh! take pity on the world or be its executioner: Devour its hope, purveyor of the tomb!
II
When forty winters, besieging your youth, Shall have dug menacing trenches across your brow, They shall make a rag without pride, without nobility, Of the proud and noble body all thought fertile.
And if they ask you where all your charms lie, And the old vigor of your faded days, To dare show your eyes ravined by tears Would be to expose yourself to bruising affront.
How much more praise would adorn your courage If you could answer: “This son is mine; He comes to settle my account, excuse my age,” — Son whose beauty declares him born of you!
Ah! that would be to be reborn and feel at once In the frost of your heart a warm blood flowing back!
III
Look in your mirror; answer its prayer That the time has come to recast your features, For you defraud your age and a mother’s hope By not restoring the tower of such a palace.
There is no maiden so fair, with flanks left fallow, Who would scorn the care of your fertile labor; There is no man so mad who would, from pride, Be deaf to life, be dead to love!
Your mother lives in you: your fever is the call Of her first April that would bloom again: In the casement opened by age’s cruel finger, You shall see your golden fruits swell and ripen.
But if you live and wish to leave no trace, Die and seal in the tomb your image and your race!
IV
Lavish of your charm, Friend, why pour out Upon yourself, yourself alone, the divine bequest of your beauty? Nature lends us and means to take us back! Generous, she wants generosity.
Then, my beautiful miser, what good is it to misuse The largesse given so you might be generous? Usurer without profit, why hoard Life, and refuse to accept its burdens?
You live without living, dealing only with yourself: It is your sweet being, Friend, that I see you cheating; And when Death comes to issue the final summons, How to settle your account, or how to cheat her?
Your sterile beauty goes with you underground, She who, made fruitful, would have been your legatee.
V
The Hours that of sweet rays once wove That loving gaze that rivets every eye, Shall become the tyrants of their own dear work And strip its grace from your gracious brow.
Old Time, restless, on the winds of Winter Drags Summer forth to soil and confound it; Frost freezes the sap, fells the proud tall trunks, And beauty is snowed over and vigor collapses.
Then, had wise Summer distilled The springtime sap in crystal phials, The essence of beauty would not be annihilated, She and her memory — sunk in the necropolis.
They brave Winter and the common death, Those flowers whose perfume Love has saved.
VI
Let not Winter, with its fleshless finger, Dry up your Summer without distilling your sap; Perfume your life before it has faded; Fear the murder of self for beauty too brief.
Use and not usury, Friend, pays in happiness Him who willingly pays out his daily sum: Create another self, and, multiplying your joy tenfold, Tenfold your image and your power as a man!
And if by ten children your being is repeated, Ten times happier shall be your happy soul: You shall be reborn living in your posterity, When the mortal Reaper comes to mow you down.
Be not stubborn: do not take, you who are so fair, For heirs Death and the worms of the tomb!
VII
See! when in the East the golden light Lifts its burning brow, the gaze of mortals Rises to salute its sacred majesty And pay humble homage to the young god of heaven.
It climbs the heights of the heavens and of glory, At its noon, like a man mature and strong: Dazzled eyes adore the victory Of the pilgrim haloed in his golden dust.
But, fallen from the zenith, its weakened brow falters…
[The collection continues with further sonnets, presented as French verse interpretations of the English originals.]