translations from Vivien’s 1901 book Études et Préludes
Undine
There’s a light in your laughter and a darkness in your touch.
Your lips are cold. You smile at the distress
your kisses cause. Your eyes are blue
as the lotus on the lake, your brow is whiter,
purer than a water lily.
You withdraw. There’s a fluid grace to your step;
your hair, unbound, spreads like a net;
the stream of your words is a river one mustn’t
trust; your arms are elegant,
smooth and supple as reeds,
as reeds that border waters—
so soothing, so skilled, so certain
is their embrace as they enclose,
one is scarcely aware of drowning.
What fear there is passes
as rapidly as life
extinguished in a kind of cruel swoon.
Sonnet to Death
I await you, my always virgin love,
I await our night of triumph, glad for its grandeur;
you, a bridal bouquet of lilies in your hand
—emblem of eternal tenderness—
I await your ultimate lover’s kiss,
the subtle feel of nothingness,
profound as the grave.
Each petal will tremble, every leaf on the wreaths;
the organ will roar like a drunk for our nuptials,
soar to austere cries, piping sharp and shrill,
as if agonized by passion.
Candles on the altar will flower with fire,
the sound of crying, the incense, the wedding hymn
of Extinction will rise for us.
Dawn will not wake us. Those newly wed
are allowed to sleep as late as they may.
Our wedding night will never know day.
The Scent of the Grapes
I breathe in the scent of the grapes, it fills me,
like a rising wave of drunkenness,
with its heavy sweetness. The harvest scent
is pleasantly suffocating. Now land and sky
are bright and clear with the calm that only comes
with autumn. Look at these fields, wounded,
scarred, by centuries of farming.
Still humid and warm with the last breath of summer.
the fenced-in vines on their trellises
have swelled the dense heavy tumult of their grapes,
with the careless generosity of a woman
umbuttoning her blouse.
The ghost of a bacchante wanders among them,
with red hair and lips, large dark eyes,
rich with secrets and blazing with desires
the ancients hadn’t learned to be ashamed of.
She offers her flesh to be kissed, even bitten,
crying aloud with pleasure
to the glory of wine,
to the glory of loveless kisses lavished
on stupid lips, of rudely roving glances
from eyes that never shone with a thought—
the glorious largesse of the winepress !
It seems the field shimmers and flickers
with phantoms of bygone orgies
and those to be. The dense and too-rich scent
of new wine fills a night
when no one will sleep.
Sonnet: Your hair has the surreal splendor . . .
Your hair has the surreal splendor
of a drug dream, it seems to flicker
with cold blonde fire, as if you were moonlit.
Your eyes are the blue of skies or seas,
your dress has rustle of wind through forest leaves.
Your white hands which receive my kisses
are so cold I half expect my contrasting warmth
will sear them. You’re as distant
as if all the worlds, including this,
were nothing but dust hovering in space.
And yet, the ecstasy that kept me wakeful
night long, just watching you—seems now on the wane.
I saw what I can’t unsee,
it woke me like a nightmare, obscene,
I glimpsed on your lips,
lovely as a summer’s dawn,
the experienced grin of an old tired whore.
Amazon
The amazon smiles at the wreckage,
though even the sun has gone to sleep,
sick at last of battle.
The amazon breathes deep, her nostrils widen,
like those of a war-horse, at the scent of blood.
She’s exultant, this bizarre connoisseur of death—
She loves the kind of lover
who screams as if tortured,
who shudders with pleasures that look like pain,
who subsides after crisis into an exhaustion
that looks like death. Kisses and cuddles
make her sick. She needs
the thrill of horror to keep her interest.
What she really wants is to hover like a prey-bird
till she can print a final kiss on lips that don’t respond.
She dreams of that terrible inexpressible tremor,
that spasm more beautiful and frightening
than the ultimate one of love.
Justin Brumby’s translation of Vivien’s poetry may be purchased here.