A New Translation / Rendering of Villon's Ballade de bonne doctrine a ceux de mauvaise vie

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My translation / rendering of François Villon's Ballade de bonne doctrine a ceux de mauvaise vie. I am, of course, here indebted to William Ernest Henley's 19th century Straight Tip To All Cross Coves.


Say you palm off communion plates,
Say you play and cheat at bones,
Print out bills til you get burned,
Scarred and scammed like all the others,
All of them fuckers, none of them true,
When you're the man who does the work.
What do you get from all of this shit?
Booze and Bitches just fuck you up.

Sing it say it bang or bash,
Fucking loser, drunken fool,
Fake it, break it, take all the cash.
Bright big city, piece of shit town,
Run your con and all your games:
Cards or drugs or whatever's rough.
I tell you this: You gonna always lose
Cause Booze and Bitches just fuck you up

Say you think your sick of this shit?
Go work for the man in the government:
Kiss the horse's ass and the pig's soft dick.
You are such a fucking idiot.
So sit back now and just rest your bones,
You'll never be able to work enough.
Cause you know your shit will always go
To Booze and Bitches who fuck you up.

You still got your shoes on your feet,
Shirt on your back, your bones and blood,
That's all your ever gonna need
For Booze and Bitches to fuck you up.

The original:

Car ou soies porteur de bulles,
Pipeur ou hasardeur de dés,
Tailleur de faux coins et te brûles
Comme ceux qui sont échaudés,
Traîtres parjurs, de foi vidés;
Soies larron, ravis ou pilles:
Où s'en va l'acquêt, que cuidez?
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

Rime, raille, cymbale, luthes,
Comme fol feintif, éhontés;
Farce, brouille, joue des flûtes;
Fais, ès villes et ès cités,
Farces, jeux et moralités,
Gagne au berlan, au glic, aux quilles
Aussi bien va, or écoutez!
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

De tels ordures te recules,
Laboure, fauche champs et prés,
Sers et panse chevaux et mules,
S'aucunement tu n'es lettrés;
Assez auras, se prends en grés.
Mais, se chanvre broyes ou tilles,
Ne tends ton labour qu'as ouvrés
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles?

Chausses, pourpoints aiguilletés,
Robes, et toutes vos drapilles,
Ains que vous fassiez pis, portez
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

See also:

Straight Tip to All Cross Cove (De bonne doctrine a ceux demauvaise vie) by Francois Villon

11 Translations of "Ballade de bonne doctrine à ceux de mauvaise vie" by François Villon

The Bone's Prayer to Death its God - The Dry Salvages, Section II

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.

For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

Dry Salvages from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Response to Shelton Walsmith's Hamden Series

Fibonacci's Sequence: Series I: poems, days, death

doves exist, dreamers and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxon, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

- From alphabet by Inger Christensen

The length of each section of Inger Christensen's alphabet is based on Fibonacci's Sequence, a mathematical sequence beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21..., in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers.