Do you come from the vast sky or out of the abyss,
O beauty? From your gaze, infernal and divine,
pours a confusion of benefaction and wickedness,
so that one may compare you to a heady wine.
Diffusing fragrance like a stormy night, your eye’s a reflector,
which imprisons in its gleam both dusk and daybreak.
Your mouth is an amphora, your kisses a nectar
that makes timid boys bold and grown men quake.
Do you rise from some black gulf or descend from the stars?
Destiny follows your petticoats like a hound in thrall.
You sow at random both joy and disaster,
and inscrutable, profound, you govern all.
You tread insouciantly on the dead, O beauty, as if to mock them.
Horror isn’t the least entrancing of your jewels,
and murder, among your most prized gems,
dances on your bare midriff like an amorous heirodule.
Toward you, O candle, the ephemeral moth flies,
crackles, blazes briefly, then says: “Bless this fire,”
and the panting lover pressing between his mistress’s thighs
seems like a dying man caressing his funeral pyre.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, 0 beauty—
dreadful, innocent, awesome fiend—
is little matter, if your eye, your smile, your foot opens to me
the door to an infinity of which I’ve only dreamed.
Whether from Satan or from God, angel or fiend,
what’s the difference, if with your eyes of velvet, your rhythms sublime,
if with your fragrances and gleaming rays, O mystic queen,
you render a universe less hideous and free from heavy chains the passing time.