Dance of the Hanged Men

On the black gallows, one-armed fellow,
The paladins are dancing, dancing,
The thin paladins of the devil,
The skeletons of Saladins.

Sir Beelzebub pulls by the rope
His small black puppets grinning at the sky
And slapping their heads with a backhand blow,
Makes them dance, dance to the sound of an old noel!

And the jostled puppets entwine their thin arms:
Like black organ-pipes, their breasts [pierced with light
Which once noble ladies pressed,
Struck against one another for a long time in hideous love-making.

Hurray! You gay dancers who have no more bellies!
You can cavort about, the stages are so long!
Hop! don't try to know whether it is a battle or a dance!
Beelzebub in a rage saws on his fiddles!

Oh the hard heels! one's sandal never wears out!
Almost all have taken off their shirts of skin;
The rest is not embarrassing and can be seen without scandal.
On the skulls the snow sets a white hat:

The crow is a plume on these cracked heads;
A piece of flesh is loose on their thin chins:
You could say, as they turn about in dark skirmishes,
They are stiff knights clashing pasteboard armor.

Hurrah! the breeze whistles in the great ball of skeletons!
The black gallows moans like an iron organ!
Wolves give answer from violet forests:
On the horizon the sky is a hellish red...

Hello! shake those funereal braggarts
Who, surly, with their fat broken fingers, tell
Their beads of love on their pale vertebrae:
You dead, this is no monastery!

Oh! there in the middle of the dance of Death
Leaps into the red sky a great mad skeleton
Carried off by his impetus, like a horse rearing:
And, still feeling the rope tight around his neck,

Clenches his small fingers on his thighbone which cracks,
With shouts similar to jeers,
And, like a clown going back into his booth,
Springs back into the dance to the singing of bones.

On the black gallows, one-armed fellow,
The paladins are dancing, dancing,
The thin Paladins of the devil,
The skeletons of Saladins.