La mémoire et la mer [English translation]

The tide, I hold it in my heart

which surfaces like a nod,

I'm sick of missing my little sister,

of missing my child and my swan,

a boat, that depends on

precisely what it is docked to.

From my heavens it is raining

light-years and more,

I am the Jersey phantom1,

he who comes on grandstanding nights

to throw mist at you like a kiss

and gather you into his rhymes

like the three-layered net of July

where the seabass was shining alone,

the one I saw shining

on the land's fingers of sand.

Remember that sea dog

that we used to release on parole

and which, in the desert, mouths

necropolis sea wracks.

I'm sure that life is there

with it's lungs beome like flannel

when it cries about those times,

the grey-blotched cold which calls us.

I remember the nights back there

and the sprints won on the foam,

[against] those incompetent pursuers

who destroy themselves on the rocks.

Oh the angel of lost pleasures,

oh rumours of a different lifestyle,

my desires since then are nothing

but a heart-break of my loneliness.

And the devil of the conquered evenings

with his pallidnesses of recovery

and the shark of the heavens

amongst the wet mossy rocks.

Come back, green girl of the fjords,

come back, violin of the massed violins,

the horns are sounding in the harbour

to celebrate the return of their friends.

Oh the rare scent of salt flats

in the peppery heat of the fissures

when I was going, geometrizing,

my spirit in the pit of your hurt,

in the mess of your stern,

sticky in a fine dawn's sheets,

I saw an extra stained glass window,

and you green girl, my depression.

The shells set out

under the broken fluid high power projectors

play the castanet so much

that it makes Spain seem pallid.

God of granites, take pity

on their decorative purpose

when the knife comes to get

into their castanet-like appearance.

I saw what we approach,

when we sense the meeting

between the blood's shutters,

and that the corpuscles displayed

a mathematical blue

in this always restless sea

from which comes to me bit by bit

that memory of the stars.

That rumour which comes from there

under the friendly arch where I avoid the truth

these hands that fuss about me,

these cud-chewing hands that moo,

that tale follows me for a long time

like an anathematised beggar,

like the shadow that wastes its time

drawing my theorem

and under my red-haired makeup

it comes crashing like an ever-swinging door,

this noise that wakes up

in the street of dead musics.

I'm finished with the sea, finished,

on the beach the sand bleats

like sheep of eternity...

when the shepherdess sea calls me.

1. There are several possible interpretations of "the Jersey phantom"; but I think Nadia (Sandring) has made a good case for it to be the ghost of William Kidd haunting the shores of New Jersey

• Artist:Léo Ferré
• Album:Amour Anarchie (1970)