Moonlight

By Victor Hugo. Translated by Timothy Adès

The moon was playing on the waves, serene…

The window to the breeze at last rides free:

The Sultan’s queen looks out. The breaking sea

Decks the dark islets with a silver sheen.

Her hand lets fall the resonant guitar.

She hears dull echoes and a leaden sound…
Is it a bark from Cos, which inward-bound

Plies the Greek-studded seas with Asian oar?

Is it the cormorants, that dive, and cleave
The flood that rolls in pearls across their wing?
Is it a Djinn, with eldritch yammering

Hurling down crenellations on the wave?

What stirs the sea beneath the secret halls

Of odalisques? Not stones from crumbling walls,

Not the black cormorant that water lulls,

Not rhythmic plash of oars of heavy hulls:

But heavy sacks, and sobbings heard within.

Plumbing the depths that take them by the arm,

You’d sense the movement of a human form.

The moon was playing on the waves, serene.