King of the Whole World

 

By Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “February 1871”

This man is ugly, old and bestial.
What are you putting on his poor head?
A crown? No, two crowns. No, three.
Merge that of emperors with that of kings,
Caesar’s laurel, the cross of Charlemagne,
and then from part of France
     and a lot of Germany.
Under such a heap of crowns once,
     a long time ago, Charles V wavered. [1]
The peace of the world depends on all this,
that this old trembling brow remains in balance.
This old man really would be happier free,
and if he were gone, we would be more comfortable too.

If he has digested badly, the sky is darkened;
his bowel-rumbling is a bitter shock;
we stagger if he spits, we collapse if he coughs;
His ignorance creates a fog on the earth.
Why not leave this old man alone?
If he had neither soldiers, nor dukes, nor constables,
we would gladly receive him at our tables;
Our glasses, under the vine, in the sun, in the open wind,
would click against yours, sire, and you would be alive.

No, we stuff you like an idol, and we petrify you
under a heavy spiked helmet, and,
as we distrust the king above who is jealous of the kings below,
we put up, Sire, a lightning rod in copper at your top;
and your people are so proud that they adore you;
they dress you up with a cloak, like the Pope in his chasuble,
and there you sit, a tyrant,
and we have you over us,
the habit of man being to get down on his knees.

You now carry Etna like Enceladus,
and like Atlas the weighty sky. O master, be sick,
crippled, catarrhal, reigning as old as you wish,
teeth chattering with fever between two sheets.
What does it matter? The universe is no less your thing.
Europe is an effect of which you will be the cause.
Shine forth. No hero stands higher than your ankle.

Bossuet will throw Jehovah under your feet.
You will be proclaimed Most High in the full pulpit.
A king, were he a dwarf, were he a poor wretch,
dropsical, goitrous, crippled, tortuous, exhausted,
less firm on his feet than a cavalryman
     who has drunk too much;
had there been snot and skin eruptions,
     spine, gout and gravel;

even if his mind was shallow, in a shrunken brain,
had he not had much more head than a rat;
even if he, under the splendor of the ceremonial cord,
in the garlanded shadow of a hernial girdle,
remained august and powerful until the last hour
and until the jolt of his final hiccups,
the men who stand at the altar,
     the men of the tribunal, prostrate themselves
      with their grave platitudes.

Though his decrepitude dismays, he is still Caesar;
even in ruins and dying, majesty persists
and covers him, he is great;
and purple is always on him, holy and splendid,
and even austere, when from the scepter and the throne
     he passes to the earthworms’ worshiping.
Agonizing, he reigns; we see him doze off,
we almost fear thunder in his last breath.
Even when he is dead, the crowd with bowed backs
places him in such a temple that it trembles,
and from below admires and contemplates him
when his miserable corpse enters the gaping sepulchre,
they still believes him to be a god
     even though he is already nothing.

 [1] Holy Roman Emperor Charles V renounced his throne and retired into seclusion.