Watching My Granddaughter, Between Two Bombardments

by Brett Rutherford

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

XI

From your first cry, Jeanne, you excited our pity
as much as our admiration (to be born in such times!)
You were born; you had this omnipotence,
you glowed with grace; yours was like a venerated creche,
where lay the humble divine child
     who does not as yet have eyes,
and whom a star comes to fetch from the heavens.
You were loaned to us six days,
     and then for six weeks,
     and then six months,
a frail glow in our human shadows.

Meanwhile, Jeanne, you kept on getting older,
all that hair now, and even a tooth,
and you are almost a great character, so soon.
So little of the newborn floats there now,
you want to be on the ground with us;
you need adventures and walking about,
and the infant’s jersey seems childish to you.
You perk up as your older brother
marches about to the tune of the Marseillaise,

Two years old; and you, you climb on my chair,
or, fierce on all fours, you crawl behind a screen,
where it is my job to seek and find you.
You want a clever toy, even a living one.
You set up a dolls’ house with a baffled kitten.
The flexible gear of growth has taken you up,
replacing the child who wails with the one who chatters,
the plaintive cry with the one of triumph.
The angels who eats at table now mocks
the memory of the angel at the breast.
You are constantly transfigured; time mixes
the Jeanne I saw yesterday with the one I see today.

With every step she takes, she leaves behind her
several little ghost-trails of herself.
We remember everyone, we mourn them,
we love them, and they would all be dead
     if she were not alive in her turn.
She is already a double-star, well on her way
to becoming a constellation in herself.
It seems that in this enchanted state of being,
to please us, each age in turn makes its own copy.
This little destiny is like a rising sun!

For fate is masked with rays in the morning;
and in the whiteness of dawn,
in a pleasant and chaste celebration,
the sunbeams come one after the other
to surround the child’s head and give to it
an aureole, some pure and crowning effect.
It would seem that life, with charming care,
tries every halo on this little Jesus,
thus preparing itself through soft caresses,
roses, kisses, laughter fresh and quick,
only to later put thorns on her forehead.