The Defeat at Sedan, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Anneé Terrible

PART 2 – WHERE MADMEN GO

Let Pliny go to Vesuvius, Empedocles to Etna,[1]
from whose craters a new dawn of fire arose.
It is right to be curious, unlike the Brahmin
made in Benares only to be fed to vermin
in search of his own paradise, I understand!

That through Lipari’s[2] perilous sea, riven
with ancient and live lavas purple-clad,
a pearl fisher sails in his tiny coraline,
teased by feline waters that paw its frail deck,
and he sails and comes home, and sails again
from Corsica’s capes to Corfu’s dread rocks!

Let Socrates be wise, and Jesus be mad,
one being rational, the other sublime, but both
subject to the whims of a killing crowd;
let the black prophet wail outside Solime
until a crowd kills him with javelins;

Let Green[3] fly off in his balloons,
and Lapérouse[4] sail ‘round the globe,
whether Alexander goes to Persia
or Trajan takes war to the Dacians,
each knows what he is doing
What each one wishes, he dares to do.
But never in all the centuries past,
has History borne witness to such an insane spectacle,
this vertigo, this dream, a man who himself,
descending from a triumphant and supreme summit,
pulls on the dark thread that brings down death.
Annoyed with the ground, he opens a pit,
and there he places himself beneath the pendulum
and its ever-descending blade. The mystery is
that he does nothing while it swings down,
as if, without a head, he’d better keep his crown!

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[1] Pliny (the Younger) and Empedocles, two classical writers who left descriptions of volcanic eruptions.

[2] Lipari, a geothermally-active volcanic island off the coast of Sicily. It is between the two volcanos of Etna and Vesuvius.

[3] Charles Green (1785-1870), British balloonist and inventor of the first reliable methods of steering and landing.

[4] Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse (1741-1788?), French naval officer and explorer who led an around-the-world expedition.