To All the Princes, November 1870

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "November 1870, III"

Teutonic kings, what poor facsimiles you are
    of the fathers before you.
They rushed out of their great lairs,
sword in hand, striving to earn for themselves
the valor of single arms, not of a mass of fighters.

You wage war differently.
Soundlessly you slip into the shadows,
     with mere chance as an accomplice,
entering another nation slowly,
a bit like a thief, almost like a banished lover,
with lowered voice, the sneak-thief’s bowing gait,
     your lamp upon your footsteps only,
just so you make himself invisible
     deep in the forest with wolf and bear.
Then suddenly, shouting Vivat! Hurrah! Haro!
a million swords slide out from their sheaths
as you rush, and strike, and thrust, and cut
upon your neighbor, who, in this battle,
has Nothing for an army and Zero as a general.

Your ancestors, upon whom Luther used
     Ein feste Burg as cradle song
would never have agreed to conquer this way,
because the conquering thirst was less strong in them
than warrior modesty, and all had in their hearts
the desire to be great, more than the lust
     to be victorious.

You, princes, you sow, from Sedan to Versailles,
in your dark paths through the bushes,
all kinds of shady and unusual exploits
that would have brought shame in the time of the knights
who knew the fierce magnanimity of the sword.

Kings, your war is not worthy of an epic
when perpetrated by spies and traitors,
and Victory puts on a cockade for theft,
     a plume for fraud!

William is emperor, Bismarck his parade-leader;
Charlemagne to his right seats the con-man Robert-Macaire[1];
We deliver the France of Austerlitz
to the likes of mercenary Mamelukes,[2]
or Pandour guards,[3] or Ivan the Terrible’s Strélitzes,
to any passing men with lances
or roughneck soldiers.
They make it their emolument, their booty and their prey.
Where once a great army was,
     there is just an enormous robber-band.

Drunk, they go to the dark abyss that awaits them.
So the bear, in the water on the floating icebergd
does not feel the ice floe melt and collapse beneath him.
So be it, princes. Wallow on conquered France,
hold Alsace at bay, and bleed Lorraine.
From Metz that was sold to you,
     from quivering Strasbourg
whose tragic halo you will not extinguish,
you will have what one receives
     from a raped woman,
shamed nakedness, a bed of crime,
     and hatred forever.
The bodies you possess
     shall be soiled, cold,
          and sinister forever after,
when they are taken by force in vile embraces.
That’s what you get from virgins and cities.

Harvest the living like a field of ripe wheat,
surround Paris, throw flames at this great wall,
kill at Châteaudun,[4] kill at Gravelotte.[5]
O kings, despair the sobbing mother,
scream from your shadows the frightening cry:
     Exterminate! Exterminate!
Unfurl your unruly flags,
     and roll through the mud your cannons;
There is something missing in your triumphant noise.
The portal of sunbeams in the heavens remains closed,
And on the mourning earth
     the laurels droop and have no scent,
their inner sap poisoned with all this flow of blood.

Up there in the distance,
     The Muses of History
          assemble the names of the great,
     the haughty group of lasting renown.
They are faceless, immobile, indignant.
Wings closed, they turn their backs,
silent, refusing to acknowledge your triumph.
We poets distinguish, at the bottom of this black firmament,
the mournful lowering of their dark trumpets,
as they shake their heads, and turn, and depart.
To think that not one glorious name
     comes out of this rubble!
O glory, what does anyone call a hero, now?
No! not from these haughty, bloody, subtle foot-stompers,
No! not from these invaders that so much rage animates
that not one of them rises from “anonymous.”
And this hideous affront weighs down on us,
to be so great, and by so little, conquered!

November 1870

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[1] Robert-Macaire. A stock character in drama, a cheat and con artist.

[2] Mamluk. Enslaved mercenaries of the Ottoman Empire.

[3] Pandours. Security guards in the Balkans.

[4] Châteaudun. Site of a French defeat on 18 October 1870. The battle included hand-to-hand and house-to-house fighting. The Germans massacred noncombatants, including women.

[5] Gravelotte, in Lorraine, site of the largest battle in the Franco-Prussian War, in which 42,000 soldiers died.

 

Paris Slandered in Berlin

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "November 1870, II"

The sinister night is scandalized by dawn,
and the sight of one Athenian
     seems an affront to Vandals.    

Paris, at the same time as one swindles you,
another would like to ambush you
     while calling it a polite arrest;

The pedant helps the ruffian soldier;
     they pull a fast one,
     dishonoring the heroic city

raining down insults with the shells
of their bombardment.
Here the thug kills with knife and sword,
and there the rhetorician with pen and press
utters his lies multiplied by an Academy.[1]

Paris is denounced in the name of morals,
     in the name of their cult,
to ease the way to slit your throat —
     that is why they insult you.
Slander progresses to assassination.

O city, whose people
     are as expansive as any senate,
fight, draw the sword, O city of light
who founded the workshop,
     who defended the cottage —
turn eyes and ears away,
    oh proud chief town of men all equal,
from this awful pile of bigots who howl around you,
black redeemers of altar and throne, hypocrites
who always prohibit clarity,
who stand watch around all gods
     against the reproach of free spirits,
and whose slanders we hear in history,
     at Rome, at Thebes,
     Delphi, Memphis, and Mycenae,
like the distant barking of obscene dogs.

 

---

[1] In January 1871, Emil Du Bois Reymond (1818-1896), noted physiology professor and cultural critic, later secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, delivered a speech denouncing Paris and its manners and morals. He later regretted and apologized for his divisive opinions.

Atop the Walls of Paris, At Nightfall

by Brett Rutherford
 

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible
 

West sky was pale, the East pitch-black
as if some bone-house arm reached up
to raise a catafalque
against the colonnades of night,
and on the firmament two shrouds unfolded.
Sunset closed in like a prison.
The dismal plaint of a solitary bird
shrilled out from frostbitten branches
and received no answer.
With downcast eyes I walked some more,
and when I turned my view
to the horizon again
the sinking sun’s face
was no more than a bloodied scimitar.
It was the vestige
of some great duel
that pitted god and monster, equals,
and one might think
the terrifying sky-blade,
lay red upon the ground,
the battle spent, or respite
between colossal wars.

(November 1870).

October 1870, Part 3

AS AN EMBATTLED STAR

     translated and adapted by Brett Rutherford

     from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "October 1870"

III.

Seven. The number of evil. The number to which God counts,
as in a vile dungeon, all deadly human faults.
Seven princes. Württemberg and Mecklenburg,
     Nassau and Saxony,
     Baden, Bavaria and Prussia,
          all in a terrible network.

They pitch their sepulchral tents by night.
The circles of hell are there in dreary spirals.
Paris has the seven knots of darkness over it.
Count them: hate, winter, war,
     mourning, and plague, and famine,
          and even boredom joins the fray.

Paris before its wall has seven leaders like Thebes.
Unbelievable spectacle! A lone star is besieged by Erebus.[1]
The whole night sky assaults the light. A shout
of distress the star emits — and nothingness laughs.
Blindness attacks the day; a dismal envy
attacks the august altar-vase of life,
the great central hearth, the one star
     on whom all other stars depend.
All watching eyes spread through infinity
are surprised. What is this? What?
     The one star’s clarity is veiled!

A long thrill of horror runs from orb to orb.

God, save your handiwork,
     you who with a moving breath
put into shade Leviathan
     to where he twists his poisonous arms!
But no, it’s done. The infamous battle begins.
Like the lighthouse that once guarded
     the port of Scée,
a blaze bursts from the star, alerting
the sky that hell rises and night descends.
The abyss is like a huge wall of smoke
where some fierce army swarms,
a monstrous cloud, brass shining through.
Infernal noises indescribable and underground sounds
mingle, and, howling in the depths of Gehenna,
the thunders sound like beasts on a chain.

A shapeless tide where typhoons roar
arrives, grows and rolls with deep cries,
and this chaos is determined to kill this sphere.
He strikes with the flame, she with the light.
The abyss has lightning and the star has rays.
darkness, flood, mist, hurricane, whirlwind,
fall on the star, again, again, again, again,
seeking to pour itself all into this well of dawn,
an assault of cosmic violation.

Who will win? Fear — hope! Shudders!
The splendid roundness of the star, at times,
under horrible swellings of darkness, fades,
and, as a face vaguely trembles and floats,
more and more sinister and pale, it disappears.

Has someone warranted the arrest of a star?
Who has such power? Who then has the right to take
     from the universe
this sacred glow and this deep soul?
Hell seems like a terrible mouth that bites,
a maw so large that sometimes we see nothing.
So, is it dead?

Suddenly a single ray cuts through a gap,
a mane on fire, shaken by winds,
appears… There it is!
The star! The star! Living, loving,
it condemns the Night to dazzlement,
and, suddenly reappearing in its original beauty,
covers it with an immense foam of light.

So, is Chaos defeated? No. The darkness
redoubles, and the reflux of the invading abyss
comes back, and it seems as if God is discouraged.
Again, in the horror, in the night, in the storm,
we seek for the star. Where is it then? What an ambush!
And nothing continues, and everything is in suspense;
All of Creation bears witness to a criminal act,
And the universe gazes with amazement into the Abyss
Which, tirelessly, at the bottom of the vermilion firmament,
Devours light, casting a vomit of shadow on the day.

 

 

---

[1] Erebus. In Greek myth, the primordial god of darkness.

October 1870, Part 2

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "October 1870."

Part 2

AS DANTE AND AESCHYLUS LOOK ON

And so the kinds of days
     of which the tragedies tell, have returned!
It seems, from omens indecipherable,
Another hegira begins for the nations.

Pale Dante Alighieri of immortal fame,
     and you, Aeschylus, playwright
     and brother of the warlike Cynegirus,
two severe witnesses, equal in love of justice,
leaning, one on Florence and the other on Argos,
you who authored, shades on whom stern eagles rest,
these dreaded books where one feels something
of what rumbles and glows behind the horizon,
you two whom the human race reads
     even now with a shudder and a backward glance,
dreamers who can say in your tombs: we are
Gods because we make men tremble!
Dante, Aeschylus, listen and look.

These kings today.
beneath their broad crowns have shriveled foreheads.
You would disdain them. They lack the stature
of those whom your formidable verses torture,
unworthy of the Argive chief’s outrage
      nor from the Pisan baron’s contempt;
but they are monstrous nonetheless, you must admit.

Though sprung from the first kings,
     they have a vulgar appearance,
but they command the legions of war.
They push the seven Saxon peoples on Paris.[1]
Hideous and helmeted, gaudy with gilding,
     tattooed all over with coats of arms,
each of them must feed on murder.
Each of these kings takes as his emblem
some species of forest beast,
     upon his shiny visor,
the chimera of a harsh and gloomy
     herald bird, splayed out with wing and claw,
or the waving mane of some impudent dragon.

And the great chief displays on his high banner,
a stain like two reflections off a polished tomb
in the form of a strange eagle,
      white at night and black during the day.

With them, with great noise, and in all forms,
Krupps, bombards, cannons, huge machine guns,
they drag beneath this wall that they call “enemy”
a war machine all cast from ancient bronze.
O Bronze alloy, this mute and sleeping slave,
who, suddenly screams with his muzzle off,
takes on from fire and powder a terrible zeal
and starts, unbridled, to destroy a city,
and goes on without respite,
     and with the horrible joy
          of resounding brass.
As if to add insult to these fallen towers,
some of the same Bronze will be employed
     later, to make infamous statues;
as if the alloy of Vulcan wished to say:
     People, contemplate in me
     the very monster
     you have used to make a king.

The whole earth trembles,
     and the seven leaders unite in hatred.

They are there, threatening Paris. They punish the city.
And for what ? For being France and in so being,
     to be the universe,
for shining above the half-open chasms,
     a giant arm holding a fist-full
of sunbeams, with which Europe is forever bathed;
They punish Paris for being freedom;
they punish Paris for merely being the city it is,
where Danton scolds, and Molière shines,
     and Voltaire laughs;
They punish Paris for being the soul of the earth,
for being more alive with each passing year,
a thing they cannot bear: the great deep torch
     that no foul wind can extinguish,
the idea on fire piercing this cloud, the numbered
crescent of progress clear in the depths of the dark sky;
they punish Paris for denouncing error,
the warning harbinger and the enlightener,
for showing beneath their terrible glory
      a vast and empty cemetery.

Paris, alone, abolishing the scaffold,
     the throne, the border,
the boundary, the fight, the obstacle, the ditch;
Paris the future pointing,
     when they are only the past.

And it is not their fault; they are the dark forces.
They follow Gothic glories in the night,
Cain, Nimrod, Rhamsés, Cyrus, Genghis, Timur.
They fight against law, and light, and love.
They would like to be gigantic,
      but are only misshapen.
Earth, these creatures do not seek your happiness.
you innocents who want to fall asleep
in the arms of sacred peace, and in the marriage
of Divine clarity with the human spirit.
No, they condemn brother to devour brother,
people to massacre the people, and their misery
it is to be omnipotent and that all their instincts
lit up for hell, tarnish the sight of heaven above.

Hideous kings! We will see, of course, before their souls
renounce slaughter, the sword, and infamous murder,
to the sound of bugles, and the neighing war horse.
In the after-morn of universal massacre,
the bird no longer knows the way to its nest,
the tiger loves the swan, and the forgetful bee
abandons its wild hive for the black hollow
     of a corpse’s eye-socket.

 

---

[1] Seven Saxon peoples. The various German principalities united under Prussian rule.

To Little Jeanne

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

I missed your birthday yesterday, sweet child.
So now you have lived one year, plus one
dear happy day, this morn that finds you prattling.
Just as the fledglings wild, beneath the leafy boughs
open their hazy eyes, chirp merrily to feel
their feathers already growing, know all they need to know
from birth, in like assurance, Jeanne,
your rosy mouth smiles. Precocious,
you paw tall volumes for the pictures that please you
(no matter the bent and crumpled pages!).
We search for children’s verse, but none describe
the way your tiny body trembles
     when I enter the room.
Nothing the famous authors say exceeds
the thoughts half-hatched within your eyes,
and your shadowy, scattered, strange reverie,
looking at me with the blank-slate memory
of a newly-formed angel. Jeanne, God
cannot be far, since you are here.

Ah! You are one year old, now that’s an age!
Born to a house of writers, large of brow,
Sometimes you are serious, with that delight
that comes from concentration realized.
You are in that celestial moment of life
where one has no shadow yet,
     where in one’s open arms,
held by parents, a child contains the universe;
Your young soul lives to dream, and laugh,
     and cry, and hope.
From mother Alice to father Charles,
all the horizon that your mind can contain
goes from her who rocks you,
     to him whose kindly smiles
          makes all seem right and good.
Embraced by these two beings since the start,
you float in caresses and light.
Husband and wife and child, complete,
O Jeanne; and that is right; and I,
I endure more days, your humble ancestor,
     because I follow you;
and you have come,
     and I will go; and I love,
having only the right to nightfall,
while yours is the right to dawn.

You and your blond brother George suffice
to feed my soul, and I see your games,
     and that is enough;
and I might want, after my countless trials,
     that your two cradles at the rise of sun,
           shadow and silhouette my tomb.

Ah! innocent newcomer, and dreaming,
you chose a singular hour to be born.
You are Jeanne, familiar with terrors.
You smile in front of everyone
     whose faces grow pale and dart
     the terrified glances of animals at bay.
You make your bee-hum in the woods,
O Jeanne, and you mix your charming murmur
as Paris hammers its great armory.
Ah! when I hear you, Jeanne, and when I see you
sing, and, speaking to me with your humble voice,
stretch your gentle hands above our heads,
it seems to me that the shadow where the storms rumble
trembles and moves away with dull roars,

and that God gives to the city of a hundred towers
(distraught like a sinking ship,
with the enormous cannons guarding the dark rampart)
God gives to the universe
     even as it tilts to one side
          and which Paris defends —
this same God gives his blessing
     through a little child.

Paris, September 30, 1870.