Reason, faith — what matter to you, O my soul, the tears of a wailing mourner,

Or the modulations of a singer!

Alike, as soon as one compares them,

Are the moans of death and those of a birth.

At the top of its softly swaying branch,

Do I know whether this dove is cooing or lamenting?

Friend! our tombs cover vast spaces,

But where are the tombs from the time of "Ad"?

All that remains of them is the dust you tread.

Ah! lighten your steps upon the earth;

Even after so long, to forget that we walk upon the bodies of our fathers is sacrilege.

Tombs overflowed how many times!

How many contrasts you take in!

In the long course of the past and of the ages,

How many are buried upon buried heaps.

Tombs choked full, half-opened by the laughter of what they know and see.

. . . . . . . . .

O life! So surprising an accumulation of miseries

That nothing is more surprising than the human care to prolong it.

Joys of births, what do you weigh

Against the moments of agony!

Creature conceived to endure,

The error is to consider you mortal.

In truth we do but pass

From one animate universe into another universe... painful? Ineffable?

To stretch out in a sleep that rests the body —

Is that dying, when the soul was but burning low, in a sleeplessness?