Đoàn Bô-hê-miêng lên đường Bohémiens en voyage

Bộ lạc tiên tri mắt ngời ánh lửa
Hôm qua lên đường địu cả lũ con
Hoặc bế trên tay cho chúng bú ngon
Kho sữa quý sẵn trong bầu vú nặng

Đàn ông chân không, giáo gươm lấp loáng
Đi dọc đoàn xe nơi trú thân nhân
Nhìn trời cao với đôi mắt trĩu buồn
Bởi nuối tiếc những ảo hình vắng mặt

Chú dế mèn trong hang đào dưới cát
Nhìn họ qua cao giọng hát ngân nga
Thần Xi-ben làm cây cỏ mượt mà

Suối trên đá và nở hoa sa mạc
Đoàn lữ hành mở ra trước mắt
Vương quốc thân quen của Thần bí tương lai

Gypsies Traveling


The prophetical tribe, that ardent eyed people,
Set out last night, carrying their children
On their backs, or yielding to those fierce appetites
The ever ready treasure of pendulous breasts.

The men travel on foot with their gleaming weapons
Alongside the wagons where their kin are huddled,
Surveying the heavens with eyes rendered heavy
By a mournful regret for vanished illusions.

The cricket from the depths of his sandy retreat
Watches them as they pass, and louder grows his song;
Cybele, who loves them, increases her verdure,

Makes the desert blossom, water spurt from the rock
Before these travelers for whom is opened wide
The familiar domain of the future's darkness.


— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)




Gipsies on the Road

The tribe of seers, last night, began its march
With burning eyes, and shouldering its young
To whose ferocious appetites it swung
The wealth of hanging breasts that nought can parch.

The men, their weapons glinting in the rays,
Walk by the convoy where their folks are carted,
Sweeping the far-off skylines with a gaze
Regretful of Chimeras long-departed.

Out of his hole the cricket sees them pass
And sings the louder. Greener grows the grass
Because Cybele loves them, and has made

The barren rock to gush, the sands to flower,
To greet these travellers, before whose power
Familiar futures open realms of shade.


— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)




The Gypsies


They set out yesterday, the tribe of ragged seers
With burning eyes — bearing their little ones in nests
Upon their backs, or giving them, to stop their tears,
The teats of inexhaustible and swarthy breasts.

The men walk shouldering their rifles silently
Beside the hooded wagons with bright tatters hung,
And peer into the sky, as if they hoped to see
Some old mirage that beckoned them when they were young.

No matter where they journey through the meager land,
The cricket will sing louder from his lair of sand,
And Cybele, who loves them, will smile where they advance:

The desert will be fruitful, the arid rock will flow
Before the footsteps of these wayfarers, who go
Eternally into the lightless realm of chance.


— George Dillon, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)