Winter Evening

Winter Evening

Ah, how the snow has snowed!
My window is a garden of frost.
Ah, how the snow has snowed!
The brief spasm of life is lost
In the sorrow that I know, that I know!

Here lie the tarns all frozen,
My soul is dark: Where to go? Where stay?
Here lie its hopes all frozen;
I have become a new Norway
And all my pale skies are fallen.

Weep, you birds of deep winter,
The mortal cold hardens and grows.
Weep, you birds of deep winter,
Weep for my tears, weep for my rose,
From the branches of the juniper.

Ah, how the snow has snowed!
My window is a garden of frost.
Ah, how the snow has snowed!
The brief spasm of life is lost
In the void hours that I know, that I know!


Emile Nelligan
(my translation)



I've never quite known what to make of Emile Nelligan -- he is such a mournful Verlaine manqué (not even Rimbaud, depite his youth, which might be an improvement, but Verlaine) that I'm not sure whether to take him seriously. So I would like to thank and acknowledge Clarissa Aykroyd at The Stone and the Star who recently posted her own sensitive version of Nelligan's Soir d'Hiver (here)-- and hers is, I think, in many ways a better poem than my own, more ploddingly literal attempt ... "but there is no competition," as Eliot writes in East Coker: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again.... But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

You can also hear Soir d'Hiver sung by Claude Léveillée here.


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