No! No! No! (Victor Hugo)

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "January 1871"

IV

No, no, no! What? The King of Prussia,
here and lording it over Paris! No!
Not in this holy place, this forested city,
this giant habitation of big ideas,
a place who glimmer leads souls to it,
this place of tumult teaching scholars science,
this great dawn that all the living dream about,
Paris a phenomenon of law and free will,

Her guidance given to the human avant-garde,
her Louvre, dark and hemmed in by its gravel shore,
her belfries, much hope, much fear inspiring,
roofs, walls, and towers, her strange balance
of those to Notre-Dame’s old will enslaved,
     and those whom the Pantheon sets free.
Such! this infinity, such! this abyss, this pile,
this ideal ship with invisible masts,

Paris, accustomed to reap and prune
     from her own harvest,
her growth commensurate and adding to
     the whole world’s grandeur,
her revolutions, her example, and the noise
of the inventions she spreads from the base of her forge,
What? what she founds and invents, sketches,
     experiments, creates,

Why, with all the future nestled under her sacred wing,
would someone, with a cannon shot, make all that vanish?
What? your dream, oh Paris, would be just a dream!
No. Paris is all about progress and success.

What does it matter that the north has come
to flood us with its black Cocytus,[1]
and that a clot of strangers submerges us today? —
the centuries are for this city,
     even if the present time is against her.

She is unperishing.
Even in this roaring storm,
my friends, I feel a deeper faith;
I feel in the hurricane the duty to shine,
and the affirmation of truth takes root.

Because the growing danger is, for the soul,
     another passing thing,
only a reason to grow in courage, and the cause
makes it more beautiful, and the right, while suffering,
     grows ever stronger,
and we seem more fairer when we are forced to stand tall.
It is very difficult for me, for my part, to grasp
that a wrestler can ever have a cause to surrender;
I have never known the art of despair;
How do I learn, when I must, to retreat,
     to tremble, to cry,
to be a coward, and to divorce my sense of honor,
to take upon myself the pains
     that are beyond my strength?

 

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[1] Cocytus, the river of wailing and lamentation, one of five rivers circling Hades, the Greek realm of the dead.