La traîtresse [English translation]

I call on death to strike me and I wait for it unafraid,

I no longer cling to life, I seek a gravedigger

who has a grave to sell whatever the price:

I’ve surprised my mistress in the arms of her husband,

my mistress, the traitress!

I thought I held my love on the end of my spear,

my little banner floated in Mrs Duponts heart,

but that’s all over, finished: last night, in a corner of the woods,

I caught my mistress with her husband, yeuch!

My mistress, the traitress!

Can I find the names, can I find the words,

to record the infamy of this disgusting girl1

who has chosen her spouse to cheat her lover,

thus taking adultery to its final extreme?

My mistress, the traitress!

How could I miss it2? What had I got in them?

So that I didn’t notice, for a certain time,

that when she kissed me she seemed less greedy3

and was now producing children who didn’t look like me.

My mistress, the traitress!

And to ram the horn4 well into my heart,

for a devilish mocking refinement

the treacherous bitch, at the top of her voice, said, directly to me

“The most cuckolded one of the two definitely isn’t the one people think.”

My mistress, the traitress!

I caught the Duponts, this pair of villains,

when they were restarting there marriage from square one,

I caught my two-faced slippery mistress

in the course of inverting the order of her cuckolds.

My mistress, the traitress!

1. literally ”child of a camel” - "camel" here is slang meaning "nasty disagreeable person" and "child of" is just emphasizing that, but in the context of “pouah” at the end of the previous stanza I think it’s reasonable to translate it as “disgusting girl”2. literally “where then did I have my eyes”3. greedy for kissing, that is4. using the cuckold’s horn against him as a dagger