Literature

Poetry Monday (with cat)!: "À la mémoire d'une chatte naine que j'avais" by Jules Laforgue (French)

"Ô mon beau chat frileux, quand l'automne morose / Faisait glapir plus fort les mômes dans les cours, / Combien passâmes-nous de ces spleeniques jours / À rêver face à face en ma chambre bien close...."

Sasha Volokh |The Volokh Conspiracy | 7.12.2021 5:40 PM

Here's "À la mémoire d'une chatte naine que j'avais" (1878-1883) by Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). (This is on my YouTube channel, which mostly consists of my Sasha Reads playlist, plus a smattering of law-related songs.) See also a previous cat poem I posted, "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot, and here's an English translation of this poem by Norman Shapiro.

Ô mon beau chat frileux, quand l'automne morose
Faisait glapir plus fort les mômes dans les cours,
Combien passâmes-nous de ces spleeniques jours
À rêver face à face en ma chambre bien close.

Lissant ton poil soyeux de ta langue âpre et rose
Trop grave pour les jeux d'autrefois et les tours,
Lentement tu venais de ton pas de velours
Devant moi t'allonger en quelque noble pose.

Et je songeais, perdu dans tes prunelles d'or
— Il ne soupçonne rien, non, du globe stupide
Qui l'emporte avec moi tout au travers du Vide,

Rien des Astres lointains, des Dieux ni de la Mort?
Pourtant!… quels yeux profonds!… parfois… il m'intimide
Saurait-il donc le mot? — Non, c'est le Sphinx encor.

For the rest of my "Sasha Reads" playlist, click here. Past poems are:

1. "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. "The Pulley" by George Herbert
3. "Harmonie du soir" ("Evening Harmony") by Charles Baudelaire (French)
4. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
6. "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova (Russian)
7. "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
8. "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
9. "Les Djinns" ("The Jinns") by Victor Hugo (French)
10. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
11. "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman
12. "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") by Aleksandr Pushkin (Russian)
13. "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
14. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats
15. "Je crains pas ça tellment" ("I'm not that scard about") by Raymond Queneau (French)
16. "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot
17. "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
18. "Она" ("Ona", "She") by Zinaida Gippius (Russian)
19. "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
20. "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
21. "Chanson d'automne" ("Autumn Song") by Oscar Milosz (French)
22. "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
23. "My Three Loves" by Henry S. Leigh
24. "Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени" ("Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni", "With my dreams I caught the departing shadows") by Konstantin Balmont (Russian)
25. "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling
26. "Rules and Regulations" by Lewis Carroll
27. "Vers dorés" ("Golden Lines") by Gérard de Nerval (French)
28. "So That's Who I Remind Me Of" by Ogden Nash
29. "The Epic" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
30. "La chambre double" ("The Double Room") by Charles Baudelaire (French)
31. "Медный всадник" ("The Bronze Horseman") by Aleksandr Pushkin (Russian)
32. "Herbst" ("Autumn") by Rainer Maria Rilke (German)
33. "Romance de la luna, luna" ("Ballad of the Moon Moon") by Federico García Lorca (Spanish)
34. "The Four Friends" by A.A. Milne
35. "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by e.e. cummings
36. "Листья" ("Leaves") by Fyodor Tyutchev (Russian)
37. "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" by Edward Lear
38. "The Persian Version" by Robert Graves
39. "Les deux voix" ("The Two Voices") by Victor Hugo (French)
40. "Lines Written in Dejection" by William Butler Yeats
41. "Loveliest of Trees" by A.E. Housman
42. "Akh, chto-to mne ne veritsia…" ("Oh, somehow I can't believe…") by Bulat Okudzhava (Russian)
43. "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe
44. "The Man from Snowy River" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson

Sasha Volokh is professor of law at Emory University.

Literature