Croatia’s Modric won the Golden Ball but his team lost
Monday
Having seen my team win the World Cup, I can afford to be magnanimous and compliment Croatia for their remarkable courage. Time after time they threw themselves at the superior French team, leaving open huge swathes of space behind them. In the end, it cost them.
To cushion myself against defeat—I was prepared for France to lose as it had lost to Italy in the 2006 finals—I already had a French consolation poem picked out. I offer it to Croatia.
As if it weren’t bad enough to lose, the Croats had to receive their medals in the rain, which makes Jules Laforgue’s “Triste, Triste” (“Sad, Sad”) apropos. Let’s just say that it is very French in its existential ennui.
Sad, Sad
By Jules Laforgue
I contemplate my fire. I stifle a yawn.
The wind weeps. The rain streams against my window.
Next door a piano plays a ritornello.
How sad is life and how slowly it flows.
I sing to our earth, atom of a moment,
In the infinite screen of eternal stars,
To the few that have deciphered our feeble eyes,
To all that is inexorably closed to us.
And our type! Always the same comedy,
Vices, griefs, melancholy, sickness,
And then we make lovely golden dandelions blossom.
The universe reclaims us, nothing of ours endures,
Nevertheless let everything down here continue again.
How alone we are! How sad is life!
Not that life flowed slowly in yesterday’s contest, which was remarkable for its scoring and its high energy.
When we win, everything feels infused with meaning, at least for a while. When we lose, “how sad is life!”
Here’s the poem in French:
Je contemple mon feu. J’étouffe un bâillement.
Le vent pleure. La pluie à ma vitre ruisselle.
Un piano voisin joue une ritournelle.
Comme la vie est triste et coule lentement.
Je songe à notre Terre, atome d’un moment,
Dans l’infini criblé d’étoiles éternelles,
Au peu qu’ont déchiffré nos débiles prunelles,
Au Tout qui nous est clos inexorablement.
Et notre sort! toujours la même comédie,
Des vices, des chagrins, le spleen, la maladie,
Puis nous allons fleurir les beaux pissenlits d’or.
L’Univers nous reprend, rien de nous ne subsiste,
Cependant qu’ici-bas tout continue encor.
Comme nous sommes seuls! Comme la vie est triste!
