Terrible Weather

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”

 

Terrible weather! In this dreary space
where the unforeseen arises,
     and the unexpected wants to come to pass,
my thoughts are a meadow
     given over to random invasions.

 

News reaches me, one fact after another;
blacker they get, and greater in enormity.
Day after day as I write this book,
the clock dictates new miseries
as the minute-hand rises and flees in terror.

Hours, mornings, noon, twilight and night,
how many? The numbered weeks of this Terrible Year
are like so many hydras that Hell creates
in order to fill its own abysses, bottomless.

 

Word of the last calamity wheels over me and passes on;
its claw on my soul, it rolls its fiery eyes,
leaving in my crumpled lines, sad, harsh, and bruised,
the track that one sees when a monster has passed.

 

If you could truly see into my shadowed mind,
you would find it marred with the countless imprints
of all these days of horror, and anger and bored inaction.
I look as if lions had walked all over me.

 

There Was a Woman, Wild in the Woods

 

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871.”

 

There was a woman, wild with grief, and she was everywhere!

In the untrod forests, whose thickets none can penetrate,
she gave the owls asylum. Softly the worried leaves
whispered into her harried ears, of evil afoot and dark designs.
At her breast the sweet newborn shivered; she swaddled it
and hurried on, for terror must not catch this tragic child.

She knew paths where no paths were visible; branches
parted for her before the growing night,
the sky’s dark tide, the baying threat of the wolf-pack.

Oh! the fierce love of the woman of the forest!

 

Such now is Paris, the mixing-pot of Europe,
Glory, Law, and Art her triple breasts
that feed her celestial child, the Future.
Silver-shod Dawn champs at the bit
in neighing salute around the cradle sublime.
She, once a Chimera, is now
the august mother of our reality,
nurse of the high-flown thinkers’ dreams,
an equal sister to Rome and Athens.
As sure as spring bursts out with laughter,
as sure as the sky that never fails to glow,
Paris is life itself, Paris the joy of living.

 

She is the wild woman still, where once
the woods stood thick. Now she is Paris,
and mother of all Europe, with three breasts
breastfeeds the Future, her celestial child
with the mother-milk of Law, Glory and Art.

At dawn the distant horses neigh
around this cradle sublime …

When the air is pure in the light of day
beneath an unclouded blue firmament,
she rocks and sings to the mighty little god.

 

Each day a festival! She nods to show
to proud and cheerful citizens this dream —
the world to be that, breathless, stutters,
this trembling imago of the new human race,
this giant (no taller than a dwarf today!)
which we dare to call Tomorrow, for whom
a furrow already forms ahead of his path.
Mother Ideal! On her calm and tender forehead
her happy mouth, and in her gaze that fixes you,
evil is denied existence in that radiant smile.

We sense that in this city, hope lives on,
a place that loves and blesses us. But if
a sudden darkness should come upon us,
if the dreaded eclipse comes to swallow us
and intends to shadow us forever;
if panic makes the people shiver, embers die;
if some vague monster tramps about
the horizon line of forts and forests;
if everything that slithers and extrudes itself,
crawling and squinting from some nether chaos,
comes to threaten to divine child, our Future;

oh, then, she is fierce. She stands, she screams,
she becomes the furious Paris. She rumbles and roars,
fierce as any monster, known or unknown.

She stands up, and she who once charmed
the whole known world, will make it shudder!

 

After the Victories of Bapaume, Dijon, and Villersexell

The Battle of Villersexell

  

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

I take the side of men, I really do.
It’s what one ought to do, and I want to do it.
But lately I noted down, and put to good use,
some very honest things a lion said to a bear,
on behalf of the beasts. It sort of goes like this,
as one was set to prevail upon the other:

“Bear! Its not quite right of you
to attack me, your clawed brother,
just in the hope of a small promotion.
Bear! Your home is among the snows,
my home extends from jungle to veldt.
And what is this Nero? A hideous name
blasted out in some trivial bugle-tune.

“If Caesar was a crocodile, this Nero
is nothing but a lizard, low to the ground.
He took a piece of Europe, preceded by
the conch-shell bleating of a hundred heralds.
At first, this killer only won by chance.
One is the big one, the other is the little.
Brother beast, let us despise these humans.
To fight among ourselves? For what!
Rather more fitting it seems that we
should make our way straight to Nero,
and thrusting aside his Ethiopian
     and armed Sicamber guards,
with tooth and claw we should each seize
the trembling tyrant’s members.

“Stripping Nero of his fake lion skin
would please one of us greatly. One kick
from you would send his chariot flying.
Once in a while it might be proper
for a good claw to penetrate a majesty
right down to the heart of his carcass,
and perhaps we will see, while gutting him,
you, that he is without brains, and I,
as I always knew, that no heart is there.
Biting your master is sweet. I think,
if only this catches on, more faces will join,
tongue, tooth, and jaw in common feast.

“Oh, they will come! That heap of beaten animals,
remembering every wrong and murder, crawl,
creep, snarl, growl, howl, groan to join us,
for every whipping past, a tooth in play.
It would be beautiful to see. The good earth,
is it not enough? Is loving one another not enough?
Do as I do! If I am going to set an example for you,
let it be a good one and not a and one.
Here is the tyrant. I am hungry. You too?
I dreamt of this moment — did you not, too?

“Did we just eat Caesar? Did we just eat Nero?
What does it matter to us? Whatever stain he has
whatever crown or laurel upon his head,
brother, my now-awakened appetites does not
distinguish the greater from the lesser food.
Large or small, I shall devour it!”

The bear did not reply. He understood nothing
the other beast explained to him.
The merciful lion scratched his face
and blinded him, so that the bear,
in front of the witness and judge of history,
bore yet more shame with one less eye.

Notes:

Hugo poses Caesar against Nero, and the polar bear against the lion in this poem from January 1871. During that month, Wilhelm of Prussia was crowned as German Emperor. The bear was associated with Berlin in heraldic shields as early as 1280 CE. The polar bear “Eisbar” became a popular obsession in Germany in the 1900s, but it is otherwise not clear that anyone associated Germany with arctic bears. Hugo may have used the polar bear to create a North-South distinction.

The lion, on the other hand, can be associated with several Roman Emperors. Emperor Commodus, emulating Hercules, sometimes wore a lion skin and fought against wild animals in the arena. The degenerate Emperor Nero donned the skin of a lion or panther and leaped from a cage to sexually assault bound captives.

 

In the Battle of Bapaume (3 January 1871), the French sought to relieve the besieged city of Péronne. General Faidherbe’s forces held their own against the Prussians, but as they failed to pursue the defeated enemy, the city surrendered on 10 January 1871. Although this may have encouraged Hugo, it was more a skirmish than a battle.

On 9 January 1871,

The third Battle of Dijon (14 January 1871), led by Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, was part of the French attempted to liberate Paris by attacking the Prussians from the rear. The main effort led by General Bourbaki, was not successful, but Garibaldi and his troops defended Dijon and defeated 4,000 Prussian troops. Hugo would later make a spirited defense of Garibaldi’s voluntary service to assist France.

 

The Battle of Villersexel (9 January 1871) involved 20,000 French troops of l’Armée de l’Est against 15,000 German soldiers. A daylong fight over the local chateau extended into the night with intense street-fighting. It was a clear victory for General Bourbaki and the Prussians withdrew.

 

The Stupidity of War

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "January 1871"

III

War works at her loom, an eyeless and imbecile
Penelope, humming a lullaby of chaos
from the oscillation of unbeing,
Oh War, attending to the clash of squadrons,
ears full of the furious noise of the bugles.
Thirsty, she reaches for a tankard of blood,
and, fierce and withered, would make others drink.

She is draped in a cloud of deformed destinies,
     from the sight of which God flees.
The light that illumines her is no light at all
     but something blacker than night
          that casts inverted beams that singe.

Immense madwoman, a whirligig of wind
     and a lightning-bolt armory,
what use are you, giantess,
     what use, you being of smoke and fire
if all that collapses before you
only rebuilds another evil,
if yours is the unthinking
     and automatic murder of beasts,
the way the wolves descend upon sheep,
if you, slouching at ease in the shadows,
defeat one Emperor only to make another!

Paris Slandered in Berlin

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "November 1870, II"

The sinister night is scandalized by dawn,
and the sight of one Athenian
     seems an affront to Vandals.    

Paris, at the same time as one swindles you,
another would like to ambush you
     while calling it a polite arrest;

The pedant helps the ruffian soldier;
     they pull a fast one,
     dishonoring the heroic city

raining down insults with the shells
of their bombardment.
Here the thug kills with knife and sword,
and there the rhetorician with pen and press
utters his lies multiplied by an Academy.[1]

Paris is denounced in the name of morals,
     in the name of their cult,
to ease the way to slit your throat —
     that is why they insult you.
Slander progresses to assassination.

O city, whose people
     are as expansive as any senate,
fight, draw the sword, O city of light
who founded the workshop,
     who defended the cottage —
turn eyes and ears away,
    oh proud chief town of men all equal,
from this awful pile of bigots who howl around you,
black redeemers of altar and throne, hypocrites
who always prohibit clarity,
who stand watch around all gods
     against the reproach of free spirits,
and whose slanders we hear in history,
     at Rome, at Thebes,
     Delphi, Memphis, and Mycenae,
like the distant barking of obscene dogs.

 

---

[1] In January 1871, Emil Du Bois Reymond (1818-1896), noted physiology professor and cultural critic, later secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, delivered a speech denouncing Paris and its manners and morals. He later regretted and apologized for his divisive opinions.