More songs by Benjamin Biolay
Description
The words flow as if someone is leafing through an old notebook, where dried flowers remain between the pages - chance encounters, moments by the window, shadows of fellow travelers whose eyes are remembered more vividly than entire years. All of these are beautiful ghosts who once smiled and disappeared, leaving behind a slight melancholy and a strange gratitude for the fact that they existed.
The music walks the fine line between memory and regret: slightly bitter, but at the same time enveloping you in warmth, like wine in the evening. Listening to it is like watching passers-by and thinking that each of them has a story hidden in their eyes that could have been yours, but remained fleeting.
Lyrics and translation
Original
Je veux dédier ce poème à toutes les femmes qu'on aime pendant quelques instants secrets.
À celles qu'on connaît à peine, qu'un destin différent entraîne et qu'on ne retrouve jamais.
À celles qu'on voit apparaître une seconde à la fenêtre et qui presque s'évanouit, mais dont la svelte silhouette est si gracieuse et fluette qu'on en demeurait épanoui.
À la compagne de voyage dont les yeux, charmant paysage, font paraître court le chemin.
Qu'on est seul peut-être à comprendre et qu'on laisse pourtant descendre sans avoir effleuré la main.
À celles qui sont déjà prises et qui, vivant des heures grises près d'un être trop différent, vous ont, inutile folie, laissé voir la mélancolie d'un avenir désespérant.
Chères images aperçues, espérances d'un jour déçues, vous serez dans l'oubli demain.
Pour peu que le bonheur survienne, il est rare qu'on se souvienne des épisodes du chemin.
Mais si l'on a manqué sa vie, on songe avec un peu d'envie à tous ces bonheurs entrevus, aux baisers qu'on n'osa pas prendre, aux cœurs qui doivent vous attendre, aux yeux qu'on n'a jamais revus.
Alors, au soir de lassitude, tout en peuplant sa solitude des fantômes du souvenir, on pleure les lèvres absentes de toutes ces belles passantes que l'on n'a pas su retenir.
Que l'on n'a pas su retenir.
English translation
I want to dedicate this poem to all the women we love for a few secret moments.
To those we barely know, that a different destiny brings and that we never find again.
To those who we see appear for a second at the window and who almost disappear, but whose slender silhouette is so graceful and slender that we remain fulfilled.
To the traveling companion whose eyes, charming landscape, make the path seem short.
That we are perhaps the only ones to understand and yet let it go down without having touched it.
To those who are already taken and who, living gray hours alongside a being too different, have, in vain madness, allowed you to see the melancholy of a hopeless future.
Dear images seen, hopes of one day disappointed, you will be forgotten tomorrow.
As long as happiness arises, it is rare that we remember the episodes along the way.
But if we have missed our life, we think with a little envy of all these glimpsed happinesses, of the kisses that we did not dare to take, of the hearts that must be waiting for you, of the eyes that we have never seen again.
So, in the evening of weariness, while populating our solitude with the ghosts of memory, we cry with absent lips for all these beautiful passers-by that we were unable to remember.
That we didn't know how to remember.