Some song on an airless night ...
The moon tin-plates clear and bright
The cut-outs of gloomy greenery.
... Some song; like an echo dies,
Buried alive in that clump it lies ...
– Finished: there in the shadows, see ...
– A toad!
Of me, your old faithful thing?
Look: a shorn poet, not a wing,
The mud lark ... – Horrible to hear! –
... It sings. – Horrible!! – Horrible, why?
Don't you see its eye's bright look? ...
No: gone, cold, to its stone nook.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Goodnight – that toad is me. Goodbye.
Dated by Corbière This evening, 20th July (probably 1872). Translation by Peter Dale in Wry-Blue Loves, 2005. Corbière's sardonic recounting of his defeats by life can verge on unsubtle self-pity, but this is saved by its sympathy with the "horrible" song of the toad. Dale's translation brings over as much as is possible in the constraints of the sonnet form (which Corbière, who scorned classical forms, upends). The final "Goodbye" is the translator's insertion for the rhyme: the poem's last words are "that toad is me."
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