by Brett Rutherford
Translated
and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, July 1871
Two brothers in
mutual murder in Thebes,
Eteocles and Polyneices, the sons of Oedipus,
and Cain who slays his brother Abel,
O brothers, the price of human quarrel!
Land passes
hands and scaffolds arise.
Flags turn to shrouds in black tatters.
Tombs open hastily to admit
a new generation of sons —
O Mighty God!
when comes the day
when you will smite Death itself?
A holy peace
would be so welcome now.
War is a prostitute,
the infamous concubine of Chance.
Her lovers are a
moronic Attila,
a Tamerlane ungraced by art.
She prefers such men, and with her choice
she drags all hope into the pit
of a mass interment.
She welcomes springtime with slaughter.
She tramples our wishes underfoot,
and as she is hatred incarnate,
I dare to hate her.
I place my hope
in you,
invisible walker-in-shadow,
the Future!
No Greeks derived
the algebras
that limn and number our present
works.
The shadowy and sad labyrinth
in which we wander is full
of sudden panics, traps and abandonments.
But still in our
hand we hold the thread
which alone can guide us to safety.
Let Atreus duel
on against Thyestes
in struggle that spans generations;
let the Leviathan take on
the ever-bellowing Behemoth
in fights that rage for millennia —
still I love and believe.
From the baffling enigma
let one clear word emerge!
Shall humankind remain in shadow
for all their days? Not so!
Not so! It is not our sad destiny
to sit in torpor on the cold threshold
of old tombs, like Saint Jerome,
wasting away in Ombos,
or like
Elektra’s agonized waiting
before the gates of Argos.
One day, defying the very thought
of specters, I went to see
the lion monument at Waterloo.
I passed through ravines to reach
the undulating plain of the battlefield.
It was the dawning hour, crepuscular.
I could make out the black mound
where nothing more than a hillock
had been before. I walked straight to it.
I felt indignant on behalf of the dead.
I ascended precisely because
the glory of blood, of the sword,
of the mass death makes me shudder.
It was my business to confront this,
the Dutch king’s monument
in the name of his wounded son.
The lion lorded it
over the silent plain below.
No human eye had thus surveyed
the ebb and flow of battle, no!
I looked upon the tall king of beasts.
It breathed not; its immobility
seemed to defy infinity.
One feels that this creature,
banished to silhouette the depth of
sky,
not pawing his familiar grassland
but hurled into a field of azure,
grows proud here in its solitude,
that it never grows tired
of the terrible memory it carries.
Fierce, he glowers down
as if he had witnessed the carnage.
As I climbed up the stone stairway,
I fell partway into the lion’s
shadow.
I said to myself, he is implacable
by day, but haply at night
he might emit a small, dull roar,
and someone who stayed too late
upon the desolate field would flee it,
confusing the lion’s roar with thunder.
More steps, and I was almost eye-to-eye
with the lion. Now he and I
stood lightning rod together,
and I heard a song.
The humblest
voice came forth
from this enormous maw.
Here in this frightful and deformèd lair
a robin had come to make its nest,
and no one had disturbed it!
(O happy invader
in the plain of death!)
This gentle, winged passer-by,
lulled by innocent spring-time,
had placed her nest and brood here
among his brazen teeth,
with no fear of the unclosing jaw,
and chirped and sang as ever robin
to the world has sung
from inside the pensive lion.
Here on this
tragic man-made mount,
like a reef in a plain of so much blood,
I envisioned, pale and listening,
a deep spirit descending upon me.
My people, hark! I understood
hope sings to us in what was once
despair. Peace
makes its nest
inside the horrible jaws of war.
