Sol 5.6

  1. O neighbors of the Seine, there lives in your haunts

    a youth who laments to the Nile his exile from home.

  2. His nights wronged him, and he was handed over

    to calamity by companions devoid of honor.

  3. Time transformed him, amid the hardship of exile,

    into a tormented spirit and a body worn lean by travel.

  4. He strives toward glory; its perils pelt him

    with shards that bring both benefit and harm.

  5. His solace is that the end of every onslaught

    through which the free man suffers is a crown of laurel.

  6. O flicker of lightning, at which hearts quake,

    like the blaze of rage in a tyrant’s entrails,

  7. come—I will present you with a tempest from my soul

    that lays mankind low, and with a hurricane from my heart.

  8. People—what are people? You cannot know their secrets,

    nor what guile and fire they reap.

  9. If the unseen one day disclosed their destinies,

    the believer would draw far back from mankind—how utterly!

  10. The prophets were baffled in trying to purify those people’s innate nature;

    what good, then, can the likes of me and my poems do?

  11. My Lord, I have believed, yet I stand in peril:

    doubt waylays me in all I avow and all I conceal.

  12. You have fashioned among mankind scattered, motley kinds

    that prick those who love the handiwork of the Originator, the Creator.

  13. I see faces promising sincere affection,

    yet never see the shadow of a heart that is not treacherous.

  14. How many a kinsman I console and champion,

    while he grazes in my preserve with a thankless, harmful heart.

  15. Your pardon, God—this outburst overcame me;

    I poured it out in verse, with no intent beforehand.

Sol 5.6