Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de rêve,
Et puis—bonsoir!
Life is vain: a little love, a little hate, and then—good-bye!
Life is brief: a little hope, a little dreaming, and then—good-night!
Of course, this requires no explanation, the French work is astonishingly clever, simple as it looks: the same thing cannot be done in the English language so well. As I have told you, at least a thousand English writers have tried to put it into English verse. So you will see that it is very famous. But is it poetry? I should certainly say that it is not. It is not poetry, because it consists only of a few commonplaces stated in a mocking way—in the tone of a clever man trifling with a serious subject. They do not really touch us. And they do not bear the test of translation. Put into English, what becomes of them? They simply dry up. The English reader might well exclaim, “We have heard of that before, in much better language.” But let us take one verse of a Scotch song by Robert Burns which is known the whole world over, and which was written by a man who always wrote out of his own [heart].
“We two have paddled in the brook
From morning sun till noon,
But seas between us broad have roared
Since old lang syne.”