UNTRANSLATABLE

Winter, wolves, Grey brother padding

The frozen streets with his yellow eyes,

The old dead out on Mountfaucon gibbet,

Creaking with ice....

                             I’ve tried translating

La Heaulmiere. It ends like this...

And so all human beauty ends

I've got arthritis everywhere.

My spinal column twists and bends.

My breasts, don’t ask, have gone a terre.

My stomach is in bad repair.

And no-one's going to want to eat

My pussy now. I've skin to spare,

Mottled and flecked like sausage meat

And so the talk goes round and round

About the good times that we had,

Poor biddies sitting on the ground

Like faggots round a fire. How sad.

First come the good times then the bad.

The fire flares up but soon goes cold.

We used to be so bloody mad

But in the end we all grow old.

Yes, but it’s neither ancient nor modern

Is it? What do I call the woman?

There’s not a lot of armouresses

About these days. “The foxy babe

Who worked in defence has a bit of a moan.”

Don’t worry. That’s a joke (I think)

But what’s her context?

                             Last winter’s snows-

Untranslatable. Best lyric poem

Written by anyone, anytime, any place....               

...But conceivable only then,

With Paris no more than a big village,

The language new.

                   I could blag it so

You’d believe I remembered a former life

As a scholar in the middle ages.

I’d draw on Hugo, Henley, Stevenson,

Even Kipling (see above)

To give you a Paris to touch and feel

And smell. The taverns, Notre Dame,

And Margot squashing Villon flat,

 But I wouldn’t be able to do his coldness.