Original subtitles

This mineral, standing or fallen,

...to what order does it belong?

...to what disorder?

To one for which there is no precise name in any language,

...nor a proper history.

Nowhere.

Whenever.

Still beneath this sky

infused with a faint splash of purple ink

trying to convince us that it is Mediterranean.

But it's in vain that I search,

...that I pause,

...that I go near.

I only multiply the viewpoints

as I try to unveil the face of the hidden god

in whose name was erected one day

this charnel house.

Let us not speak of ruins.

Let us not accuse time,

as if these stones had been

crushed by the years.

These petrified trees, how could one fail to see

how they mimick in the classic form of a temple

only the space of a yawn?

Those who set them up wouldn't provide them with this aspect...

unless, through a sort of dawning awareness,

they'd become convinced completely and profoundly,

that as soon as they should be piled up, one on top of the other,

as soon as they were planted squarely within the plumb-lines,

these pieces of formless matter torn from matter

would begin with great subtlety, like the masts of a ghost ship,

their slow passage back to the mineral realm

which not for an instant should ever cease to be somewhere else.

All shall return thus to the ooze.

To the ashes.

Nothing is able to defy time.

However boldy it may try.

The cruel god is vain.

So tonight will involve being reconciled to his good grace.

In this vale of stunted trees,

Having been systematically aligned,

the trunks were fossilized in advance.

What use

are remains and offerings?

He needs nothing:

No more of prayer than of worship.

only bloodletting.

If it remains uncertain whether he's received the cries of the willing victims

and their blood smouldering on the altar,

the thick fog which smothers these hills

will draw them very near to him:

the scents and the cries.

It's the old god, Time.

With his flowing beard.

The god of the times

when there weren't any men

much less time.

This chaos was made for him.

This devastation.

This universal junkyard.

He is at ease here.

He feels safe here.

Unkempt,

caked in mud.

He fell asleep here at the creation of the world.

In a heavy slumber without dreams

in the profusion of the nothing,

of the not-yet,

of the perpetual... in which he is mired.

Don't awaken him

as he slumbers.

He will slumber here until the end of the world.

He holds dominion over this wasteland of stones.

And when he contemplates it in his slumber,

he groans with satisfaction

because there's nothing in this mineral cemetery

that would recall

the possibility of an accident

favorable to human life.

We're still on the first day

before it all began

in this garden of horrors

I've still baptized

Temple.

Mine, once and for all time.

For I am the Word.

Even once the mark of the human hand

has been effaced from the stone...

...forever.

subtitles: depositio