A Madness Came Over Us

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

[This poem refers to few actual events. It is written in the middle of the terrible reprisals against French people perceived to have been, or to have been allied with, the defeated Communards. Thousands of people were rounded up and executed, and many others were arrested, imprisoned, or exiled to penal colonies. Hugo would be involved in a number of appeals for amnesty, and continued to plead for a policy of no reprisals. This troubled poem should be read, not as a political statement, but as a poet's general deliberations on how the madness of civil war comes to pass, the extent to which individuals are to blame, the need to document and "accuse" FACTS rather than people. It ends with a gloomy speculation that even worse forces of history were hatching that would sweep people away in more waves of senseless violence. Considering the future history of Europe, we can see his dreads as justified. — BR]

 

XVI

Concerning this somber history,
I wish to condemn no one.
The winner always wins, his goal
and will prevails, and yet
he is dragged along by his victory.

Civil war comes, and mourning,
and draped in black as he is
the victor just fresh from triumph
stumbles and loses his footing — lo!

the inky-black waters that swallows
him, we call success; he chokes
at the very thought of more glory
if it feels and tastes like this.

 

This is why I pity them all,
martyrs and executioners alike.

Alas! woe to the orphan-makers!

Misfortune! misfortune
to the widow-makers, woe upon woe!

 

Woe when the rivers run red
with frightful carnage, and when

defiling their beds with a torrential flood,

the blood of man flows
where the rain once fell!
The sky is incarnadine.

Faced with a dead man,
a double fear distresses me:

I pity the killer as much as the corpse.

 

The dead man holds the living one
immobile in his rigid hand. He can flee,
but his victim follows along.
Taking one path to evade the phantom
he comes face to face with it again.
It has no eyes, but ever it knows his name.
Turning up the dead as though to kill
a second time, his blows are in vain.

The night and drugged sleep
     do not remove it;
stand on dawns cliff and wait for it,
    and hurl it to the rocks below,
          yet still it comes;
lose him in drink and boredom,
place a thick shadow of thinking
about nothing whatsoever, and yet
the dead shadow rises up
between his hand and the bread
he reaches for. The skeleton’s lips
come in between him and anyone
he intends to caress. The crime
has a life of it own and the dead
are its haggard puppets. Eyes shut,
the unsinkable specter flashes on
no matter how dark the room.

 

***

A cruel cross-bow extends across the heavens,
and we are all of us its target. The flying bolt
aims one day for this man, the next
for another. The winner has no respite
when, seeing another fall, he knows
another arrow will soon descend.
His heart feels death
     before the arrow takes him;
he fears the event
    of which he is the minister.

Each coming hour tolls
     with a dull series
          of sinister thuds —
does one know his penultimate
moment when it comes? —

should he hurry on, or wait,
for, quickening his pace,
does he go anyway to meet the arrow
at the point of its fated descent?
Oh, yes, he has his Victory.
     It walls him in.

 

One day in his turn, caught up
in the trap of things he made,
he shall run for his life
amid an esplanade of turned backs,
    a slide of spit, fists raised
          against him, the flags
that hailed him torn now
to pad a flaming torch.
They will tell him, “Go!”
He will cross the border by night,
evading the wax-sealed warrant,
and stumbling from the forest
find only one door open — mine!

 

***

 

To the useless thinker
     dreams come, and in
those dreams, truth trumpets out:
No one is guilty.

Only from such a dark and plummeting vision
can we glimpse what truly lies

at the bottom of the human abyss.

 

The next century up
     will not be a pretty one.

It rumbles and swells in stinging vats
the way lava foams at the mouths of Vesuvius.

Who is behind this chaos?
     Who wishes Man so much ill?
I cannot pretend to know —
no one is up there handing out tablets.

Thunderbolts roar, eagles fly by;

 

everything we saw in this Terrible Year
was done between the claws of unknown,
     hideous, and necessary scourges;
they rushed like a flock of birds.
The heart’s deep blood,
     down to the marrow of the bones,
the whole of mankind trembled
as the dark swarm of new facts
    (the shock-news of deeds and actions)
split open the clouds
     and vomited disasters.

 

And as all the calamities fell
     upon our battered brows,
we recognized the evil
     from which we suffer,
the formidable mass of all the poor,

     the penned-in, downtrodden ones
let their appetites roar out.
Yet some of us thought:
if there is something they merely wish for,
let them strive on, and hear them out
— they will tire of it — distractions
are easy to arrange, and holidays —
it if occurred to anyone
that they howled from starvation,
that thought was soon put aside.

Haven’t we all suffered enough?

 

So what really happened
     during this incredible time?

The furious shocks we could all see and hear;
     the subtle venoms ran underground.

Why did these winds blow? Where did they come from?

Why these jets of flame
     that keep on crushing the huddled crowd?

Why did we suddenly perceive
     the gulf that separated low from high?

Crimes were committed, senseless and violent:

     yet we are innocent.

 

Revolutions sometimes shed blood,

and when their will to win is unleashed,

their formidable passion surmounts all reason
and flaming rampant,
cannot be distinguished from hatred.

 

Let us maintain, let us maintain
     the sacred principles;
but when hearts are led astray by a tempest,
when they blow on us like ashes,
      to the depths of the dark problem
          we must know how to come back down.

Man suffers, the bottomless abyss
acts as though it had a will
of its own; the hurricanes themselves
are the true scoundrels,
     the only true criminals.

 

Is the drunkard permitted a stay
     if he does not remember things said,
things done in the heat of insult and passion?
What of the citizen turned madman
    who comes to his senses
          amid the carnage
to find his knife-hand in a brother’s heart?

 

Can we banish the storm that pulled us under
to its own Devil’s Island? Should we all go off
to the jungles of Guyana
     until our brains cool down?

No, we are better than this. Hyenas have not
possessed us. Our neighbors have not
been transformed into cannibals or bandits.
It is not a matter of weaker wills
    against strong ones. The fury
of one fatal wind can carry us all away
and tear away the anchor of human conscience.

 

Does the man whom the wild sea shook

get charged for the flood that toyed with him?

Can one be both the vulture and the prey?

Although I think I know what struck us,

although I feel merciful towards the unknown,

I say now, that we must accuse facts only.

Facts are what they are;
     the judgment of history
     an implacable engine
          that nothing disconcerts.

 

But should we therefore fear the future?

Of course, we have to consider.
     Trembling does us no good.

Be sure of it: this curtain of destiny

thickened by enigma, this deformed ocean

where the human soul floats,

the vast obscurity of the whole phenomenon,

this world in need of a child
     whose crayons sketch out
          the way through chaos,

these ideals we held aloft
     that came back to us as scourges,

these riots that issued forth with song
     that always miss their purpose,

all this terror, yes, out of a kernel of hope.

 

The frosty morning dismays the horizon;

sometimes the day begins

with such a chill

that the rising sun seems like a dark attack.

 

A flower is suspended there,
     the stinging thorn, its price.
Amid blue mountaintops I tread
     on a path of anguish.
Does not all life begin
     by tearing open someone’s
belly?  The best we can know
     is august suffering.

Each wave of the unknown
confuses with its livid tint;
only much later, as though
a series of veils had lifted

comes clarity. And what it shows
seems some arcane geometry
a thousand times folded in.
All things, all places, and all
at one time, astonishing!
Yet it is hideous to see
beneath the shadows of the present,
the evils of tomorrow
     already pregnant there.
One dreads the coming day,
     a superhuman Hell.

 

Down in some wormhole obscure,
something wicked germinates.
Rising, it will lure the young,
     appalling their parents.
Its terrifying night will blot
the azure sky above, as rays
emit from the darkly glowing egg.

 

Oh, doom I see! This gloomy larva
     will grow its own wings,
a barely-visible specter
     in the depth of eternal shadow.

 

Tomorrow is that black embryo
    curled up inside Today.
I dread it even as I know
     it has no choice but to be.
It crawls at first. It waits
     for its wings to form.

Scant need of them, it seems,
     for it has the power to hover there,
a horror to look upon,
    formless and blind and awful,
biding its time
     for a dawn of apotheosis.

 

The Future is a monster.
Who knows, but from its fire
and disaster, an archangel
will at last reveal itself?