Il n'y a plus rien [English translation]

Listen, listen... In the silence of the sea, there's like a cursed rocking that puts the heart at the right time, with sand that rises a bit, like old hookers who lift their skin, who hog the blanket.

Immobile... Immobility, it disturbs the century.

It's a bit the smile of speed, and it's not an expensive smile, speed, these days.

Lovers of the sea leave for Brittany or Tahiti...

They're really silly, lovers.

There's nothing left

Cursed friend, friend misery...

Misery, it was the name of my dog that had only three legs.

The other [leg], destiny put it aside for eating Olympiads and semi-annual sex hitched in the bushes to at least deliver its offspring.

She's left, Misery, in bounces, somewhere in the night of dogs.

Quiet friend, prosperous friend,

When you'll go home

Why home?

When you'll return to your house, Alesia Street or Faubourg

If you find someone asleep in your bed,

If you find someone sleeping

Then go away, in the thin morning

Alone

Don't get married

If it's your wife there, wake her from her image of death

Slap her, like someone who has a blackout or a nervous breakdown...

You could tell her: "Aren't you ashamed to carry on like that in your unstable old age.

Hey, aren't you ashamed? When there are ninety thousand types of flowers?

You stupid bitch!

Bug off!

Divorce her

Don't get married!

You can do everything:

Wrap yourself in disorder, for honor, for conservation of the title...

Disorder, it's order minus power!

There's nothing left

I'm a white black who eats wax

Because he's fed up at being white, that black man,

He's got enough being called: "Whitey!"

In Marseille, the sardine that blocked the Port

Was stuffed with heroine

And the frogmen didn't return...

Free the sardines

And there won't be any fishmongers anymore!

If you knew what I know

They would point their finger at you in the street

It's better then that you don't know anything

That way, at least, you lie low, anonymous, Citizen!

You have the right, Citizen, to a decent minimum

To publicity of enzymes and charm

To traffic of dollars and traffickers of weapons

That drag newspapers in mud and blood

You have the right to the noise of the receding sea

And if you want to take her [the sea] she will try to charm you

With the wind in the back and sextants for alarm

And the sea will return without you if you're bad

Words... always words, of course!

Citizens! Get your guns!

To the skirts, Citizens! To Love, Citizens!

We'll have a career when we'll have pushed our elders' face in!

District offices are bronze monuments... the beat of a bird's wing doesn't even make a dent... Just letting you know!

We're not even Jewish Germans anymore

We're nothing anymore

There's nothing left

Well cut pants young guys ogle, definitely!

Busy breasts

Empty wombs

Work it out!

The smile of those who heat up their tin at converted and mosquito-free beaches

That is in hell, where God puts on his black glasses not to risk being recognized by his admirers

God is an idol, also!

Under the pavement there's no more beach

There's hell and Security

Our real life isn't elsewhere, it's here

We're in the world, we've been told enough

Whether literature likes it or not

Words, we put masks on them, a gag on the face

To the encyclopedia, words!

And we leave with our cries!

So there!

There's nothing left... no, no more

I'm a dog?

Perhaps!

I'm a rat

Nothing

With beating heart until the last beat

We come with our accessories to clean house in people's head:

"Learn then to sleep naked!"

"Throw out your slippers!"

"Turn over your chairs!"

"Eat standing!"

"Sit on tons of unpleasantness and appear in the window screaming at those who yell in principle."

If ever you notice that your revolt becomes encrusted and an habitual revolt, then

Go outside

March

Die

Kiss

Finally love trees, animals and turn away from the conformable and the unconformable

Let go of your concepts, if they're concepts

Nothing is worth anything

There's nothing left... no, no more

Invent formulas of the night: CLN... C'est la nuit! 1

Even in the sun, especially in the sun, it's night

You can die... The people won't remember even one of their inspiration.

They'll channel to you their stale air and eternal regrets reeking of a certificate of studies and the umbilical catechism.

It's really disgusting

They'll shut you up, the people.

People tease each other, always.

Look, at the table, when they eat...

They're swallowed up in the unmentionable

They surpass themselves and head for trash and the punctual burp!

Punctuation of the absurd, it's indeed the inversion of abdominal reactors, like a landing: one burps and one stops the massacre.

On the lanes of the unconscious, there are dribbling beacons always slightly remembering eats, a body organ, being full.

My most beautiful memories are from another planet

Where butchers sold humans by auction

I am from the railway race who watches cows go by

If we didn't eat cows, sheep and the remains

We wouldn't know cows, or sheep, or the remains...

In the end, we're raised to pick on each other

Then, let's pick!

T-bone steak for two, you know?

Luckily there's the bed: a parking!

Are you coming, my love?

And then, it's like roulette: one puts, one puts...

If the roulette only had one hole, they would still make us put

Actually, that's what happens!

I understand the players: they have thirty-five chances to get lost...

And they put, they put...

The tragedy, with a couple, it's that there are two

And there's only one hole in the roulette...

If I see a couple in the street, I change sidewalks

Don't get married

Don't vote

Or you're stuck

She was beautiful as revolt

We had it in our eyes,

our arms our pants

Her name was imagination

She slept like the dead, she was like dead

She slumbered

And was buried from memory

In the Molotov cocktail, one must put Martini, my boy!

Schlep your ideas like drugs... You don't risk anything at the border

Nothing in the hands

Nothing in the pockets

Everything in the head!

- Nothing to declare?

- Non.

- What's your name?

- Karl Marx.

- Go, pass!

We left... We were a handful...

Soon we'll find ourselves poor, alone, with the projects of our imagination in the past

Listen to them... Listen to them...

It feels rough like new wine

We left... We were a handful

Soon the sidewalks will overflow

Chitchat is not a sufficient detonator

Armed silence, it's good, but you must keep your mouth shut...

All those janitors!

Listen to them...

There's nothing left

If the dead woke up?

Huh?

How many were we?

It will work!

Sadness, always sadness...

They sang, they sang...

In the streets...

Don't get married. Those in San Francisco, in Paris, in Milan

And those in Mexico

Arm in arm

Well hooked to the dream

Don't vote

Oh DC-8 of the Pelicans

Storks leaving on time

Labrador Lips of the bison

I invent below blue reindeer

Coated in red from the sunset

I'm going West from memory

Towards Clarity towards Clarity

I'm enlightened at Night in the dark of my nerves

In the gold of my hair I've put 100,000 watts

Circuits are broken inside my body

I imagine a telephone in a moor

Where we see each other me and me

In this obscene mist in the colored twilight

I'm only a warning light shy of signs

My circuits disconnect

I'm only a binary

My son, you have to break camp like rising dough

It's early Get up Take wine for the road

Unsheathe yourself from the anxious dream of fixed property

Drive Drive my son to the ideal star

You'll encounter yourself You'll recognize yourself

Your plan before you, you'll enter into it

Molt is made backwards in this inventive world

You'll take back your girl voice and sing Tomorrow

Turn your eyes inward

When you'll pass the wall of the wall

When you'll move past your vision

Then you'll see nothing

There's nothing left

That fathers and mothers

That those who made you

That those who made everybody else

That the "Mister"

That the "Madam"

That the "seated" in the ice-cold, subdued, lifeless velvet

That those horrible biped and rolling stores

That carry everything in front

All those to whom you'll be able to say:

Mister!

Madam!

But leave those people alone

That imaginary bowing and scraping you make up for them

That subdued despair

All that sadness that gets up in the morning at a set time to go earn YOUR money.

With tight lungs

Hands grown larger by outrage and good morals

Eyes haggard from worried watches...

And you count your money?

Sorry... THEIR money!

What dishonors you

It's the administrative, ecological cleanliness you pride yourself on

In your air-conditioned bathrooms

In your deserted bidets

And your lying mirrors...

You make mirrors lie

Your powerful to the point of being reflected the way you are

In ties

In mink

Stuffed with snuffiness and boredom

in the falling green water of the mountains you've arranged to subject

At a given point

At a fixed time

To your narcissist orgies.

You look at yourself and you can't event recognize yourself anymore

That's how beautiful you are

And you count your money

Lengthwise

In width

In margin

From the salaries you release with precision

With parsimony

I was going to say "on the sly" like precursor North winds that tell the feats of the food bowl, with that vengeful and leveling pomp that prevents all identification...

I'm saying that to exploit your neighbor, you're champions of anonymity.

Revolutions? Let's talk about it!

I'm talking about revolutions we can still show

Because they're of use to you,

Because they've always been useful for you,

Those "historic" revolutions,

Because "histories" amuse you, before they interest you,

And when they interest you, it's too late, you're told another one is in the making.

If something unprecedented shocks and embarrasses you,

You make arrangements the night before, always the night before, to retain a place

In a palace of exiles, surrounded by the prestige of the uprooted.

The deep roots of this country, it's You, it seems,

And when you're dislocated by "chaos in the street," as you call it, to a "new order" as they say, you're transplanted on the return and you're saluted.

For two hundred years, you get tickets for revolutions.

You would even be tempted to bring your derriere to them,

So that you catch every bit of it, right?

And the "good-for-nothings" who amuse you, those "good-for-nothings" who disturb you too, they're wrapped in the back pages while "yours" are wrapped in a flag.

You still believe, you people, you're in a stud farm!

Race holds you up in the world you've crushed.

You have the style of power

You're even able to talk about it among yourselves

As if you talked to your subordinates,

Afraid to give up your stature, your turgidity, afraid they'll point the finger at you, in the halls of boredom, and that they'll say to each other: "Well, he's going down, he'll end up bending, crawling"

Be quiet! For crawling, you can't be beat; only, you're only conceding it in a metaphor...

You're willing to lie down but with allure,

That "allure" you're wearing, Mister, in your buttonhole,

And when we know what may have cost you bitter silences,

Badly aimed dismissals

Half-smiles dry like tears,

That unfortunate ribbon red like shame you never decided to let flush your face,

I wonder how and why Nature instills

Such stubbornness,

Such skill

And such biological indifference

To make your sons resemble so much their fathers,

From the skirts of your matrimonial wives

To the ambivalent upper-crusters where you train them to drink,

In your high society

From the cup of the devout.

Me, I'm a bastard.

We're all bastards.

What separates us, today, it's that your bastardy is sanctioned by the civil code

On which, with your permission, I'd like to spit, before taking my leave.

Be quiet. You don't risk Anything.

There's nothing left

And that nothing, you can keep it!

You don't care about it up so far, if you can,

We, we can't

One day, in ten thousand years,

When you're no longer here,

We will have EVERYTHING

Nothing from you

Everything from us

We'll have had time to invent Life, Beauty, Youth,

Tears that will shine like emeralds in girls' eyes,

The smile of animals finally unhinged,

Priority to the Left, excuse-me!

We'll no longer die of anything

We'll live from everything

And the germs of bullshit you won't have failed to bequeath to us, rising

From your manure

Form your books racked up in your silotheques 2

From your public documents

From your correctional administrative regulations

From your decrees

From your prayers, even,

All those germs...

Be quiet,

We will already have machines to repeal them

WE WILL HAVE EVERYTHING

IN TEN THOUSAND YEARS

1. CLN is the acronym of National Liberation Committee. "C'est la nuit" means "it's night"2. A word that combines "silo" and "libraries"

• Artist:Léo Ferré
• Album:Il n'y a plus rien