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.