La souris
Belles journées, souris du temps,
Vous rongez peu à peu ma vie.
Dieu ! Je vais avoir vingt-huit ans,
Et mal vécus, à mon envie.
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De muis
Mooie dagen, muizen der tijd,
jullie knagen stilletjes aan mijn leven.
God ! ik ben al bijna achtentwintig,
verspilde jaren, naar mijn zin.
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Mouse
Beautiful days, mouse of time,
Little by little you gnaw away my life.
God! I’m going to be twenty-eight –
wasted years |badly lived|, just as I wished.
Or, should we interpret the last line differently: and
badly lived, I fear, or to my regret, or
neutral: I think ? as other translators
(CD-booklets) do.
IMHO: Apollinaire knew what he was writing. Fond of
ambiguity as he was, he likes to take his reader "à contre
pied". He even speculates on misunderstanding (mis-hearing:
à mon envie <> à mon avis. Lees maar er staat
niet wat je hoort.) Only (re-)reading reveals true meaning.
Poulenc, Deux mélodies (nr 1), 1956
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comment on the music:
"This is the first of two songs written in September 1956. In
honour of the eightieth birthday of the soprano Marya Freund,
a close colleague of his youthful years, Poulenc returned to
the Apollinaire collection that had begun his song-writing
career. He chose a deliciously apposite verse for someone
(himself surely) who could scarcely believe how the years of
his life (1918–1956) had slipped away—slowly nibbled by the
mouse of time. In my own experience, having first performed
this song long before the age of twenty-eight, there was a
distinctly Poulencian melancholy in returning to it for this
recording, well over three decades later."
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2013
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