by Brett Rutherford
Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "February 1871."
Selections from a 20-page canto-length poem.
1
On one side, the sacrificial victims.
On the other, those who sacrificed them.
This growing-up of the species,
where self-confessed deformities
develop and flourish.
Terrifying fate! everything serves its end,
even shame; prostitution has its fertility;
crime keeps the death rate up;
in a state of corruption, new embryos appear.
Those whom we come to love
are born from what we deplore.
What we see clearly is that we suffer. For what?
We enter the rout of life with cries of fear;
sometimes we regret surviving
the worst that has come our way.
The human race climbs a staircase
which turns and plunges into the night
only to re-enter the day again.
In this unnatural progression we lose sight
of the good and the evil in turn.
At last we come to think murder is good;
death saves; the moral law bends
and disappears into the dark spiral.
2
But what an obscurity!
what waves of smoke and foam!
In all this mist, what optical illusions!
Is it a liberator, this tiger that leaps?
Is this leader a hero, or is he a bandit?
Just try and guess. Who knows? in these depths
made of crime and virtue, of murders and parties,
deceived by what we see and what we hear,
how can we find the star in so much floating horror?
This is why everything seemed vain and troubled before;
like an ever-growing and redoubling night;
The vast caving-in of tumultuous facts,
the battles, the treacherous and self-defeating assaults,
on Carthage, and Tyre, Byzantium and Rome,
catastrophes, men falling terribly from high thrones,
all had the appearance of a sterile torment, and,
following as hail follows the wind’s anger,
and as heat follows cold,
all that occurred seemed to speak forth
only single law: Nothing lasts.
The nations, bowing heads, had no other philosophy
in these ebbs and flows than the velocity
of the chariots passing over them;
no one saw the purpose of these vain quarrels;
and Roman Horace cried: — Since everything is fleeing,
let us love, live, and watch the shadow of the mountains fall;
laugh, sing, pick grapes from the vines to hang them,
O Lydé, behind your ears;
This little thing is everything.
By Bacchus, on the weight of heroes, slackers,
glory and kings, I will question Caron, the passer of shadows! —
Since then we have understood.
Statistics gradually lost their appearance of chaos,
and vaguely revealed a few illuminated spots.
3
Has anyone unraveled the germ of life?
Does anyone see the end point of the tunnel
through which we plummet, space and
time?
Does anyone see both ground and sky?
Have we even penetrated nature?
What is light and what is the force
that emanates from the magnet?
What is the brain? what makes a body move about?
Why does the moon’s rays have no heat?
O night, what is a soul? Is a star one of them?
Is perfume the wandering soul of the pistil?
Does a flower suffer? Can a rock think?
What is the wave? Etnas, Cotopaxis, Vesuvius,
where does the flaming of earth’s enormous vats come from?
Where then is the pulley and the rope,
and the bucket that hang in your well, O black Chimborazo?
“Alive!” What does that mean, anyway?
do we distinguish a thing from a being?
What does it mean to die?
(Say, mortal! what does it mean to be born?)
You ask in fact: Is this the whole law?
Come, whoever you are, you who speak, tell me,
what are you? Do you want to plumb the abyss?
Have you the strength
to scrutinize the work of the sap beneath the bark;
to watch, in the night, for underground veins,
the wedding of terrestrial water with ocean waves,
and the formation of metals; to hunt down
in their lairs lead, mercury and copper,
so that you could say: This is how
gold is made in the earth
and dawn in the firmament!
Can you encompass such knowledge? Speak!
No? Well, be then thrifty of axioms about God,
keep mum with sentences on what man is,
and do not pronounce judgments on infinity.
