The Lion of Waterloo

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,[1]
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,[2] 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.

 

 

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[1] Polyneices, son of Oedipus, and Eteocles, his younger brother, kill one another in the struggle for control of Thebes.

[2] Saint Jerome is often depicted with a lion and lived as a hermit and spent much time around deserted tombs. I can find no reference to his being in any place named “Ombos,” a name for two different locales in Egypt.