gérard de nerval

english translation

And It Vanishes

original French poem

Épitaphe

Il a vécu tantôt gai comme un sansonnet,
Tour à tour amoureux insoucieux et tendre,
Tantôt sombre et rêveur comme un triste Clitandre,
Un jour il entendit qu’à sa porte on sonnait.

C’était la Mort! Alors il la pria d’attendre
Qu’il eût posé le point à son dernier sonnet;
Et puis sans s’émouvoir, il s’en alla s’étendre
Au fond du coffre froid où son corps frissonnait.

Il était paresseux, à ce que dit l’histoire,
Il laissait trop sécher l’encre dans l’écritoire,
Il voulait tour savoir mais il n’a rien connu.

Et quand vint le moment où, las de cette vie,
Un soir d’hiver, enfin l'âme lui fut ravie,
Il s’en alla disant: “Pourquoi suis-je venu?”

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Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 1855) was one of several pseudonyms used by Gérard Labrunie, who translated Goethe’s Faust at age 19 and continued to import German Romanticism into French while also reverting to Renaissance poets for sonnet forms. A theater critic, travel writer and prose stylist, he is also ranked, on the basis of a dozen evocative sonnets, as one of the finest French poets. Subject to repeated schizophrenic breakdowns, he died at 47.

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Diane Furtney

Diane Furtney, after her Tulsa upbringing and with a psychology degree from Vassar College, worked a year in Israel (1967), then took an assortment of jobs, sometimes in clinical psychology, in several US cities. Besides nonfiction ghostwriting, she has authored two prizewinning poetry chapbooks (Destination Rooms and It Was a Game) and two comic mystery novels (pseudonym D.J.H. Jones).