October 1870, Part 2

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "October 1870."

Part 2

AS DANTE AND AESCHYLUS LOOK ON

And so the kinds of days
     of which the tragedies tell, have returned!
It seems, from omens indecipherable,
Another hegira begins for the nations.

Pale Dante Alighieri of immortal fame,
     and you, Aeschylus, playwright
     and brother of the warlike Cynegirus,
two severe witnesses, equal in love of justice,
leaning, one on Florence and the other on Argos,
you who authored, shades on whom stern eagles rest,
these dreaded books where one feels something
of what rumbles and glows behind the horizon,
you two whom the human race reads
     even now with a shudder and a backward glance,
dreamers who can say in your tombs: we are
Gods because we make men tremble!
Dante, Aeschylus, listen and look.

These kings today.
beneath their broad crowns have shriveled foreheads.
You would disdain them. They lack the stature
of those whom your formidable verses torture,
unworthy of the Argive chief’s outrage
      nor from the Pisan baron’s contempt;
but they are monstrous nonetheless, you must admit.

Though sprung from the first kings,
     they have a vulgar appearance,
but they command the legions of war.
They push the seven Saxon peoples on Paris.[1]
Hideous and helmeted, gaudy with gilding,
     tattooed all over with coats of arms,
each of them must feed on murder.
Each of these kings takes as his emblem
some species of forest beast,
     upon his shiny visor,
the chimera of a harsh and gloomy
     herald bird, splayed out with wing and claw,
or the waving mane of some impudent dragon.

And the great chief displays on his high banner,
a stain like two reflections off a polished tomb
in the form of a strange eagle,
      white at night and black during the day.

With them, with great noise, and in all forms,
Krupps, bombards, cannons, huge machine guns,
they drag beneath this wall that they call “enemy”
a war machine all cast from ancient bronze.
O Bronze alloy, this mute and sleeping slave,
who, suddenly screams with his muzzle off,
takes on from fire and powder a terrible zeal
and starts, unbridled, to destroy a city,
and goes on without respite,
     and with the horrible joy
          of resounding brass.
As if to add insult to these fallen towers,
some of the same Bronze will be employed
     later, to make infamous statues;
as if the alloy of Vulcan wished to say:
     People, contemplate in me
     the very monster
     you have used to make a king.

The whole earth trembles,
     and the seven leaders unite in hatred.

They are there, threatening Paris. They punish the city.
And for what ? For being France and in so being,
     to be the universe,
for shining above the half-open chasms,
     a giant arm holding a fist-full
of sunbeams, with which Europe is forever bathed;
They punish Paris for being freedom;
they punish Paris for merely being the city it is,
where Danton scolds, and Molière shines,
     and Voltaire laughs;
They punish Paris for being the soul of the earth,
for being more alive with each passing year,
a thing they cannot bear: the great deep torch
     that no foul wind can extinguish,
the idea on fire piercing this cloud, the numbered
crescent of progress clear in the depths of the dark sky;
they punish Paris for denouncing error,
the warning harbinger and the enlightener,
for showing beneath their terrible glory
      a vast and empty cemetery.

Paris, alone, abolishing the scaffold,
     the throne, the border,
the boundary, the fight, the obstacle, the ditch;
Paris the future pointing,
     when they are only the past.

And it is not their fault; they are the dark forces.
They follow Gothic glories in the night,
Cain, Nimrod, Rhamsés, Cyrus, Genghis, Timur.
They fight against law, and light, and love.
They would like to be gigantic,
      but are only misshapen.
Earth, these creatures do not seek your happiness.
you innocents who want to fall asleep
in the arms of sacred peace, and in the marriage
of Divine clarity with the human spirit.
No, they condemn brother to devour brother,
people to massacre the people, and their misery
it is to be omnipotent and that all their instincts
lit up for hell, tarnish the sight of heaven above.

Hideous kings! We will see, of course, before their souls
renounce slaughter, the sword, and infamous murder,
to the sound of bugles, and the neighing war horse.
In the after-morn of universal massacre,
the bird no longer knows the way to its nest,
the tiger loves the swan, and the forgetful bee
abandons its wild hive for the black hollow
     of a corpse’s eye-socket.

 

---

[1] Seven Saxon peoples. The various German principalities united under Prussian rule.

To Little Jeanne

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

I missed your birthday yesterday, sweet child.
So now you have lived one year, plus one
dear happy day, this morn that finds you prattling.
Just as the fledglings wild, beneath the leafy boughs
open their hazy eyes, chirp merrily to feel
their feathers already growing, know all they need to know
from birth, in like assurance, Jeanne,
your rosy mouth smiles. Precocious,
you paw tall volumes for the pictures that please you
(no matter the bent and crumpled pages!).
We search for children’s verse, but none describe
the way your tiny body trembles
     when I enter the room.
Nothing the famous authors say exceeds
the thoughts half-hatched within your eyes,
and your shadowy, scattered, strange reverie,
looking at me with the blank-slate memory
of a newly-formed angel. Jeanne, God
cannot be far, since you are here.

Ah! You are one year old, now that’s an age!
Born to a house of writers, large of brow,
Sometimes you are serious, with that delight
that comes from concentration realized.
You are in that celestial moment of life
where one has no shadow yet,
     where in one’s open arms,
held by parents, a child contains the universe;
Your young soul lives to dream, and laugh,
     and cry, and hope.
From mother Alice to father Charles,
all the horizon that your mind can contain
goes from her who rocks you,
     to him whose kindly smiles
          makes all seem right and good.
Embraced by these two beings since the start,
you float in caresses and light.
Husband and wife and child, complete,
O Jeanne; and that is right; and I,
I endure more days, your humble ancestor,
     because I follow you;
and you have come,
     and I will go; and I love,
having only the right to nightfall,
while yours is the right to dawn.

You and your blond brother George suffice
to feed my soul, and I see your games,
     and that is enough;
and I might want, after my countless trials,
     that your two cradles at the rise of sun,
           shadow and silhouette my tomb.

Ah! innocent newcomer, and dreaming,
you chose a singular hour to be born.
You are Jeanne, familiar with terrors.
You smile in front of everyone
     whose faces grow pale and dart
     the terrified glances of animals at bay.
You make your bee-hum in the woods,
O Jeanne, and you mix your charming murmur
as Paris hammers its great armory.
Ah! when I hear you, Jeanne, and when I see you
sing, and, speaking to me with your humble voice,
stretch your gentle hands above our heads,
it seems to me that the shadow where the storms rumble
trembles and moves away with dull roars,

and that God gives to the city of a hundred towers
(distraught like a sinking ship,
with the enormous cannons guarding the dark rampart)
God gives to the universe
     even as it tilts to one side
          and which Paris defends —
this same God gives his blessing
     through a little child.

Paris, September 30, 1870.

 

Will This War Make Us Into Noble Beings?

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/Translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

     "To Prince Prince-Cut-Down-A-Size", September 1870.

The emperor makes war on the king.
We told ourselves:
— Wars are the threshold of revolutions. —

We thought: — It’s yet another war.
     Yes, but this is the Big One.

Hell wants a laurel; death craves an offering;
these two kings have sworn to extinguish the sun;
the globe will be covered with blood, vast and ruddy,
and men will be cut down like weeds;
and the winners will be infamous, but superb. —
and we who want a human life in peace, who give
the land to the plow’s furrow,
      and not to the cannon ruts,
sad, but proud nonetheless, in awe we said: —
     just think: France against Prussia!

What does it matter if this flash-in-the-pan Batavian[1]
     attacks this arrogant Borusse![2]
Let the kings do their thing; then God will attend.
And so we dreamt of Vedic clashes, Vishnu against Indra,
an avatar clouded by apocalypse,
with flames from all sides to pierce and eclipse it.
We dreamt of the night’s enormous battles;
of more than one chaos of anger and noise
as when a hurricane attacks the sea, as when an angel,
wrestling a giant, struggles, and spews a mix
of heavenly blood with the dark ichor of Titans;
god upon god, Apollo versus Leviathan.

The shadows we imagined drove us mad.

We hurtled, as in famous battles past,
collided, in the horror of an unquenchable quarrel,
Rosbach[3] against Jena,[4] Rome against Alaric,[5]
the great Napoleon and the great Frederick;

We thought we could see approaching us,
     in haste, with the help of our own wings,
victories a-wing like swallows
and, like the bird run to its nest, go straight
to France, to progress, justice, law.

We thought we were witnessing
     the fatal and final clash of thrones.

At the sinister death of the old Babylons,
the crushed continent, killed and resurrected
would bloom again in dawn and freedom.

One hoped, perhaps,
     that after monstrous disasters,
new worlds would bloom
     from the collapse of stars!

Or so we thought. Either, we said, it will be
like Arbelle, Actium, Trasimene and Zara,
terrible, but grandiose — a chasm with its slope,
and the whole universe at the edge of its tether, as in Lepanto,
as in Tolbiac, in Tyre, in Poitiers.

Anger, Strength and Night, black gatekeepers,
will open the wide grave before us.
The South or the North
     will have to get in line.
One race or the other will have to drop
to the abyss’s bottom
where kings and gods crumble.
And thoughtful, believing that we see glory coming towards us,
we prepared for colossal battle:
shocks as the men of the Loire saw,
thundering Wagram, magnificent and hideous Leipsick,
Cyrus, Sennacherib, Caesar, Frederick the Second,
Nimrod, we shudder at these dark approaches... —

Suddenly we feel a hand in our pockets.
It has come to this, that now we rob our own.
Certainly, we had already told ourselves
     Bonaparte indigent
was a crook, and must have hoped
to loot Germany, having embezzled France;
He stole his throne; he is vile, deceitful and ugly,
that’s all true; but we had this fantasy that he was going
to confront an old king,
     some redemption in his pride in his own old race,
having God as crown and honor as breastplate.
In that scenario he would place before him,
     as in the time of the Dunois,
one of those paladins from ancient tournaments
whose armor we vaguely drew with our eyes
in the clouds full of dawn and portent.

O downfall! Illusion! Swiftly the scenery
is pulled away and replaced with another!
It is a whistle, the sign among bandits,
     and not the militant horn.
The night. You stand in a tawny thicket.
      Sabers swarm around you.
Gun barrels shine among the branches.
Cries come from the shadows.
     “Surprise — an ambush! Stop!”
Some detonation lights the sky in red
and everything flares up around you,
     limned in hell’s crimson skylight.

“You there! On your knees!
     We’ll bash your heads in
          if anyone makes a move.
Face down and no one standing!
Now give us your money — give it all.”

Whether you like it or not
     to be knee-deep in mud and water,
what can you do? So they search you,
     and there is a gun at your back.

“No smart ideas, now! We are ten to one,
     all armed to the teeth,
and if you resist, the worse for you!
Obey!”  These voices seem to come from a cave.
What can one do? we hold out our purse,
     we lie flat on our stomachs,
and while, foreheads on the ground, we submit,
we think of these taken-over countries
     that were formerly called
Frankfurt, Poland, Hanover, Hesse.

They are gone. It’s done! Get up!
So now we find ourselves penniless
in the middle of the Black Forest,
     and we think bitterly,
that no one prepared us for such wild betrayals.
We, ignorant in the art of ruling,
     and the supposed rules of war
     can only curse and swear,
that highway robber Cartouche[6]
     had been enlisted here,
to wage a war on one and all,
     just like his German counterpart,
          the robber Schinderhannes.[7]

---

[1] Batavian. Napoleon III’s older brother Louis Napoleon was the child-king of Holland for two weeks in 1810.

[2] Borusse. The Latin name for Prussia is Borussus.

[3] The Battle of Rossbach, 5 November 1757 in Saxony, a Prussian victory against France, and a turning point after which the French did not engage the Prussians further.

[4] The Battles of Jena, 14 October, 1806, between the armies of Napoleon I and Frederick the Great, a triumph for the French.

[5] Alaric I, King of the Goths, defeated and sacked Rome in 410 CE.

[6] Cartouche. Nickname for Louis Dominique Bourguignon (1693-1721), a French highway robber. Many ballads were written about his Robin Hood-like exploits.

[7] Schinderhannes. Nickname for Johannes Büchler (1778-1803), a German highway robber, also known as “The Robber of the Rhine.” Schinderhansl, the children’s card game (Black Peter), is named after him.

Worthy of One Another (September 1870)

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

SEPTEMBER 1870

III.

So look: Here is our simpleton of crime;
And over there, madly served by his oppressed victims,
That ogre of divine right, devout, correct, moral.
Born to be emperor and yet always a corporal,
Here is the Bohemian and there is a Sicambre,[1]
(one the night-idler of the dank taverns,
   the other a crude Clovis chided for his heathen ways)
The cutthroat fights nocturnally,
      as the second of December attests.[2]
The hare on one side, the jackal on the other.
The Ollioule ravine[3] and the Bancal house[4]
seem to have furnished some kings; the Calabrians
had no one more frightening than these saber-draggers;[5]
Looting, extortion, it’s their war; such art
would charm the gods in the upper balcony,
but would disturb some military theorists.[6]
It’s as easy as the night-time arrest of a carriage.[7]

Yes, Bonaparte is vile, but Wilhelm is atrocious,
and nothing is so stupid, as, alas, the challenge-glove
this naïve joker hurls at the feet
     of that black bandit.

One attacks with nothing; the other allows the approach
and suddenly draws lightning from his pocket.
The German thunder, soft and treacherous, concealed itself.
Their emperor took ours by holding out a baby’s rattle.
He laughed: “Come this way, child!”
     and the little one ran,
          his short legs stumbling,
and the trap-door closed over him.

Carnage, heaps of dead, mourning, horror, betrayal,
infamous tumult around a sinister horizon;
and the thinker, faced with these numberless attacks,
is overcome by who knows what dark glare.
What crimes, fair heaven! Oh! the terrible outcome!
O France! one gust of wind in a moment dissipates
this shadow Caesar and his shadow of an army.

War where one was the flame
      and the other was only smoke.

 

 

---

[1] Sicambre. An allusion to Clovis, first king of the Franks, ordered by a bishop to remove his pagan necklaces at his baptism.

[2] Second of December. The date of Napoleon III’s coup.

[3] Ollioule. The gorges at Ollioule near Toulon were settled in Neolithic times, and the town of Ollioule was founded in the sixth century BCE by the Romans as Oppidum de la Courtine.

[4] Bancal. Jean-Louis Bancal de Saint-Julien, French brigadier general 1789-1815, who also fought in the American Revolution.

[5] Calabrians. The Calabrians in Italy offered a surprising peasant resistance to the French invasion of 1806-1807. French soldiers were captured, castrated, and burned alive by peasants whose last food rations the invaders were attempting to confiscate.

[6] Gods in the balcony. Hugo employs “Poulaillier,” literally, a chicken coop, a term used to describe “the gods,” the uppermost cheap seats in a theater. Hugo then mentions the Chevalier de Folard (1669-1752), a French military theorist who studied battlefield tactics.

[7] Arrest of a carriage. Many readers would read this as an allusion to the arrest of the fleeing King Louis XVI in June 1791.