Guillaume Costeley - Nous voyons que les hommes - ноты, перевод

Nous voyons que les hommes
 Font tous vertu d'aimer,
 Et sottes qui nous sommes
 Voulons l'amour blamer: 
 
 Ce que leur est louable,
 Nous tourne à deshonneur,
 Et faute inexcusable,
 O dure loi d'honneur, 
 
 Nature plus qu'eux sage
 Nous a en vn corps mis,
 Plus propre à cet' usage,
 Et nous est moins permis.
 
 O peu de connaissance
 De leur trop grand vouloir,
 Et de leur impuissance,
 Et de notre pouvoir.
 
 O malheureuse ennuie
 Des hommes rigoureux,
 Qui privent notre vie
 Des plaisirs amoureux.
 
 Si des le premier age
 Ce sexe audacieux
 Par injure et outrage
 Voulut forcer les cieux.
 
 Et si fut si moleste
 Jadis au dieu des dieux ,
 Osant son feu celeste
 Porter en ces bas lieux.
 
 Ce n'est point de merveille
 S'il nous a aussi fait
 Presqu'injure pareille,
 Sans lui avoir méfait.
 
 Ayant par sa malice
 Introduit finement,
 Qu'aimer ne serait vice,
 Qu'aux femmes seulement.
 
 Si leur outrecuidance
 Surent punir les dieux,
 Nous auons esperance
 Qu'ils nous vengeront d'eus.
 
 Et sera la vengeance
 Les uns mourant d'avoir
 Eu trop de jouissance,
 Les autres de le voir.
 
  [Last verse lost] 

  

 by Mick Swithinbank
 Men, plainly enough, all think it a feather in their cap if they make love. It is foolish of us women to speak ill of love:


 what is seen as praiseworthy for them is dishonourable for us and an inexcusable fault; morality is harsh.


 Nature has more sense than they do: it has given us a body better designed than men's for amorous practices, yet to us they are more forbidden.


 Little do they realise that their desires are too pressing, while we have all the power and they have none.


 Oh vexatious men with your severe rules, depriving us of love's pleasures!


 If even in antiquity it was men (note: represented by Prometheus) who brazenly sought to set aside the laws 


 instituted by the king of the gods, outraging him by seizing his celestial fire and bringing it back to these lowly realms,


 it is no wonder if men have done us a wrong nearly as great, although we have done them none,


 as, in their malice, they have cunningly ruled that love should be a vice only for women.


 If the gods once punished men for their overweening presumption, we have good reason to hope that they will also take revenge on them for what they have done to us.


 This is the form which that revenge will take: some of them will die as a result of making love too much, and the rest will die (of envy) after beholding it.