by Brett Rutherford
Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871.”
From the fields, the animal roar of drum-beats.
Windless, the flags hang limp at half-mast.
From the Bastille we march to the foot
of the dreary hill where the ages past sleep
next to the living century beneath the cypresses.
The mute wind moves no branches.
The people have weapons on their arms;
they are in respite from their own struggles.
The people are sad; somber they stand, and full of thought/
Silently, their large battalions form a hedge around the grave.
The dead son is there,
and the father longing for the tomb is there,
one yesterday still valiant, robust and handsome,
the hiding the tears on his face, is old;
and each legion greets them as they pass.
O people! O majesty of sweetness immense!
Paris, city of sunlight, you whom the invader
assailed and was unable to conquer,
and whom he has incarnadined with blood,
you whom one day we will see, amid a royal orgy,
emerge, with lightning on your forehead,
like the Commendatore,[1]
O city, you have this height
of grandeur to pay mind to the pain of one man.
To find a soul in Sparta
and to see a heart in Rome,
nothing is more admirable;
and Paris has tamed the universe
by the force through which we feel goodness.
These people are heroes; these people are righteous.
They do much more than conquer: they love.
O august city, that day everything trembled,
when the revolutions rumbled, and in their mist,
through the rays, you saw re-open before you
that terrible shadow which sometimes opens wide
before great peoples; and the man who followed
his son’s coffin paused to admire you,
you who, ready for all proud challenges,
unfortunate, made humanity prosperous.
Dark, he felt like a son at the same time as a father,
a father when thinking of him,
a son when thinking of this city.
May this illustrious young fighter full of faith,
gone into the deep place that calls for us all,
O people, keep your great soul forever close to him!
You gave it to him, people, in this supreme farewell.
That up in the superb freedom of the blue sky,
he witnesses, holding on high an unseen weapon,
the struggles of duty, and carries them on.
Law is not law only here below;
the dead are living people still fraught in our battles,
sometimes having good, sometimes evil as their targets;
sometimes we feel their invisible arrows passing by.
We believe them to be absent. No, they are present;
we get past the earth, the days, the tears,
but there is no getting past fate.
The tomb is our sublime extension.
We wake up there surprised
to have thought we ever fell.
As into the deeper azure the swallow migrates,
we enter happier into an even greater duty.
We see the useful with the right parallel;
and on our own wings we are carried out of the shadow.
O my blessed son, serve France,
from the middle of this abyss of love that we call God.
It is not to sleep that we die,
no, it is to do from above
what our humble sphere does below;
only to do it better, only to do it well.
We only have the goal, heaven has the means.
Death is a passage where everything changes to grow;
who was an athlete on earth
is in the abyss an archangel;
on earth we are limited, on earth we are banished;
but up there we grow without hindering the infinite.
the soul can display its sudden scope there;
it is by losing your body that you regain your form.
Go then, my son! go then, spirit! become a torch.
Shine! Glide into the immense tomb!
Serve France. For God places in it a mystery,
for you now know what the earth does not know,
for the truth shines where eternity shines,
for as we see only night, it is light
that leads you forth.
—Paris, March 18.
[1] Royal orgy … Commendatore. I take this to be a reference to the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the corrupt Don Giovanni, amid a wild dinner party, is interrupted by the arrival of the ghost of the Commander whom he had murdered. The earth opens up, and Don Giovanni is dragged into Hell by his ghost-visitor.
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