Hanged man’s ball
Hanged man's ball (1870)
A. Rimbaud
At the black gallows, amiable one-armed man,
Dance, dance the paladins,
The thin paladins of the devil,
The skeletons of Saladins.
Sir Beelzebub pulls by the tie
His little black puppets grimacing against the sky,
And, slapping their foreheads with the back of his slippers,
Makes them dance, dance to the sounds of an old Christmas!
[Dou, dou, dou, dou... Dou, dou, dou, dou... Dou
Dou, dou, Dou...]
And the shocked puppets embrace their slender arms
Like black organs, the openwork breasts
That the fair damsels once clasped
Clash for a long time in a hideous love.
Hurrah! the gay dancers, who no longer have a belly!
We can caper, the trestles are so long!
Hop! that we no longer know if it is a battle or a dance!
Beelzebub enraged scrapes his violins!
Oh hard heels, one never wears out one's sandal!
Almost all have taken off their leather shirt;
The rest is not very embarrassing and can be seen without scandal.
On the skulls, the snow applies a white hat:
The crow makes a plume on these cracked heads,
A piece of flesh trembles on their thin chin:
One would say, whirling in the dark melees,
Stiff valiant men, colliding with cardboard armor.
[Dou, dou, dou, dou... Dou, dou, dou, dou... Dou
Dou, dou, Dou...]
Hurrah! the north wind whistles at the great dance of skeletons!
The black gallows roars like an iron organ!
The wolves go answering from the violet forests:
On the horizon, the sky is a hellish red...
[Dou, dou, dou, dou... Dou, dou, dou, dou... Dou
Dou, dou, Dou...]
Hey, shake me these funereal captains
Who parade, sly, with their big broken fingers
A rosary of love on their pale vertebrae:
This is not a monastery here, the dead!
Oh! behold, in the midst of the macabre dance
A great mad skeleton leaps into the red sky
Carried away by the momentum, like a horse rearing up:
And, still feeling the rope tight around its neck,
Tightens its little fingers on its cracking femur
With cries like sneers,
And, like a minstrel returning to the hut,
Bounces into the dance to the song of the bones.
...
On the black gallows, amiable one-armed man,
Dance, dance the paladins,
The thin paladins of the devil,
The skeletons of Saladins.