Certitude
by Paul Eluard

If I speak it’s to hear you more clearly
If I hear you I’m sure to understand you

If you smile it’s the better to enter me
If you smile I will see the world entire

If I embrace you it’s to widen myself
If we live everything will turn to joy

If I leave you we’ll remember each other
In leaving you we’ll find each other again.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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She Looks Into Me…
by Paul Eluard

The unknowing heart
To see if I love
She has confidence she forgets
Under the clouds of her eyelids
Her head falls asleep in my hands
Where are we
Together inseparable
Alive alive
He alive she alive
And my head rolls through her dreams.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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You Rise the Water Unfolds
by Paul Eluard

You sleep the water flowers

You are water ploughed from its depths
You are earth that takes root
And in which all is grounded

You make bubbles of silence in the desert of sound
You sing nocturnal hymns on the arcs of the rainbow
You are everywhere you abolish the roads

You sacrifice time
To the eternal youth of an exact flame
That veils Nature to reproduce her

Woman you show the world a body forever the same
Yours

You are its likeness.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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Absence
by Paul Eluard

I speak to you over cities
I speak to you over plains

My mouth is against your ear

The two sides of the walls face
my voice which acknowledges you.

I speak to you of eternity.

O cities memories of cities
cities draped with our desires
cities early and late
cities strong cities intimate
stripped of all their makers
their thinkers their phantoms

Landscape ruled by emerald
live living ever-living
the wheat of the sky on our earth
nourishes my voice I dream and cry
I laugh and dream between the flames
between the clusters of sunlight

And over my body your body extends
the layer of its clear mirror.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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Air Vif
by Paul Eluard

I looked in front of me
In the crowd I saw you
Among the wheat I saw you
Beneath a tree I saw you

At the end of my journeys
In the depths of my torment
At the corner of every smile
Emerging from water and fire

Summer and winter I saw you
All through my house I saw you
In my arms I saw you
In my dreams I saw you

I will never leave you.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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The Beloved
by Paul Eluard

She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair is wound in mine,
She has the form of my hands,
She has the colour of my eyes,
She is swallowed by my shadow
Like a stone against the sky.

Her eyes are always open
And will not let me sleep.
Her dreams in broad daylight
Make the suns evaporate
Make me laugh, cry and laugh,
Speak with nothing to say.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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The Season of Loves
by Paul Eluard

By the road of ways
In the three-part shadow of troubled sleep
I come to you the double the multiple
as like you as the era of deltas.

Your head is as tiny as mine
The nearby sea reigns with spring
Over the summers of your fragile form
And here one burns bundles of ermine.

In the wandering transparency
of your noble face
these floating animals are wonderful
I envy their candour their inexperience
Your inexperience on the bed of waters
Finds the road of love without bowing

By the road of ways
and without the talisman that reveals
your laughter at the crowd of women
and your tears no one wants.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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As Far As My Eye Can See In My Body’s Senses
by Paul Eluard

All the trees all their branches all of their leaves
The grass at the foot of the rocks and the houses en masse
Far off the sea that your eye bathes
These images of day after day
The vices the virtues so imperfect
The transparency of men passing among them by chance
And passing women breathed by your elegant obstinacies
Your obsessions in a heart of lead on virgin lips
The vices the virtues so imperfect
The likeness of looks of permission with eyes you conquer
The confusion of bodies wearinesses ardours
The imitation of words attitudes ideas
The vices the virtues so imperfect

Love is man incomplete

Translated by A. S. Kline

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Fertile Eyes
by Paul Eluard

Fertile Eyes
No one can know me more
More than you know me

Your eyes in which we sleep
The two of them
Have cast a spell on my male orbs
Greater than worldly nights

Your eyes where I voyage
Have given the road-signs
Directions detached from the earth

In your eyes those that show us
Our infinite solitude
Is no more than they think exists

No one can know me more
More than you know me.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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I Said It To You
by Paul Eluard

I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For each wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands
For the eye that becomes landscape or face
And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour
For all that night drank
For the network of roads
For the open window for a bare forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words
Every caress every trust survives.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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The Curve Of Your Eyes
by Paul Eluard

The curve of your eyes embraces my heart
A ring of sweetness and dance
halo of time, sure nocturnal cradle,
And if I no longer know all I have lived through
It’s that your eyes have not always been mine.

Leaves of day and moss of dew,
Reeds of breeze, smiles perfumed,
Wings covering the world of light,
Boats charged with sky and sea,
Hunters of sound and sources of colour

Perfume enclosed by a covey of dawns
that beds forever on the straw of stars,
As the day depends on innocence
The whole world depends on your pure eyes
And all my blood flows under their sight.

Translated by A. S. Kline

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Ring Of Peace
by Paul Eluard

I have passed the doors of coldness
The doors of my bitterness
To come and kiss your lips

City reduced to a room
Where the absurd tide of evil
leaves a reassuring foam

Ring of peace I have only you
You teach me again what it is
To be human when I renounce

Knowing whether I have fellow creatures

Translated by A. S. Kline

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