A Revolution on Trial

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

You, judges, sitting at the high bar,
imagining the verdict you might make
if Revolution herself were brought to trial,
a harsh, barbaric ferocious defendant
whom even screech-owls flee in panic, who,
respecting no magic makes way through dervishes
and fakirs and marabouts,
not even sparing the church, priests and nuns
scattered, Jesuits in terror and deshabilé.
Knowing that half of this was done
when Revolution merely showed her face,
you, judges, are inflamed with anger.

 

If kings are nothing but inflated men,
and gods are only men exaggerated,
those ghosts that lorded over us
from mountaintops just fade away.
A ghost in armor is a pile of junk.
The reliquary, sacral Popes
are nothing but dried-up ghouls.
That unexpected wind that blows
upon your august brows, o judges,
is a blast from Nature’s bowels.
Your faces distort in outrage.

 

What mourning! What agonies!
Here no fiery burning bush —

instead a black shrub that weeps.

Night’s festivals, voracious and cruel
are done, and only groans remain.

 

An awful day of trial has come.
Smiting their own broad chests,
the interrogators have failed.

Dredging the dark for evidence,
they have come up empty.

The blind bat cannot bear witness;
the weasels wander aimlessly
and shriek in an unknown language;
the lowly worm has lost its dignity
and cannot be pressed for answers.
A solitary fox cries out;
alas, the nocturnal animals

who hunted in that realm of night

     while the birds slumbered,
are at bay, and do not
      respond to summonses.

Wolves are about, and make the woods
too desolate for the bailiffs.

There is no calling up the dead:
the ghosts, oppressed, no longer speak
and jostle one another randomly.

 

Where will you find the evidence?

Have you a good description, even,
of what Revolution looks like,
     and what kind of garb she wears?

Her last known address was everywhere
a month ago, and nowhere at all today.

 

The sun is all wrong: you squint,
     adjust the shades against
     too early light: too hard to read
those endless indictments
     that looked so fine in candle-light!

If things go on this way, goldfish
will dart from ray to shade until
they droop and fall exhausted;
the ravens will hover overhead,
but never choose a place to land;
too weak to lift their coffin lids,
even the loathsome vampires starve.

 

Your inquiries have turned
all Nature topsy-turvy, and you
are no wiser than when you began.

You, in your robes, daring to think
that Revolution could be put in chains,
and marched away to the galleys,
the truth is right before you —
it is the dawn itself you try to stop.

 

 

Critics and Theorists

by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

VI

So long as its branches spread wide and green
above the marshy ground, so long as it becomes
the most enormous dome of the forest,
does the oak even notice below itself
the hideous water in which its roots abide?

 

Termites and carpenter ants, insects of horror,
creep up through the brush toward it, drawn
by its mass and its seeming immobility,
but to it, as to the marble giant, august
and mutilated, to it, as to the granite sphinx,
sinister in its own roseate light, to it
the machinations of wood-lice mean nothing!

 

When night’s dark winds convulse
    and make the palm trees quiver,
the Colossus does not doubt himself;
hands on his knees, thoughtful and calm,
he waits to make its speech at dawn.

If slugs at his base track drool and slime,
he ignores it. If dank toads congregate,
and make a council against him,
he is unaware that such beings exist.

 

If some learnèd worm comes inching up,
intent to take lodge on his visage,
he never acknowledges affront
with either nod or sigh. He stays mute,
holding within the deep resonance
of his frightening mystery.
Let legions come, make festival,
bleat their own names at his expense,
thousands resplendent with honors
and festooned with scrolled diplomas —

not one of them comes back from Memnon
with affirmation or prophecy. It was
as though they had never come and gone.

He waits the appointed sunrise,
and the suddenly ruddy glow it casts
upon his features, and only then
will his formidable voice come forth,

and he will never mention them. 

Falkenfels

by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

V

One sees it in the distance — Falkenfels! —
up there amid the drizzle, the demolished burg
of an old count who lost his fortune, a ruin now.
I wanted to see the town, and better yet,
to set eyes on the man who lords over it.

 

Mounting the hill I find
an unexpected ravine, in which
an old chapel was overrun with beetles,
its only congregants. The crucifix,
tipped over, and the pulpit, broken
and toppled sideways, give proof
that no priest ever comes down here.
The place is near collapse; no one
in this impoverished spot holds out
a coin to help repair it. They dance in rags,
not finery, at harvest fête.

As for the dead, they get no masses
said in their names, no candles lit.

No money anywhere — now that’s

enough to drive a priest away.
Even a saint deserts his niche,
when the last rat has nibbled away
the last crumb of the sacred Host.

There is no gold, just gilding,
and God himself would snort
     at such a miserable threshold.

So this is why the chapel died.

A genuflect is wasted here.

 

From this corpse of a church
I turn my back and flee
with a shiver this shadowy ditch,
to resume my climb to the summit.

I blink. I find myself here again
as though I had never moved,
but the sun is far behind me.

Again, the sinister chapel.

 

What happened was this:
I got to Falkenfels.
Sublime but tawny, in stark,
undecorated hues, the high town stood.

Even in broad daylight the tower loomed
so that its battlements cast
a hulking sense of menace.

Even a window-box flower wilts
when the sun is threatened thus.

In the wall-gap where once a gate
had proudly blocked all visitors,
under a high and tarnished coat-of-arms,
there sat a tall and pensive old peasant —
no, it was the Count himself!

 

He did not rise from his low camp-stool.
At the sound of my slow steps he turned
his head my way but did not rise.

As I had come unannounced, it was
my duty to declare myself and hail him.

If there had ever been retainers,
     guards, and servants, none came
          to block my way to his view.

The only one near him was the child,
     a pink young face beneath a rumpled cap.

Saluting a defeated man is no easy thing.

     I did him the honor of naming him.
I saluted the abolished count as though
     he still retained his honors.

I said to him honestly, “I grieve to see
    you poor now, who once were great.
A traveler and stranger, I come to greet
     you in the most civil manner.”

In a long silence I regarded him,
     the shattered walls, the ugly town,
          the mountain range around us,
               the distance from everything
                    that mattered.

I looked at the boy and blurted out:

“O, let me take this child to the city!

Returning to Nature and becoming wild
     is good for old men like us,
but for the child this is terrible.

Dawn trembles in the choking fog.
Roses die here in perpetual shade,
where the only bird is the owl.

I see on your brow the proud silhouette
of your ancestral towers —
     even if nothing blossoms here now
          but the lowly bramble —

this has a desolate beauty, I know,
but living in one’s own century is better.

Your child would wither here, and die
     without knowing more of the world
          than the far peaks seen in the mist.

 

“This is a time of monsters, and prodigies,
     but the prodigy is sure to conquer.

A dark eagle is such a one — I see at least
     a falcon’s eye gleaming there —
Is this your son? Your son’s son, then?
Dark grandfather, dare now to send him forth.
Let him see Paris as pilgrims once
     went all the way to Rome.

No one will call him ‘Count,’ admittedly,
     but there he can add
     to his noble and beautiful name
          a scroll of brave and worthy deeds.

 

“When you move on, you must let others in.
The eagle sends the eaglet forth, the shrub
must escape the old oak’s shadow.

This is the right progression of things.” —

 

Beneath his sinister and forbidding face
the old man smiled superbly. He saw through me,
and forgave my hasty admonitions.

Although I stood, he, seated still,
     made me inclined to kneel,
as his low voice rumbled out.

 

“Ruin loves isolation” he said.

“If I was once a big man, it suits
me now to keep quiet concerning it.

People are curious about a fallen man.

They come to gawk. You saw me — good for you.
At least you were polite about it.
There’s nothing more to say —
     allies and friends, acquaintances even —
I no longer exist for them. So let us be.” —

 

“But what of the boy?” I argued still.
“A spirit meant to soar needs light.
Old man, there is more than night!

What father would not regret
     a child without a future?”

 

“I who am dead,” the old man replied,
“hear miserable things about the likes of you
and all the others who boast about their lives;
that among you, only the inexorable
get to celebrate a triumph; that man
kills man in endless retaliation;
that the fox is more admired than the lion;

that words called “true” one day
     are suspect in the next;
that Reason limps along with naught
     below her kneecaps;
that bodies of those the Left disposes of
     pile up in heaps, while the Right

mows others down mechanically
     with something they call
          a “machine-gun”;
and that, amid the blood and cries,
     the horror and misery,
it is a crime to open one’s door
    to anyone proscribed,
         to offer them asylum.

 

“Is this true? I fear it is.” —
     I dared not contradict him.
“Is this false? I hope so.” —
     My silence told him all.

“So let me be. I am honest in my den.

My grandson here will drink
     the same pure water as I do.
You offer me your city,
     while I prefer the woods.
Why so? seeing the men you are,
     I find more sympathy in rocks,

and in the animals, less
    of your collective stupidity.”

 

Chastened, I had no arguments.

My downhill journey passed with ease,
as though a wind were pushing me.
Now, looking back up
     at the hulking towers
I feel the contempt of Falkenfels.

 

  

Ever and Always, We Are Crucified

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, July 1871

 

What hatred invents, the mob
embraces as self-evident truth.

Calumny’s worm, some vile, invented lie,
creeps over every man who is great.

It seems each radiant brow the sun
beams down upon, attracts
     its very own crown of thorns;
instead of his accustomed cup,
     he is offered atrocious gall.

To be star, one wears
     a cloak of infamous darkness.

 

Listen. They say of Phidias,
     that he sold not only statues,

          but the bodies of women as well;
that vices got their name
     from what Socrates did with his pupils;

that Horace had a way with goats
    that made temple virgins shudder;
that Cato threw an African slave
     into a bay of sharks;

that Michelangelo loved gold, and paid
     gold out for blackmail, and gave
himself in service to the staff of Popes
(he, a Roman!) stretched out his back
    to them, while with the other hand
          he asked his price;

that Dante’s roving eye
     shone with the glint of greed;

 

that Moliere mistook himself
    for his daughter’s husband;
that the encyclopedic Diderot
     took bribes with the hand
           that was not busy editing.

 

And so before the human race,
     the gossiping tribunal storms.
For the crime of his genius,
    not one has ever been spared.
Ever and always, the punishment comes!

Name one, and there upon his cross
     he hangs with his defining slander.

Not one, in ancient times as well as now,
who on the bleeding Golgotha of glory,
     with the halo of his good works
          upon his forehead,
not one escapes the vile cross.

Some have a sly Caiaphas[1]
     accusing him of blasphemy,

others have some grammarian
like the “Homer-whipper” Zoilus.[2]

Ever and always, the crucifixion goes on.

 

---

[1] Caiaphas, Judaean high priest associated with the crucifixion of Jesus.

[2] Zoilus. Greek grammarian who attacked Homer, who was ironically crucified for his criticisms of Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Egypt.

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.

 

 

---

[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.

Flux and Reflux

by Brett Rutherford

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

Note: The Battle of Forbach in August 1870, which defeated Napoleon III, hastened the consolidation of the German states and led to the coronation of German emperor William I in January 1871. On 10 May 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt was signed, establishing the new frontiers between Germany and France. In this treaty, 1,694 French towns and cities in Alsace and Lorraine passed into German control. Hugo’s poem reflects on the bitter irony of one emperor’s defeat leading to another tyrant, and how the victor can now sit back and watch the French murder one another in civil war. Hugo also sees that the implementation of martial law and mass executions serve an immoral proposition that the best way forward for the nation is to get rid of “the lower element” rather than address systemic poverty. Hugo’s lines seem obscure in places without the specific context of the events of early 1871, so I have added some lines for clarity, and I have also embellished a little more than usual in this rather polemical poem, where “Kill the Poor” seems an undercurrent.

 

II

One Emperor down. Is it all over, then?

Alas for us all, another pops up.
One is knocked down in France;
      in Germany, they prop another up.
Forged on the anvil of Teutonic victory
     (their triumph at Forbach),
a giant smithy hovers there,
as Germany forges
     from the shards of a despot
          a brand-new tyrant.

 

Kaiser Wilhelm! Emperor of all
     the German States —
must it be? then there is no escape
from these badged and beribboned
     Emperors! Our traitor Caesar
is chased away by another who adds
     an imperial title to his crown.

 

I care little, if one comes in
     all puffed up with his triumph,
so long as the other one is gone,

if this is the year of Wilhelm
so long as it is not a year of Bonaparte,

if the hideous night owl goes hooting off
to be replaced by an ominous eagle.

 

But no! What was I thinking?
The grief! The shame!
Was this supposed to be
the end of troubles? They start all over.

Just when our patching-up commences,
the storm resumes with all its fury.
The news that reaches me is monstrous.
Is one snake worse than another?

Once you have faced a dragon,
     can another make
     an even grander entrance?

 

How tragic and Greek,
these two European brothers.
Which, I wonder, is Thysetes,
and which is Atreus?

One hides his face

     amid plum-puddings;[1]
the German smirks,
applauding our feast
of mutual cannibalism.
The invasion ends,
and we act out upon our stage
cruel acts of puppetry
from which the world recoils.

 

O House of Bonaparte,
    this is your wake!

Even the goddess of Victory
averts her eyes at such behavior.
A nation of such shame
     ought not to have
personified virtues on its soil.

 

Instead of solving enigmas
we crush them underfoot.

You whose “wisdom”
is everyone else’s idiocy,
what future are you devising?

As you go forward hatefully,
what reciprocity awaits
when the end of your own road
is another line of bayonets?

You see Utopia
     while uttering “Martial Law”?

If, in their hunger and poverty,
     the lowest of the low
seem like a wolf-pack intent
    on biting the hand that brings them bread,
unlettered and untaught,
     proud in their fierce innocence,

if in their filth, their laughter
     comes off as a sinister mockery,
if their crushed spirits appear
     to be the very dread of night,
          a dark heart devouring all,

and you recoil at their pain,
     at the sight of their pale families
         extended in legions to the end
               of every dark city lane,
and if your only answer,
     confronted with dilemmas
         a millennium in the making,
is “Kill them all!” — is your excuse
that some of them once killed
     a few of us — that eye for eye,
and blow for blow, is just a natural
remedy that anyone can understand,

then where does it end? Does murder
at last eliminate murder
when there is no one left to kill?

Then only? Just whom does death appease?

 

Do the speeches you make
still mention august ideals,
illuminated dawns,
extoling happiness,
     and life in bloom,
an Eden of forthright facts
and generous edicts,

while your eyes are closed,
your hand on the shoulder
of the one who guides you —

Medusa, sword in her hand,
breast bare for all to see
     (the future! the future!)

her eyes aflame
    with paralyzing fire!

 

When, at the end
     of so many of your acts,
the cemetery is the final scene,
and when the bone-yard is not big enough,
some bottomless well will do:
just hurl the victims down,
     into a jumble of heaped skeletons,
do not concern yourself
     with what goes on in those dark cavities,
this sowing of earth that seeds
     another generation of death,
are you not troubled a little?
    Does the earth not shift at night
beneath your bed of luxury?

Presented with the slums’ street-map
is your answer, “Build more cemeteries?”

 

The poor man is in rags; the rich one
complains he must make do
with last year’s tattered overcoat.

Nothing is whole for anyone,
and the infamous shadow
casts its pall everywhere.

Hearts without love, souls
    without a glimmer of blue sky
         to brighten them; alas!

everywhere tumult and anger,
     dungeons and the threat of hell,
all in a darkness so intense
     that an ever-greater dark
          seems over and behind it.

The mind, under this cloud
     that muffles everything
          to a stunned silence,
senses that something incubates,
     and bides its time, enormous —
what is it? A mystery!

Something is being constructed.

Awakening, we shall find it.

Its imperceptible onyx stone
will gain a chalky whiteness,
as the fatal black work
     reveals the skeleton inside.

 

What we encounter there
     is not the desired goal,
     some Gallic Utopia;
instead it is the thing
     we have always ignored,
          the obstacle itself.

Reefs show their heads
     one after the other,
because History has its Cape of Storms.

The clarity is on the other side.
One more thing must be surpassed!

These ebbs and flows,
     these new beginnings,
          these fights, may serve an end.

 

Above the immense hatred,
     there is a being who loves.
We are its object: have faith!

It is not without some goal supreme
that constantly, in this abyss
     where the sounders dream,
a prodigious wind blows from the depths,
and through the harsh night,
pushes and carries and returns again
to all the divine reef — whom?
We are not in or of some battered ship
that dashes on the rocks and perishes —
it is we, the whole of humanity,
we are the sea itself that hurls itself
on and ever forward. On!

 

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[1] amid plum-puddings, i.e., Napoleon III in exile in England