Whatever is your lover's language, "La Glace" is her mirror, and among its many reflections, there is inevitably one that will echo to her! Researchers have participated to translate this short poetry. International radio stations and singers, have lent their voice to say it in their mother tongues.

To translate is to do something else than the original, and even it is as closely as possible, we will never know, what exactly the words convey in a translation which seems perfect, when it is not in our language.

To translate a poem is surely something even more insane. For me, intuitively it is impossible, except by agreeing to obtain another creation. But my four lines written with this symmetry on the vertical axis to be read in a mirror, clearly possessed a force, which any translation would continue to carry.

Given the number of translations offered on my site, it is obvious that their qualities are very variable. If some translators have preferred "word for word" to stay as close as possible to the original poem, others have taken more or less important liberties.

Some languages are also those of cultures, where certain concepts, where certain words, do not exist. The words "mirror" and "poem" for example! To get around this obstacle, a few of my translators have used circumlocutions, such as "your reflection in water", while others simply left them in a language where they exist, English "poem", Spanish "poema" ...

If you want to dive into a serious analysis regarding "translations" and even more specifically "the translation of poetry", I suggest you take a look at the work of Christine Lombez.

To quote her in her publication "Translate as a poet": "Poets do not limit themselves to having a surface connection, motivated by external contingencies, with translation. They are often literally" haunted "by it. It is the case of Paul Celan, André Du Bouchet, Giuseppe Ungaretti also, who said he wanted to make in his translations “an original work of poetry”, of Philippe Jaccottet and many others. It would therefore seem that poetry and translation, because they try to appropriate the same part of the immaterial, present in language, cannot do without each other and mutually enrich each other in their approach. This is a nameless dialogue that spans texts and ages. For many poets, in fact, translation participates in this process because it makes visible a distance in the writing which is the very place where the elusive is manifested. An “elusive” which, beyond the choices of translation, is the basis of the raison of any poetic quest."

With almost 554 idioms, you will find:

- The interpretation, the adaptation you need, to tell her an Amerindian "I love you"! - The version in the language, the dialect or the talk of your love. - Love poems, mirrors of the original, translated into the languages of West Europe and Oceania. - Some small poems in African, Indian, and Papuan languages. - Translations into regional languages of Europe, and those of Philippines, Asia and Middle East. - Let us not forget the version of the love poem in the languages of the former Soviet Union (USSR) and Indonesia! - Informations about all these languages, sometimes about the ethnicities who speak them and the literature that they have generated. - Surprise your lover with the rare languages of the best of ... and do her smile with poetic amusements and planned languages!

Many anonymous have brought their stone to this building, and have helped me to realize this little poetic project. I say little, because nothing is great, and all remains to be constructed. Poetry is a moment that one captures. It writes, it flies away to disappear and no longer matter ... and then reborn in another form. My little poem "The Poets" tries to sum it up. - But my other texts and poems, edited and translated: "Les Poètes", "Un Parfum l'Interdit", "Les Mots Évaporés", are another story.

If you like these four little lines translated, please promote them ... by creating links, on your blogs, and social networks! The specificity of this website, is also in the wealth of encounters, i should say impulses, because it is completely free, and it will remain so. Nothing was paid and nothing will ever be paid, everything was built on a voluntary basis, by people of various origins, who fell in affection for my 4 little verses!

** NB: I would to specify something very important :

This site is in no way a scientific work, and does not claim to be. Many of these translations that i have reveived, can of course be questioned, modified, improved or even changed ... Many languages having no literary language, and therefore no written standard, the way that the translators wrote these translations for which there is no defined spelling, could only be phonetic. Also, don't be surprised to see these words spelled differently in other texts you might find.

In the same way, the information about the languages, or the ethnic groups that speak them, provided by translators or that I have been able to glean on the right or on the left, in multiple readings, and which have become for me a passion to which I did not expect, are a kind of synthesis, from what I was able to retain. They have no other pretension, that to pose a decor, to embellish a translation, of which the starting point, and the only one of importance, is poetic. These pages are not those of a linguist or an ethnologist, and I say it, because i have been able to find sometimes contradictory informations, very variable in terms of numbers, hypotheses, and my goal is not to detail them to submit them to the reader, but just to set the decor for a poem.

I couldn't resist the beauty of all the writing that I came across to write all these different translations. I wanted to introduce them! To do this, I used Aksharamukha converter. The objective was to set a nice backdrop for all these translations. All the transliterations and conversions do not represent something exact. They have only two objectives: to give you an idea and to let you enjoy the beauty of these scripts. On each page the translation I got is first, conversions and transliterations are below.

I will be very happy to receive your comments, corrections, suggestions, improvements etc.