Victor Hugo
Translated and adapted by Brett Rutherford
PART TWO
Right is above the tyranny of “All,” no wind contrary
overthrows it. “All” can distract nothing
nor pull aside anything from the common future.
The People rule themselves, each his own king,
and that is right. Nothing broaches this right?
What, some nobody passing by, claims my soul?
Shame! The same, tomorrow, voting stupefied
would seize, and prostitute, and sell my freedom.
Never. The Crowd one day may overwhelm the right,
but the flow descends again, the foam disperses.
All that is right stands bare again when waves are gone.
Who then pretended that the first taker
was entitled to my assent? That I had to assume,
like a yoke, his baseness, to obey his caprice?
Let such a one but enter my cottage
and it becomes a dungeon!
Shall I be forced to make myself a link
because everyone wishes to form a chain? No!
Shall the tender reeds be ruled by oaks?
Ah, they come calling, bourgeois or peasant,
to talk me into it, one selfish, the other blind.
One calls out “Revolution,” the other “Tradition,”
as though their minds were postered walls,
one moment infamy, another moment honor, as
fast erased, replaced in white-wash amnesia.
This stranger might hail from Athens or Carthage
or even Rome: see him, like fountain overflow
gush down the cobblestones into the fatal stream.
Mud he becomes, who once was crystal clear.
This man, so dazed and battered by the succession
of beautiful and harsh days, becomes indifferent
to the depths of turpitude. The people he once dazzled
with his virtues no longer know him.
Once Brutus, he is now a bellowing Falstaff.
He stumbled from glory to the infamous orgy.
Does he even know his own history,
what Washington was to freedom’s cause,
or how the drummer-boy Barra fell
in the monarchist onslaught of ’93?
His dead heart no longer beats
when such names are mentioned.
Where formerly he restored the old cults
of hero-worship, or robust ancestors
—
like dead frugal Phocion, most honest
of all the Athenians, or Lycurgus,
lawgiver of Spartan buried at last,
or Riego hanged, his uprisings failed —
see now, how much has been forgotten!
He purified himself, he washed, oh, he was holy,
all while ignoring everything.
He does not even realize his doings today
dishonor the works of yesterday.
A cowardly and vile amnesiac,
his pride is gone; neither protest
nor revolution rise within him.
The same white lime he paints on tombs
he smears upon the tavern wall.
He makes footstool from a heroic pedestal.
“Honor” becomes an antique word to him
a rusty trifle, gothic or comical,
an armor so inconvenient it is consigned
as scrap, laughed at when seen
in old books’ copperplate engravings.
What ancients proudly fought for
he thinks a game, a joust.
Deception! He once was great,
with but a trace of self-mockery,
now he is bowed down
with self-insult and irony.
Now he is so enslaved he bristles indignity
when the past is spoken of.
He is lost in the vapors of forgetting,
and when a whiff of bravery asserts itself
he fears it.
All this allowed, can we blame anyone?
Can we blame the sea waves for showing us
the million tiny heads within it. What point
in blaming this one, that one, for his errors?
What is one person’s, choices, and memories?
This human cloud, the mass, this whirlwind
of all the living, incapable, alas,
of guilt or innocence? Who can be rescued
and then lifted up? In all his vagueness,
obscurity and disconnectedness, each man
can serve a purpose nonetheless. Progress
is always there and self-evidence.
He be useful, even if the goal is indistinct.
His use, in Paris as in London, is to assert
what progress can be, and let others respond to him.
The English Republic expires, dissolves.
Who’s left in the lurch? Proud Milton stands,
and him we read and ponder. One is enough:
crowds disappear, but thinkers endure.
Their work is enough to germinate the future,
because of them nothing ever really dies.
Amid the catastrophes of law, nothing is hopeless.
What does it matter if the villain is happy
and proud, and even revered?
Your foul deeds done
beneath the sky of heaven, reek
and you succumb,
Rome. Freedom conceals itself
within the catacombs.
The victors may claim the gods
and seize their temples;
the vanquished take comfort in Cato,
whose name and words endure.
Just as Galgacus rose up, defying Rome
in Britain’s cause, from Poland’s
plains
Kosciusko came to aid America.
Jan Huss was interrupted in reform;
Luther defied all Power and
soldiered on.
When light is needed, an arm to lift it comes.
One dies, if it must be, to prove the thing his faith
requires, and of free will, simply and fearlessly
the righteous step out to separate themselves
from the huddle of the enslaved.
Such martyrs almost leap
into their own open graves,
loathing their fallen fellow men more
than they detest the gnawing worms:
small wonder! The truly great —
oh, such as Roman Regulus
tormented in his box of nails
doomed to oblivion in Carthage;
or Arria or Porcia, two only
among the many women who died
in concentrated courage;
Curtius and Adam Lux, and Thraseas
all calm and strong;
the warlike Condorcet, the stoic Chamfort —
how chastely they left
a world that did not deserve them.
Thus flies the dove, thus soars the swan,
thus eagles forsake the swamp of snakes.
These few bequeathed an example to all,
in the full view of the wicked, to those
who crawled abject on hands and knees,
their act an affront to egoism, to a life of crime,
to the weak hearts given over to darkness.
Gone into the endless sleep, these generous martyrs
went willingly, content to close their eyes upon
a world they could not continue in.
Approach the martyr’s bier if you dare:
to virtue they offer the fiercest kiss.
Sublime and holy is the caress of the tomb
to the great and the pure, to those made
beautiful by the ideal and the good.
Two come to me now and complain,
“Poet, but nothing is fair in this life!”
Faced with all the harms done to them;
faced with Locuste, with the judgment of Pallas;
faced with Carrier, faced with Sanchez,
faced with those appetites already inclined
toward their own non-existence,
the denying sophists, false hearts and vacant brows;
faced with all this, what affirmation there is
in these great suicides. I tell you,
when everything seems dead in the living world,
when I hesitate to put one foot before another,
when not a single cry comes from the silent masses,
when Doubt and Silence seem the universe’s pall,
I know that one of us, deep in the ditch
he may be in the darkest enclose, will turn,
call out the name of one of these pure dead,
and ask its shade: Should we believe,
O austere shadow long departed? Should we endure,
move on, resist, and struggle? Speak, ashes!
And from the space where the courageous dead
lay down will come an answer: “Yes!”
PART THREE
WAITING FOR THE VOTES TO BE COUNTED
Oh! what falls around us in the shadow?
So many snowflakes! Do you know the number?
Count the millions and then the millions!
Black night! We see the lions returning to their den.
The thought of eternal life recedes and fades.
The snow falls. The twilight, hideous, blinds us.
We feel but cannot see, the mountains hunching, sinister.
We dare not fall asleep, for fear we’d never wake.
Snow blankets the fields, it covers the cities;
Flakes whiten the sewer grates, hiding their vile mouths;
The dismal avalanche fills the tarnished sky;
Dark ice, hard-caked and falling thick! Is it over?
We can no longer distinguish our path; everything is a trap.
What will be left of all this snow,
The earth’s cold veil, one universal shroud,
Tomorrow, one hour after sunrise?
What is to become of us?
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