A Bomb Over the Rue Feuillantines

 

By Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

VI

What are you? what, fallen from somewhere above, you wretch!
What are you made of? Lead, fire, death, the inexorable,
a reptile of war slithering in its own tortuous furrow.
What are you for! you, the cynical and monstrous
assassination that the princes of the depths of the nights
     throw randomly at men,
You, crime, you, ruin and mourning,
     you who call yourself hatred, terror, ambush,
     carnage, horror, wrath,
it is out of the blue that you fall upon us!

Not you! Not you again! You frightful fall
of iron, infamous outbreak,
bronze flower burst into petals of flame,
O vile human lightning, O you through whom
bandits are great, through whom the tyrants
call themselves divine, servant of royal crimes,
iron prostitute, sprung from the cloud
by who knows what marvel of science?
What a sinister usurpation of lightning!

How dare you come from heaven, who are born in hell?
(The forge that made you was surely beneath the ground!)
The man whom your bite has just now touched
sat pensive in the corner of a hovel,
minding his own affairs, not yours.
His eyes searched in the shadows
for a dream that shone; he was thinking;
when he was little, he had played there;
the past appeared before him, full of childish voices;
that’s where the Feuillantine nuns were.
Your stupid thunder strikes down a paradise.
Oh! How charming it was! how we used to laugh!

To grow old is to regard the fading light.
A garden once grew green where this street stands.
The ruin that new cobblestones imposed on nature,
alas, the bomb has now completed.
Here sparrows made raids upon the mustard-seed,
and the little birds quarreled to feed;
the wood was full of supernatural glimmerings;
so many trees! what pure air in the trembling branches!

The tow-headed lad has white hair now,
one was a hope, the other a ghost.
Oh! in the shadow of the old dome
we were impossibly young!
Now we are old like him. And so it is.
I day-dream, passing by. Right here,
his soul once flew away singing,
and it was here that to his unfocused eyes
appeared flowers that seemed eternal.

Here life was light; here walked,
beneath the outspread April foliage,
his mother, to whose dress he clung.
Memories! how suddenly everything vanishes!
Dawn opened its corolla to the old man’s gaze,
in this sky where the terrible blossoming bombs
     just go on blazing around him.
O the ineffable dawn where doves flew!
This man, who looks gloomy here, was joyful.
A thousand dazzling wonders filled his eyes.
Spring! in this garden abundant there were
periwinkles, roses, and piles of white daisies,
all of which seemed laugh in the warming sun.
A child among the flowers, he was one of them.