When 7.5 Million Voted Yes, Part Two

[The 1870 French Constitutional Referendum]

Victor Hugo

Translated and adapted by Brett Rutherford

PART TWO

Right is above the tyranny of “All,” no wind contrary
overthrows it. “All” can distract nothing
nor pull aside anything from the common future.
The People rule themselves, each his own king,
and that is right. Nothing broaches this right?
What, some nobody passing by, claims my soul?
Shame! The same, tomorrow, voting stupefied
would seize, and prostitute, and sell my freedom.

Never. The Crowd one day may overwhelm the right,
but the flow descends again, the foam disperses.
All that is right stands bare again when waves are gone.
Who then pretended that the first taker
was entitled to my assent? That I had to assume,
like a yoke, his baseness, to obey his caprice?
Let such a one but enter my cottage
     and it becomes a dungeon!
Shall I be forced to make myself a link
because everyone wishes to form a chain? No!
Shall the tender reeds be ruled by oaks?
Ah, they come calling, bourgeois or peasant,
to talk me into it, one selfish, the other blind.
One calls out “Revolution,” the other “Tradition,”
as though their minds were postered walls,
one moment infamy, another moment honor, as
fast erased, replaced in white-wash amnesia.
This stranger might hail from Athens or Carthage
or even Rome: see him, like fountain overflow
gush down the cobblestones into the fatal stream.
Mud he becomes, who once was crystal clear.

This man, so dazed and battered by the succession
of beautiful and harsh days, becomes indifferent
to the depths of turpitude. The people he once dazzled
with his virtues no longer know him.
Once Brutus, he is now a bellowing Falstaff.
He stumbled from glory to the infamous orgy.
Does he even know his own history,

what Washington was to freedom’s cause,
     or how the drummer-boy Barra fell
     in the monarchist onslaught of ’93?

His dead heart no longer beats
     when such names are mentioned.

Where formerly he restored the old cults
     of hero-worship, or robust ancestors —
like dead frugal Phocion, most honest
     of all the Athenians, or Lycurgus,
lawgiver of Spartan buried at last,
or Riego hanged, his uprisings failed —
see now, how much has been forgotten!
He purified himself, he washed, oh, he was holy,
     all while ignoring everything.
He does not even realize his doings today
     dishonor the works of yesterday.
A cowardly and vile amnesiac,
     his pride is gone; neither protest
          nor revolution rise within him.
The same white lime he paints on tombs
     he smears upon the tavern wall.

He makes footstool from a heroic pedestal.

“Honor” becomes an antique word to him
     a rusty trifle, gothic or comical,
an armor so inconvenient it is consigned
     as scrap, laughed at when seen
in old books’ copperplate engravings.
What ancients proudly fought for
     he thinks a game, a joust.
Deception! He once was great,
     with but a trace of self-mockery,
now he is bowed down
     with self-insult and irony.

Now he is so enslaved he bristles indignity
     when the past is spoken of.
He is lost in the vapors of forgetting,
and when a whiff of bravery asserts itself
     he fears it.

All this allowed, can we blame anyone?
Can we blame the sea waves for showing us
the million tiny heads within it. What point
in blaming this one, that one, for his errors?
What is one person’s, choices, and memories?
This human cloud, the mass, this whirlwind
of all the living, incapable, alas,
of guilt or innocence? Who can be rescued
and then lifted up? In all his vagueness,
obscurity and disconnectedness, each man
can serve a purpose nonetheless. Progress
is always there and self-evidence.
He be useful, even if the goal is indistinct.
His use, in Paris as in London, is to assert
what progress can be, and let others respond to him.

The English Republic expires, dissolves.
Who’s left in the lurch? Proud Milton stands,
and him we read and ponder. One is enough:
crowds disappear, but thinkers endure.
Their work is enough to germinate the future,
because of them nothing ever really dies.
Amid the catastrophes of law, nothing is hopeless.
What does it matter if the villain is happy
     and proud, and even revered?

Your foul deeds done
     beneath the sky of heaven, reek
          and you succumb,

Rome. Freedom conceals itself
within the catacombs.
The victors may claim the gods
     and seize their temples;
the vanquished take comfort in Cato,
    whose name and words endure.

Just as Galgacus rose up, defying Rome
     in Britain’s cause, from Poland’s plains
Kosciusko came to aid America.
Jan Huss was interrupted in reform;
     Luther defied all Power and soldiered on.
When light is needed, an arm to lift it comes.
One dies, if it must be, to prove the thing his faith
requires, and of free will, simply and fearlessly
the righteous step out to separate themselves
from the huddle of the enslaved.
Such martyrs almost leap
     into their own open graves,
loathing their fallen fellow men more
    than they detest the gnawing worms:

small wonder! The truly great —
oh, such as Roman Regulus
     tormented in his box of nails
     doomed to oblivion in Carthage;
or Arria or Porcia, two only
    among the many women who died
    in concentrated courage;
Curtius and Adam Lux, and Thraseas
     all calm and strong;
the warlike Condorcet, the stoic Chamfort —
how chastely they left
     a world that did not deserve them.

Thus flies the dove, thus soars the swan,
thus eagles forsake the swamp of snakes.

These few bequeathed an example to all,
in the full view of the wicked, to those
who crawled abject on hands and knees,
their act an affront to egoism, to a life of crime,
to the weak hearts given over to darkness.
Gone into the endless sleep, these generous martyrs
went willingly, content to close their eyes upon
a world they could not continue in.
Approach the martyr’s bier if you dare:
to virtue they offer the fiercest kiss.

Sublime and holy is the caress of the tomb
to the great and the pure, to those made
beautiful by the ideal and the good.

Two come to me now and complain,
“Poet, but nothing is fair in this life!”
Faced with all the harms done to them;
faced with Locuste, with the judgment of Pallas;
faced with Carrier, faced with Sanchez,
faced with those appetites already inclined
toward their own non-existence,
the denying sophists, false hearts and vacant brows;
faced with all this, what affirmation there is
in these great suicides. I tell you,
when everything seems dead in the living world,
when I hesitate to put one foot before another,
when not a single cry comes from the silent masses,
when Doubt and Silence seem the universe’s pall,
I know that one of us, deep in the ditch
he may be in the darkest enclose, will turn,
call out the name of one of these pure dead,
and ask its shade: Should we believe,
O austere shadow long departed? Should we endure,
move on, resist, and struggle? Speak, ashes!

And from the space where the courageous dead
lay down will come an answer: “Yes!”

 

PART THREE

WAITING FOR THE VOTES TO BE COUNTED

Oh! what falls around us in the shadow?
So many snowflakes! Do you know the number?
Count the millions and then the millions!
Black night! We see the lions returning to their den.
The thought of eternal life recedes and fades.
The snow falls. The twilight, hideous, blinds us.
We feel but cannot see, the mountains hunching, sinister.
We dare not fall asleep, for fear we’d never wake.
Snow blankets the fields, it covers the cities;
Flakes whiten the sewer grates, hiding their vile mouths;
The dismal avalanche fills the tarnished sky;
Dark ice, hard-caked and falling thick! Is it over?
We can no longer distinguish our path; everything is a trap.
What will be left of all this snow,
The earth’s cold veil, one universal shroud,
Tomorrow, one hour after sunrise?
What is to become of us?

 

When 7.5 Million Voted Yes, Part 1

[The 1870 French Constitutional Referendum]

Victor Hugo

Translated and adapted by Brett Rutherford

PART ONE

Is it in my soul to pander to the crowd? No!

Ah, the People are above,
     but what of the masses below?
The Crowd, a dim shape bending over he rubble,
each one a numeral, a grain of dust within a number,
each a vague profile within the night’s shadows.
The Crowd passes and shouts,
     calls out, sheds tears, and flees.
We owe fraternal pity to their sorrows.
But when the Crowd lifts itself,
     having the force within it,
we derive a virile language
     from the crowd’s grandeur,
its perils, its sacred triumphs,
     its sense of rightness.
Since the Crowd is the mistress
     by sheer force of number, she needs
reminding there are laws above,
     that the soul spells out
     across the face of the heavens.
Those sacred principles
     are brilliant and absolute.
Only when naked, cold, and bleeding
     do they kneel and kiss the feet
of first principles, but no one dreams
in solitude of a life of groveling.
The Crowd and the Dreamer have rude encounters.
Only from a brow where anger boiled
could Ezekiel cry out to dead bones: Rise up!
Moses, bringing back the tablets, was furious.
Dante had a lion’s growl. Formidable thinkers
are grave, storm-tossed, same as the wind
that blows from deep sky into the drifting dunes
where Thebes is engulfed like a sunken vessel.
This savage spirit, weighted with shifting shadows,
has, truly, better things to do than go about
caressing, in night too sluggish to have its own stars,
some crouching stone monster that only meditates.
Having within him the riddle adorable or cursed,
this hurricane is not kind to trembling colossi.
It is not from smelling incense that the Sphinx
has lost his nose! And yet, in truth,
there is one sacred smoke, incensed, austere,
one gives to the mass where a mystery shivers,
and who, within his bosom, balances
two appetites, the just Right mixed
with an appeitite unjust. Oh, human race,
a chaos of souls, half light, half night!

The multitude can throw an august flame,
but one wind blows, and suddenly it falls
from virgin honor to the level of the sewer rat.
The Good, this grand a fatal orphan —
See, Joan of Arc transform to Messalina,
     martyr to sullied murderess.

Ah! When Gracchus mounted his thundering rostrum,
when Cynaeginus held on with his teeth
     the fleeing ship at Marathon,

when, with The Three Hundred, men and boys,
Leonidas goes to his fall at Thermopylae,

when Botsaris arises, when Swiss confederates
break Austria’s hand with its hard iron rod,

when the proud Swiss Winckelreid, arms wide,
dies pierced by Austria’s formidable pikes,

when Washington fights, when Bolivar appears
of defy, out of nowhere, the might of New Spain,

when hermit Pelagius puts up a roar
as falling stars shine on his anchorite woodland,

when Manin, waking up the graves, stirs up to war
the somnolent sleep of the Lion of Venice,

when the mere peasants, armed with guns
routed Lautrec of Lombardy and France,
with its artillery, struck down the English Achilles,

when Garibaldi, scorning the hypocritical priests
displays Homeric soul in the mountains of Sicily,
and suddenly blazes next to him from Aetna,
crater of Titanic wrath, o Holy Liberty!,

when the immovable Convention stands
against the will of thirty monarchs,
     all mixed in the same mad tempest,

when, leagued and terrible,
     and bringing back the night
all Europe rushes, groans, and faints —
as at the foot of a dike a wave dissolves —
before the pensive grenadiers of Sombre-et-Meuse

when all these things occur, it is the People!
     Hail, O sovereign People!

But when some Roman beggar or street thug
like Sixtus V kisses the cross upon his knees,

and when the crush of the crowd, insensible and wild,
smothers in its own waves, a wild wind propelling it —
(honor in Coligny, reason in Ramus) —

When a monstrous fist, from the dark
     where horrors float
comes out, holding by its hair
     the head of Charlotte
pale from the blow of the axe
    and red with her last breath,

this is the Crowd, and this appalls and offends me.
The element of blindness and confusion,
this is the number, sadly feeble yet grimly strong.
And from this human peat-bog comes tomorrow
the order to receive a master from its hand.

To snuff out our soul and take on shame,
do you believe we will accept this tally?

Truly, we venerate Athens, Sparta, Paris,
and all the great forums from where
     the great outcries issue,
but we must elevate above the shout,
     the august conscience.

A just man’s thought outweighs a world of wrong.
A mad sea pounds in vain against a single, great heart.
O Multitude, obscure and easy to conquer,
too often you lull about like beasts, or farmyard animals,
and we resist you! We others do not want,
having had Danton for father, and Hampden grand-sire,
a tyrant ALL, as bad as a despot ONE.

See the People. They die. Magnificent, they fight
for progress. Yet here is the Crowd: it sells itself,
eating its birthright in a viscid stew.
The eyes-averted Church just washes all away,
     wipes clean with shrigging, “So be it!”

Here are the People: they storm the Bastille.
They clear the shadows while walking forward.

Here are the masses:
They lie in wait for Aristide and Jesus,
Zeno, Bruno, Columbus, the Maid of Orleans,
     only to spit on them.

And see, the People, with its spouse, The Idea,
and there, the populace en masse with it prize,
The Guillotine. Small wonder I choose the Ideal.

Here are the People. In power, they change
the month of April to the lovely Floréal.
People become a Republic, they reign, deliberate.
Here is the populace en masse: they go
all in for cruel Tiberius and his caprices.

I want the Republic. I hunt down Caesar.

The horses cannot amnesty the chariot.

 

A constitutional referendum was held in France on 8 May 1870. Voters were asked whether they approved of the liberal reforms made to the constitution since 1860 and passed by the Sénatus-consulte on 20 April 1870. The changes were approved by 82.7% of voters with an 81.3% turnout. However, France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War caused the Empire to be abolished later that year. Although this was the ninth constitutional referendum in French history, it was the first to have more than 8% oppose the motion; four of the previous seven had officially gained 99% approval. – Wikipedia “1870 French constitutional referendum.”

The Dark Lady

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Asclepiades, The Greek Anthology, v, 210

Dark as dusk the lady was
when she waved a branch at me.
By myrtle, by palm, by ivy green,
by oak, by pine, by olive, be black
or brown or tawny from too much
sun, what matters it to me?
Like wax I melt before the heat
of love, though she be sent
by fierce Hannibal or Africa’s
proud Dido, Queen. Coals burn,
and what was black as night
throws red and amber light
upon the bedroom walls.
So tremble, Europe, now
beneath the slippered feet
of the beautiful Didyme.

Oh, Give It Up

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Asclepiades, The Greek Anthology, v, 85.

You, virgin still? Oh, why?
Small dam against a torrent,
frail barricade defying love,
why grudge it when a line
of suitors would un-Sphinx
your riddles and reduce
your silly girl talk to a sigh
of most sweet surrender?

If I may be so rude:
Just think on Hades, dear,
and its loveless eternity.
There, no one will give you
a second glance. In Acheron,
upon its acid river shore,
one lies not down for love
but to lament, in ash and dust,
the bygone days one wasted.

Wrong Rub

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Anonymous, The Greek Anthology, v, 82

Girl of the bath,
you rubbed so hard
I thought my skin would peel.
This is no way
to make a man ready
for the hot and cool
waters. Sun-burn,
hot coals, the bite
of Medusa’s head-dress —

Off with you, then.
Go practice your art
on someone who merits
such punishment!

 

[Note: The Greeks and Romans did not have soap. It was the custom, upon entering the public bath, to have a preliminary skin cleaning by an attendant who would apply oil to one's limbs, and then, using a special tool, scrape off the oil, removing dirt in the process. Only after completing this process would one enter the waters of the baths, alternating between hot and cold pools.]

 

Waiting for the Votes to be Counted

by Brett Rutherford

from Victor Hugo's "When 7.5 Million Voted Yes"

 

Oh! what falls around us in the shadow?

So many snowflakes! Do you know the number?

Count the millions and then the millions!

Black night! We see the lions returning to their den.

The thought of eternal life recedes and fades.

The snow falls. The twilight, hideous, blinds us.

We feel but cannot see, the mountains hunching, sinister.

We dare not fall asleep, for fear we’d never wake.

Snow blankets the fields, it covers the cities;

Flakes whiten the sewer grates, hiding their vile mouths;

The dismal avalanche fills the tarnished sky;

Dark ice, hard-caked and falling thick! Is it over?

We can no longer distinguish our path; everything is a trap.

What will be left of all this snow,

The earth’s cold veil, one universal shroud,

Tomorrow, one hour after sunrise?

What is to become of us?

 

My first English version of a 230-line poem by Victor Hugo is in the computer. If I had any doubts about the "relevance" of this work the opening tirade removes all doubts. It is titled "Les 7,500,000 Oui" which seems to make no sense. It is actually about the 1870 referendum in which French voters were asked to approve everything the dictator Napoleon III had done since 1860 (overlooking tens of thousands of liberals and democrats exiled or arrested and thrown into foreign prisons). The poem's title is therefore properly titled, "When 7.5 Million Voted Yes." The people voted yes by an 80% majority.

Hugo's poem is an agonized questioning about "the people" versus "the masses," asking why people would vote against common sense and against their own interest. Hugo calls up the vision of patriots and liberators across history and from many cultures, even bringing in Washington, Bolivar, and Garibaldi. He insists there is a higher standard that mass culture must be reminded of, or be educated about, so that they would choose freedom. It is today's lament a well as yesterday's, and every intellectual knows the irony of feeling that she or he knows better than the people, what is good for the people.

 

Although this poem will require many footnotes for today's average reader (the sad plight of our culture), it also has many direct and powerful images in plain and direct language.

At the end, as if exhausted by the range of his own tirade, Hugo adds a short lyric poem that can be interpreted as the anxiety of waiting for the votes to be counted. It is a landscape with snow falling, and he says it all with the simplest of stark images.

Here I have adapted these closing lines, as a freestanding poem, about our election, your election, the next election. Poetry matters.