Martyr, Volcano, Goddess, Avatar, Part 2

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “July 1871”

 

[Poem XI]

III

City, your fate is beautiful!

High on a hill, and at the heart
of all humanity, you re-enact
an almost-biblical Passion.
None can approach without hearing
how your tender voice emerges

from your august torture,

because you suffer this for all
and for them all your blood is shed.

The peoples before you
will form a circle on their knees.

 

The nimbus glow at the top of Aetna
fears not Aeolus or any other wind.

Just so, your fierce halo
     cannot be smothered out.
Illustrious and terrible at once,
your light burns everything
    that threatens life,

     defending honor, and work and talent,
     upholding duty and right,
     healing with balm, perfume, and medicine.

You gleam the future purple
     even as you burn the past away,

because in your clarity, sad
     and pure, pale flowers spring
to life amid the embers.

In your immense love,
     gnaws an immenser pain.

 

Because you exist, and will continue so,
O city, mankind believes in progress,
seeing it born clean and viable once more.

Your tragic fate attracts the Muses’ envy.
Your death would orphan the whole universe.

The star in your wound, would, if it could,
ascend and join the heavens, but no!
Empires would trade their plunder in,
yes, even Berlin, or Carthage,
to lay hands on your crown of thorns.

Never was an anvil so hammer-bright.

 

City, no matter what,
     Europe will call your name
          as its founding goddess,
but what you must suffer
     until that day arrives!

Paris, what your glory attracts,

the tribute they come to pay you,

     costs you a martyrdom.
The challenge is accepted.

Go on, live large. Let the people show her
they always know how to be heroic.

She is still calm, you see,
     after the tyrants flee,
     after the executioners
have done their worst,
    look, there she stands!

 

It happened so gradually
    no one saw how you managed it:
the sword in your hand

     became a branch of palm.

City, do as the Greeks did,
     the Romans and Hebrews,
breaking the urn of war
     to offer up the splendid bowl
          of unity and peace.

 

The peoples will have seen you,

O magnanimous city,

after having been the light of the abyss,

after having fought as was her duty,

after having been reduced to a crater,

after the churning of volcanic chaos
    whose lava bubbled forth
    the visage of Vesuvius,
        the memory of circuses and forums
               reduced to ash,
the freedom of the world at risk
     until you returned from ash in glory
after having chased away Prussia,
     that frightful giant,

 

now rising anew from the yawning abyss,
     you, bronze-robed deity of eternity,
from flaming lava cooled,
a colossal statue, Paris!

 

IV

The “men of the past” imagine
they still exist. Just barely, I would say.
They imagine themselves living;
and the work they perform
     is all done in the shadows.
In the viscous sliding
     of their numberless folds,
     their comings and goings
     all flat on their belllies,
they are only a swarm
     of deluded earthworms.
The dead weight of the sepulcher
     presses them down to ooze.

 

Ignore them, sacred city!

Nothing of you is dead,
for, Paris, your own agony
gives birth, and your defeat
was an onset of new creation.

We will refuse you nothing.

Whatever you want, will come to pass.

The day you were born, the Impossible
reached and surpassed its expiration date.

I will affirm and will repeat it tirelessly
to the face of the perjurer,

into the ears of the deceiver,
plain on the page, where traitors
and cowards cannot avoid it.

They wounded you, oh queen,
but you live! Oh goddess, you live!

 

Against you they added insult to injury,
but still you live, Paris! From your aorta,
earth’s blood, man’s blood, alike
spurt out in never-stopping flow.
It seems the wound might never heal.

Yet in your womb, o mother in labor,
we felt the whole city move. Fetal,
an unknown universe stirs there.
We feel the beat and pulse of the future.

 

Who cares about these sinister clowns?
All will be well. No doubt, there are clouds.
We search, we see nothing. Well, it is night.
Around us is a fenced-in horizon.
Crown of future Europe, we fear for you.

Alas, what a ruin! She seems more fit
for a coffin than for a temple mount;
no model for a civic goddess here,
but instead the type of eternal mourning.

 

On looking upon her, even a man
of firm resolve must hesitate,
give out a shiver instead of a sigh.

Doubting, we weep and tremble,
but pacing around to listen,
we vaguely hear,
    from the walled shadow no torch can light,
    from the depth of defeat’s sink-hole,
from what they called your tomb,
arising, the song of a soul immense.
Huge and indomitable
     something is indeed beginning.

From out of the mist it comes:
     a new century!

 

All of our steps down here might seem
to be no more than a dark procession,
in vain, nocturnal, dubious.
“Men of the past” will scoff at me.
To them, all life, despite our work,
despite desire, is earthy stuff.
Nothing can be divine to them
until implacable eternity
     devours all in quest
of that one great living Thing.
Their pretext for doing nothing,
or doing ill, is that they’re blessed.
Death always offers a getaway.

 

For “men of the past”
     sure happiness awaits in Heaven.

Earth offers only hope,
     and nothing more.
I say that growing hope,
and waiting out the time
   it takes regrets to fade,
is Progress. One atom of hope
is a new seedling star.
Greater well-being dawns

in lesser misery.
My critics prefer the dreary darkness.

Darkness they love, to the point of blindness.

They hate the seer and would blind the soul.
What a terrible dream!

 

You hold the shroud of the city
before us and cry, “She is dead!”
That shroud for us is pricked with holes
through which the flames appear.

What does the dark zenith matter
when rays shine forth,
and constellations never seen before
arise, suns beaming to one another
profound and august affirmations.
There! The True. There! The Beautiful!
There! The Great! There! The Just!
On each and every world a form of life
with a thousand golden halos,

each life of Life partaking!

 

Amid this fest of hope,
you only contemplate the shadow.

“Look over there! A shadow!” —

“No use! There’s yet another shadow!”

Be that as it may. You cannot help yourselves.

Caught under triple veils,
you want us all to stumble about
in what you think is darkness.

 

“Men of the past,” we seek what serves.
You scurry about to invent new harms.

Our clock ascends to midnight
     and hopes for what will come;
your midnight, vertiginous,
     seems only a falling-off.
Each has his own way of seeing night.