Summation

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

[A denunciation of Louis-Jules Trochu (1815-1896), President of the Government of National Defense, who resigned from his post January 22, 1871]

Thoughts and prayers,
thought and prayers, on bended knee —
let this immortal France find its way!
Don’t order it about! You might have been
a valiant soldier, dear leader, but stop
all this talk of intercession
     by all the various saints of Heaven
to avert the present danger!

For Paris, her crown aflame
amid the impure cloud surrounding it,
you are too pious, patient, and gentle
for this world in peril, for this angry people.
These are virtues that really do not help.

Something awful is always rising.
You flatter yourself to think
that merely by force of will you’ll tow
that blackened sphere, superb and vast,
that doom impossible to lock away,
the fate that breaks from out the shadows
above the sinister horizon.

Let France stand up to kings on ever side,
a battered, enormous, disheveled star,
sending out hurricanes to disperse the melee,
and though with blinding, scattered light,”
let this giantess fight on with irritated splendor,
and empty golden quivers on this unworthy
enemy, an army of clownish Schinderhans.

Let France’s fiery mane shake once, and rays
of fury will penetrate their skulls,
through their bronze helmets, and through
the density of their foreheads, and dull eyes.

You, so inclined to pity and prayer,
have not in your armory this sacred hatred.
The hour is dark. You cannot mail
a sermon to the enemy and expect a peace.
Saving the highest and best is the task
at hand, against a foul and sad cloud
that comes to tarnish it. The blue
of the empyrean can shine again only
from a relentless war against the abyss.

See with your own eyes this sublime Paris,
and tremble, as you ought. Do you fear,
myopic and timid, short-sighted and dull,
the immense, clear truth of the people?

Ah! Unleash this France, into a fire
not seen before, a flame indomitable
that grows as the wind carries it.
Trust to its roar, as lightning bolts
issue from it into the fleeing mist.
What fights as one voice will scatter all
before it, making the princes of night repent
for coming to wipe their muddy boots
    at the edge of a sun-bright volcano,
for having offended daylight itself
     with their advances.
Oh, what a dawn shall envelop all
these vile, deformed, and blood-stained kings,
a dawn more terrible as it reveals the orb
of the unforgiving sun. Let this goddess win!

Don’t stand in the way. Holding us back,
we shall have to lead you by a leash
once this great nation unbrakes itself
and hurtles forward. Trust the Marseillaise,
whose words are as drink, to rush us
madly into battle no matter what.
Light is a sword, it cuts the clouds
the way a battering ram knocks down a gate.
Stand aside for anger: sufficient unto the day
is the revenge thereof. We need this rage:
stop hindering it with platitudes.
A great people must be admirable in rage.

Darkness is a lack, and mist is a blindness.
We let a tawny and treacherous shadow
come over the plain; it made
the green meadow a sepulchral field.
The woods became an enemy hide-out,
the kindly river-bank a precipice
    of danger and drowning,
    corpse-lilies floating seaward.
Darkness concealed betraying lies,
     the lairs of foxes, wolf-tracks’
when all the low and slimy, abject
     and jealous beings arrived,
the awful lynx, the limping jackal,
     the hyena with his obscene grimace,
even along the ground, the cowardly
     asp, all in this unhealthy mist
turned France into a zoo of predators.
They came forth, and prowled,
    and slipped and crawled, and drank
        the blood of the people,

Morning comes now, avenging us.
We feel the indignation in the dawning day,
Not here! Not us! This specter, Wilhelm,
Emperor, and Prussia, this nightmare,
when with a pack of voracious kings,
when the swarm of all the crows and ravens
were animated by their hideous design
and came by ferocious instinct to the carnage,
when War, thief, hydra, satyr,
when the plagues, which follow every struggle,
stretch out dank hands to the survivors
    as a further degradation —

Faced with all this, you soldier
more of the collar white than the epaulet,
just step aside!

Let this France rise as an apparition
on the threshold of the gulf of defeat.
Let it rise up, painting the distant peaks
with purple hues. Let its light shine,
darting in all directions from nadir to zenith,
in dazzling beams that save us, and devour
our enemies, delivering with terrible joy.

 

 

No! No! No! (Victor Hugo)

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "January 1871"

IV

No, no, no! What? The King of Prussia,
here and lording it over Paris! No!
Not in this holy place, this forested city,
this giant habitation of big ideas,
a place who glimmer leads souls to it,
this place of tumult teaching scholars science,
this great dawn that all the living dream about,
Paris a phenomenon of law and free will,

Her guidance given to the human avant-garde,
her Louvre, dark and hemmed in by its gravel shore,
her belfries, much hope, much fear inspiring,
roofs, walls, and towers, her strange balance
of those to Notre-Dame’s old will enslaved,
     and those whom the Pantheon sets free.
Such! this infinity, such! this abyss, this pile,
this ideal ship with invisible masts,

Paris, accustomed to reap and prune
     from her own harvest,
her growth commensurate and adding to
     the whole world’s grandeur,
her revolutions, her example, and the noise
of the inventions she spreads from the base of her forge,
What? what she founds and invents, sketches,
     experiments, creates,

Why, with all the future nestled under her sacred wing,
would someone, with a cannon shot, make all that vanish?
What? your dream, oh Paris, would be just a dream!
No. Paris is all about progress and success.

What does it matter that the north has come
to flood us with its black Cocytus,[1]
and that a clot of strangers submerges us today? —
the centuries are for this city,
     even if the present time is against her.

She is unperishing.
Even in this roaring storm,
my friends, I feel a deeper faith;
I feel in the hurricane the duty to shine,
and the affirmation of truth takes root.

Because the growing danger is, for the soul,
     another passing thing,
only a reason to grow in courage, and the cause
makes it more beautiful, and the right, while suffering,
     grows ever stronger,
and we seem more fairer when we are forced to stand tall.
It is very difficult for me, for my part, to grasp
that a wrestler can ever have a cause to surrender;
I have never known the art of despair;
How do I learn, when I must, to retreat,
     to tremble, to cry,
to be a coward, and to divorce my sense of honor,
to take upon myself the pains
     that are beyond my strength?

 

---

[1] Cocytus, the river of wailing and lamentation, one of five rivers circling Hades, the Greek realm of the dead.

The Stupidity of War

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "January 1871"

III

War works at her loom, an eyeless and imbecile
Penelope, humming a lullaby of chaos
from the oscillation of unbeing,
Oh War, attending to the clash of squadrons,
ears full of the furious noise of the bugles.
Thirsty, she reaches for a tankard of blood,
and, fierce and withered, would make others drink.

She is draped in a cloud of deformed destinies,
     from the sight of which God flees.
The light that illumines her is no light at all
     but something blacker than night
          that casts inverted beams that singe.

Immense madwoman, a whirligig of wind
     and a lightning-bolt armory,
what use are you, giantess,
     what use, you being of smoke and fire
if all that collapses before you
only rebuilds another evil,
if yours is the unthinking
     and automatic murder of beasts,
the way the wolves descend upon sheep,
if you, slouching at ease in the shadows,
defeat one Emperor only to make another!