Paul Verlaine translations

Paul Verlaine: English Translations

Il pleure dans mon coeur (“It rains in my heart”)
by Paul Verlaine
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It rains in my heart
As it rains on the town;
Heavy languor and dark
Drenches my heart.

Oh, the sweet-sounding rain
Cleansing pavements and roofs!
For my listless heart's pain
The pure song of the rain!

Still it rains without reason
In my overcast heart.
Can it be there's no treason?
That this grief's without reason?

As my heart floods with pain,
Lacking hatred, or love,
I've no way to explain
Such bewildering pain!

Published by Better Than Starbucks

Spleen
by Paul Verlaine
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The roses were so very red;
The ivy, impossibly black.

Dear, with a mere a turn of your head,
My despair’s flooded back!

The sky was too gentle, too blue;
The sea, far too windswept and green.

Yet I always imagined―or knew―
I’d again feel your spleen.

Now I'm tired of the glossy waxed holly,
Of the shimmering boxwood too,

Of the meadowland’s endless folly,
When all things, alas, lead to you!

Paul-Marie Verlaine (1844-1896) was a French poet and a prominent figure in the Symbolist and Decadent poetry movements, along with Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Verlaine has been called "one of the most purely lyrical of French poets." At age 14 the precocious Verlaine sent his first extant poem "La Mort" to Victor Hugo. Verlaine married 16-year-old Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville in 1870. The following year he began a famous/infamous love affair with the boy poet Arthur Rimbaud. Their passionate affair, the subject of various sensational books and films, ended in 1873 when a drunken Verlaine shot Rimbaud, injuring his wrist, and ending up in jail for eighteen months. In 1894 Verlaine's peers elected him France's "Prince of Poets." Keywords/Tags: Verlaine, French, translation, rain, languor, heart, treason, pain, spleen, roses, ivy, despair, sky, sea, blue, green, holly, boxwood