The Choice Between Two Nations

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Translated/Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

1

TO GERMANY

No nation surpasses you
Times past, earth was a place of fear,
Then, circled by might, you were the righteous people.
Upon your august forehead rests
     a tiara obscured in shadow,
and yet, like bright fabled India
you shine: O country of blue-eyed men,
noble and far-seeing in Europe’s dark depth,
a stark and shapeless glory envelops you, immense.
Your beacon is lit on the peak of giants;
like the sea-eagle that calls no single ocean home,
your history is one of ever-greater grandeur.

Jan Huss the Wise, the apostle Crescentia followed;
that Barbarossa ruled, does not prevent
     the arrival of the daring poet, Schiller.
The emperor on his summit fears your spirit
     and dreads your thunderbolt.
No, nothing worldly eclipses you, Germany.

Your Widukind[1] can hold his own beside our Charlemagne,
and Charlemagne would see himself in one of your soldiers.
Sometimes it seems you have a guiding star,
and the peoples have watched you, O fecund warrior,
rebel against the double yoke that weighs upon the world,
and stand, delivering the light of day with iron hands,
Hermann[2] defies Caesar, Luther the church of Peter.

For a long time, like the oak to which the ivy clings
you were the signet ring that bound to one law the vanquished.
As silver and lead are mixed in brass,
you knew how to meld into a single, sovereign people
twenty tribes, the Hun, the Dacian, the Sicambre.
The Rhine gives you gold, and the Baltic, amber.
Music is your breath; soul, harmony, incense:
She alternates in your powerful anthems
the cry of the eagle with the song of the lark.
Seeing the silhouette of your crumbling towns
we imagine the many-headed hydra;
we fancy the ghost-warrior vaguely seen
on the slope of the mountain, with thunder above.
Nothing is so fresh and charming as your green plains;
the rays thrust down between the gaps of mist.
The hamlet sleeps, tranquil beneath the wing
      of the sheltering manor,
and the pale-haired virgin, leaning on the cisterns
in the evening, seems for a the world to be an angel.

Like a temple raised on uneven pillars
Germany presides over twenty hideous centuries,
and the splendor in its shade, comes from them.
It has more heroes than Athos has peaks.[3]

Teutonia,[4] on the threshold of sublime clouds
where lightning dances with the stars, appears;
his pikes in silhouette are like a forest.
Above his head a victory bugle
stretches out, emblazoned with its history.
In Thuringia, where hammered Thor still stands;
Ganna, the disheveled druidess plunges
into the rivers, whose waters shine with phantom flames;
and monsters with women's breasts, the Sirens, sing;
the Harz that Velleda haunts, the Taunus
where Spillyre wipes her bare feet in the grass,
all these have a bitter and divine sadness,
leaving in the deep woods its prophetess.
At night, the Black Forest is a sinister Eden;
the moonlight, sudden, on the banks of the Neckar
sounds, and living fairies fill the trees.

O Teutons, your tombs look like the trophies of war,
your ancient bone-yards sown with giants.
Your laurels are everywhere; be proud, Germans.
Only a Titan foot can fill your sandal.
Brilliant bugle-calls and feudal glory
gild your helmets, emblazon your shields;
Rome had its Horatius;[5] Celts honor Galgacus;[6]
What Homer was to Greece.
      Beethoven is to you.

Germany is powerful and superb.

2

TO FRANCE

O my mother!

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[1] Widukind, a Saxon war chief who opposed Charlemagne, 775-785 CE, a symbol of Saxon liberty.

[2] Hermann. Arminius, the Germanic war chief who engineered Rome’s most catastrophic defeat in the Teutoberg Forest, 9 CE.

[3] Mt. Athos, a high peak in Northeastern Greece, is on a peninsula that is also mountainous. It has been occupied by Greek Orthodox monks since the Middle Ages.

[4] Teutonia, here a personification. Ancient Roman writers called some of the German Tribes “Teutons, from a proto-Celtic word meaning “the people.”

[5] Horatius Cocles, a Roman officer who held a narrow bridge against the Etruscans so that Romans could destroy the structure behind him.

[6] Galgacus, a Celtic chieftain who fought against a Roman army in Northern Scotland, 84 CE.