Hymnes orphiques: Traduit du grec ancien par Leconte de Lisle

by Leconte de Lisle

EXTRAIT:
VII. parfum de hèlios
L’Encens

Entends-moi, Bienheureux, qui vois éternellement toutes choses, Titan resplendissant d’or, Hypériôn, lumière ouranienne, force naturelle, miroir infatigable et doux des vivants, à droite engendrant le matin, et, à gauche, la nuit ; modérateur des temps, qui conduis quatre chevaux aux pieds sonores, qui te précipites, strident, en feu, avec une face claire, et qui fais ta route dans les tourbillons d’un mouvement sans fin ! Conducteur des hommes pieux dans la bonne voie, ennemi des impies, qui portes une lyre d’or, qui diriges le cours harmonieux du Kosmos, maître des ouvrages excellents, qui mènes le Kosmos, joueur de syrinx, qui cours dans le feu, qui roules en cercle, Porte-lumière éclairant les choses changeantes, qui apportes la vie, ardent et pur, terme du temps, immortel, tranquille, partout visible, lumière circulaire du Kosmos, qui étincelles de beaux rayons, instituteur de justice, aimant les fontaines, maître du Kosmos, gardien de la foi jurée, le plus puissant des protecteurs, œil de justice, lumière de la vie, traîné par des chevaux, et qui pousses ton quadrige avec le fouet sifflant, entends les paroles qui t’implorent, et donne une vie pieuse et douce à ceux qui sont initiés aux mystères.

50 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 30, 2015

About the author

Charles-Marie René Leconte de Lisle was a French poet and translator of the XIX century. In Leconte de Lisle the Parnassian movement seems to crystallize. His verse is clear, sonorous, dignified, deliberate in movement, classically correct in rhythm, full of exotic local colour, of savage names, of realistic rhetoric. It has its own kind of romance, in its "legend of the ages," so different from Hugo's, so much fuller of scholarship and the historic sense, yet with far less of human pity. Coldness cultivated as a kind of artistic distinction seems to turn all his poetry to marble, in spite of the fire at its heart. Most of Leconte de Lisle's poems are little chill epics, in which legend is fossilized. They have the lofty monotony of a single conception of life and of the universe. He sees the world as what Byron called it, "a glorious blunder", and desires only to stand a little apart from the throng, meditating scornfully. Hope, with him, becomes no more than this desperate certainty:

Tu te tairas, ô voix sinistre des vivants!
You will be quiet, o sinister voice of the living!


His only prayer is to Death, "divine Death", that it may gather its children to its breast:

Affranchis-nous du temps, du nombre et de l'espace, Et rends-nous le repos que la vie a troublé!
Free us of time, of name and of space / and give us the repose which life hath troubled!

The interval which is his he accepts with something of the defiance of his own Cain, refusing to fill it with the triviality of happiness, waiting even upon beauty with a certain inflexible austerity. He listens and watches, throughout the world, for echoes and glimpses of great tragic passions, languid with fire in the East, a tumultuous conflagration in the Middle Ages, a sombre darkness in the heroic ages of the North. The burning emptiness of the desert attracts him, the inexplicable melancholy of the dogs that bark at the moon; he would interpret the jaguar's dreams, the sleep of the condor. He sees nature with the same wrathful impatience as man, praising it for its destructive energies, its haste to crush out human life before the stars fall into chaos, and the world with them, as one of the least of stars. He sings the "Dies Irae" exultingly; only seeming to desire an end of God as well as of man, universal nothingness. He conceives that he does well to be angry, and this anger is indeed the personal note of his pessimism; but it leaves him somewhat apart from the philosophical poets, too fierce for wisdom and not rapturous enough for poetry.

Reviews

[ethel —]

Moi quand Proust me lobotomise pour que je lise le premier ouvrage venu :
(C'était très parfumé)