Launch

Well, here it is, the result of spur-of-the-moment inspiration put on hold. I don't expect this place to have much of an effect anywhere, or to accomplish anything magnificent. Hope you enjoy your stay, whatever it was that led you here.

Wondering about the title? It means a choice or chosen landscape in French, and this blog will be such a place for my thoughts. The source is one of my favorite poems, Clair de lune by Paul Verlaine:

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
l’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune

Au calme clair de lune, triste et beau
qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
et faire sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau
les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi des marbres

My adaptation:
Your soul's a chosen landscape where lightly
dance charming masquèd figures side by side
playing the lute while a melancholy
beneath their fantastic disguises hides

While they sing in a minor mode about
victorious love and gracious life's boon
their own happiness they appear to doubt
mingling their song in the light of the moon

The calm moonlight, whose sad beauty aches
and sets to dreaming the birds in the trees
and among the marblèd statues makes
slim fountains sob in ecstasy.