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Renee Vivien English Translation

Words to My Love
by Renée Vivien
translation by Michael R. Burch

This is Vivien’s “coming out” poem, although the term wasn’t coined until many years after Vivien’s death. The poem was written about forbidden love to a girlfriend and lover. 

Please understand me: an unusual creature,
not so very good, or bad; perhaps a bit sly.
I hate overheavy perfumes, abrupt outcries.
I prefer grey to crimson, scarlet and ochre.

I love the dusk, when day winds slowly down,
an intimate fire ablaze in the bed-chamber
as the lamps glow wanly, golden-amber,
reddening bronze and blueing the mantle-stone.

My eyes take in the carpet, smooth as sand,
imagining Sappho’s shores of golden peas,
where beyond the bright sun sets on Aegean seas...
And yet, within, I still bear the sinner’s brand.

For I am at that age when virgins yield
in their weakness to the men they want, and dread,
and yet have no companion, here nor ahead,
because you beckoned from a forbidden field.

The hyacinth bled—blood-red—upon the glen
while you imagined Love: pure, innocent, freed.
But women have no right to such Love! ... We’ve
been banished to the brutish rule of men.

And yet I had the impudence, to yearn
for forbidden Love’s immaculate white light,
the gentle voice communing with the night,
the delicate step that doesn’t scar the fern.

They have forbidden me your delicate lips,
because your hair is long and fragrant-odoured,
because your eyes convey the wildest raptures,
as depthless seas toss about small, unmoored ships.

They have wagged their fingers, in their pious manner,
because my gaze entreated your dear gaze...
No one has tried to understand our ways,
or why I was bewitched by your strange glamour.

What of this dreadful law that I transgress?
Nay, judge my love! Pure, unbesmirched by evil,
and honest, though perhaps as lethal, still,
as any man’s desire for his mistress.

They did not understand my heart’s desire,
as I walked the path my destiny transpired;
they asked, “Who is that woman doomed to fire—
the flames of Hell?” Yet I love as required.

Let us leave men to their strange “moralities”
to seek new dawns like honey, golden-bright,
far sunnier days, and ah!, more loving nights!
Our minds will rest at ease, in amities.

Immaculate, the bright stars shine, above...
What do they care how men judge, from afar?
And what have we to fear, because we are
pure in our lives, our thoughts, and in our love.

Tags: forbidden, Sappho, understand, desire
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