To the Cannon Named After Me

 

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870"

IV

Listen to me today, for soon enough
your turn will come to be the one listened to.
O cannon, feared warrior and thunderer,
dragon full of anger and shadow, whose mouth
mingles fierce flame with every roar,
a heavy colossus with lightning in your veins,
you who will scatter in air the blinded dead,
I bless you. You are going to defend this city.

O cannon, I charge you:
     never turn your mouth upon us.
     Be silent in civil war,
but against the foreigner watch out. Just yesterday
you came from the forge, terrible and proud.
The women followed you. How handsome he is! they said.
Because the Cimbri[1] are out there. Their victories are such
that shame has been brought to us, and Paris signals
to the princes that she calls all people to witness.

The struggle awaits us; come, oh my strange son,
let us stand one beside the other, and make an exchange:
place, O black avenger, sovereign fighter,
your bronze in my heart,
     and take my soul within your brass.

O cannon, you will soon be on the ramparts.
Eight horses will drag you, your boxes
full of grapeshot jumping on the pavement.
From the middle of a crowd bursting into cheers,
you will go your lonely way,
     few among the crumbling hovels
     will take notice of your passage.
Take your haughty place at the large embrasures
where an indignant Paris stands, her saber raised.
There, never fall asleep or calm down.

I am one who hoped to heal all with austere indulgence;
since I have rumbled my complaints
     among the living, in the forum or from the heights in exile,
a sower of peace through the immensity of human war,
since towards the great goal where merciful God leads us,
I, sad or smiling, always have my finger raised,
since I, who have known mourning, am pensive now,
as much as one who loved the gospel and craved
     some union Biblical —
but you, ah, you who bear my name,
oh monster, you must become terrible!

For love becomes hatred in the presence of evil;
for the spirit-man cannot submit to the beast man,
and France cannot endure barbarism;
because the sublime ideal is the one great homeland;
and never was duty more obvious
to obstruct the overflowing wild flood,
and to put Paris, the Europe that she is transforming,
her people, under the shelter of an enormous defense.

For if this Teutonic king were not punished,
everything that man calls hope, progress, pity,
fraternity, would flee from the earth without joy;
for Caesar is the tiger and the people are the prey,
and whoever fights France attacks the future;
because we must raise, when we hear from out
the formidable shadow the neighing
of Attila’s horse and his vanguard of Huns,
around the human soul an unapproachable wall,
and Rome, to save the universe from nothingness,
must be a goddess, and Paris a giant!

This is why the cannons that the lyre gave birth to,
that the azure stanzas issued, must be
pointed, mouths gaping, above the ditch.
This is why a quivering thinker is forced
to use light for sinister things;
before kings, before evil and its ministers,
faced with the world’s great need to be saved.
He knows that after dreaming, he must fight.
He knows it is a necessary fight,
     to strike, to conquer, to dissolve,
and so, with a ray of dawn,
     he manufactures a thunderbolt.

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[1] Cimbri. A Germanic tribe defeated by the Romans in 101 CE.