Who Is the Ultimate Victor?

by Brett Rutherford

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

Attention, Teutons! We have a thing or two
it seems we need to teach you. Sit up!
No, you will not “take” Alsace and Lorraine,
and it is we who will “take” Germany. Listen:
Cross our border, enter our cities,
a glance at our books will show you
     the spirits who still walk among us.
Breathe the deep air which intoxicates our thinkers.
Unknowingly you will surrender your sword to progress.
Drink from our Frankish cup, adopt our regrets,
our mourning, our fruitful evils, our wishes, our hopes.
Before too many days you will cry our tears;
     you shall envy our sufferings;
you will begin to yearn for our great wind, the Revolution.
This is understanding, oh Germans! what the halcyon knows,
that some waves celebrate when a fierce storm comes,
and we get straight to the point of the storm,
by letting it break our masts and our tackle.
Kings give people to the fields for fertilizer
and this mass murder is called a victory.
They hurl into history an Austerlitz or Rosbach,
and say: “It’s over now.” — Just let time pass.
What has just ended, O kings, is a beginning.
Yes, people have died, but people
     keep right on getting born.
Invincible dawn shines right on through
     the armor and the crowns of kings.
That dawn is Justice and Freedom, too.

The conqueror feels conquered. Tamed tamer,
he is surprised; in his shame-clouded heart
a mysterious construction rises;
an idiot gladiator acquires the spirit of his prey;
he becomes a beast himself. His own ideal
bares teeth and smiles at him. His hand is stayed:
what he adores he can no longer kill.

The glacier melts before the ray that gilds it.
One day, as Linus sang, he moved the stones
He stood upon. The mountain’s Titan,
awake from silent granite’s slumber,
shouted: “Move no more, icy and heavy rock!”
The rock replied: “Do you think I am deaf?”
Thus the immobile mass listens and dreams;
     and thus from a song it is moved,
when black branches come to loosen the knot,
when the sap enters and flows through new branches,
a tree that the shadow filled and that, now, wings will fill.
Man goes about with rocks in his head, prejudices,
vice, error, rotten false dogmas of selfish cast;
but let a voice pass before him a high idea,
then all these stones line up to form
     a new thing, temple within his soul.

Man! Eternal The walls of Thebes erected
by stones that walked to the songs of Amphion!
Ah! deliver yourself then, we challenge you,
Germans, from Pascal, from Danton, or from Voltaire!
Teutons, free yourself from the frightening mystery
from ever-ongoing Progress,
from new things only vaguely mastered,
from reality unmasking wild ignorance,
and of the day that reduces every soul
     to what it once thought was slavery!

Superb slavery! obedience to law
by which error collapses and reason grows!
Deliver yourself from the mountains
     that only offer you their summits to climb.
Deliver yourself from the dark underwing
     of the unknown and the sublime,
things you cannot see and that you already possess.
Deliver yourself from the wind that we blow on you!
Deliver yourself from the unknown world that is beginning,
Duty, and spring and space immense!
Deliver yourself from water, earth, air,
from our Cornelius, yes, and from your Schiller,
from your lungs wanting to breathe, from the pupils
that show you the eternal lights up there,
from the truth, true at all times, in all places,
from today, from tomorrow... —
     You may even deliver yourself from God!
Ah! you are in France, Germans! be careful!
Ah! Such barbarity! You reckless and haggard crowd,
you come running with swords! ah! your camps,
like the fiery silt vomited by volcanoes,
roll to Paris out of your crater!
Ah! you come to our home to take some land from us!
So be it. We in our turn shall take all of your heart.

Tomorrow,
tomorrow, the French goal being the human goal,
you run toward us. Yes, you, great black nation,
you will come to riot, to struggle, to glory,
to the testing, to the great shocks, to the sublime misfortunes,
to revolutions, like the bee to flowers!

Alas! you are killing those
     through whose whole being you shall one day live.
No matter the fanfare swelling its brass voices,
these wars, these furious clashes, these blockades!
You seem to be our victors,
     I say you are our vanquished.
As the ocean filters at the bottom of a coral reef,
through every pore of you
     our ardent philosophy comes in.
Before too many days have passed,
      you will curse the things we curse;
and you will not be able to leave, Teutons,
without having stocked up on hatred here
against Peter and Caesar, chain and chariot
because our looks of mourning, anger and fear,
pass over the common people and strike the king!

You who for so long, as low as peat,
     held poor, kept blind
moaning at random like a bull bellowing,
you will draw from us the haughty will
to exist, and to see clear-browed;
and what you carry forth in your war-pack
will have nothing of the low or vulgar about it.
Yours will be the bitter ardor to do like us,
and to become all equal and to become all free.
Germans, this will be your well-thought purpose
to strike down this pile of thrones pell-mell,
to stretch out a hand to the nations,
mastered by law alone, your leaders
     serving only what duty compels.

So let the universe know, if it looks down and asks,
that Germany is strong and that France is great;
that the candid German is finally triumphant,
a people who have outgrown their infancy!
Your blue-eyed hordes will start following us
with the novel and superb joy of living,
and the deep contentment of no longer having
anvils to forge superfluous swords.
The most poignant lesson that we encounter on earth:
to be for reason comes out of having been against it;
we serve the law with all the more virtue
once we repent of having resisted it.
Germany, flooded with so many murders,
will be the august prisoner of the Idea;
for we are all the more captive
     the more we were once victorious and cruel;
she will not be able to give back her heart to the night.
The German cannot escape from his own soul
whose light and flame we will have changed,
and he will recognize himself as French, shuddering
to kiss our feet, he who once drank our blood!

No, you will not take Lorraine and Alsace,
and, I tell you again, Germans, whatever we do,
it is you who will be taken by France. How ?
As iron filings to the magnet fly,
as night titanic is seduced by dawn,
as with its mountainsides, where sonorous echoes sleep,
its caves, its burrowed nesting hole, its boary thickets
and its sublime night-horror and its familiar wolves,
and all its shapeless foliage made ominous,
the gloomy wood is lit by one clear spark.

When our lightning has crossed your massifs;
when you have suffered, then savored, thoughtfully,
this air of France where the soul is all the more at ease
because she vaguely feels the Marseillaise
     is always floating somewhere there;
when you have given enough of your goods, your rights,
your honor, your children, to be devoured by kings;
when you see Caesar invade your provinces;
when you have weighed your princes in two ways,
when you say to yourself: these masters of humans
are heavy on our shoulder yet light
     if we place our own hand upon them;
when, after all this, you will see the scars
the battles have done to us and to you yourselves;

when your funereal depths are filled with coal,
wrapped in our flags, and shrouds, and souls,
when they have slowly dug mines into your darkness,
when they have brooded in you for the right time,
one day, suddenly, in front of the awful absolute scepter,
before kings, before ancient Sodoms,
before evil, before the yoke, you, forest of men,
you will have an enormous anger that will be set ablaze;
you will open yourself, abyss, to the hurricane of God.
Glory to the North! You shall be the Aurora Borealis
people, illuminating an ideal Europe!

You will shout: — What? Kings? What! An emperor?
How dazzling to see, Germany in fury!
Go, people! Oh vision! a sinister combustion
of all the black past, priest, altar, king, minister,
in the blaze of a new faith, life and reason,
casting a huge glow on the horizon!
Brothers, you will return our flame to us enlarged.
We are the torch, and you will be the fire.

 

 

 

 

Family, Anglo-Saxon Style

 

     by Brett Rutherford

They watch for one another's

death notices.

While you are laid out

in the funeral parlor,

they come to your house

to yank the paintings

from off the walls,

your Chinese vases wrapped

in the remembered quilt

grandmother mistakenly

left to the unworthy heir.

 

Estates contested, their wills

not mentioning one another,

they initiate suits

to the delight of lawyers.

 

A quick cremation cheats

the hovering, pregnant fly,

the patient, boring worm,

the ghoul who would dig

for that last ruby ring.

Family? Ha! They'd take

the casket handles and hinges

for a scrap-metal sale.

Pall-bearers? Forget it!

A grave? Go dig your own!

 

 

The Warning

by Brett Rutherford

He could be anyone, really,

a face in the crowd.
Jowled man, raggedy-beard,
ill-fitting overcoat, too long
in a basement from the look
of him, he surveys the crowd
at Sixth Street and Liberty.

Happy, the faces going

to the John Williams concert,

more so, the families off

to see the Nutcracker.

Shoppers stride over

to the Christmas village,

to skate beneath

a handsome, lit pine.

 

He waits for a bus where

brown faces outnumber him,

and at this he is furious.

He rambles loudly, not into phone

but into the general air,

talk radio host to everyone

and no one. "Just wait!" he booms,

"Till all the undesirables are gone.

All gone .... all gone ... it's coming.

Then there will be no one left

but us conservatives." I groan

and turn away,

 

but he is not to be avoided,

pushes his way into the 13 bus

I too am taking. Shoppers

get on, bags bulging with gifts

or groceries. "Know where you've been,"

he mutters, "and what you've been up to.

Bet you didn't pay for that."

 

He mumbles awhile about

the conservative curfew

that would clean things up:

no one downtown after 7 pm.

"Close all the theaters."

 

More black people get on.

More shopping bags.

"Target acquired!" he proclaims.

"Target acquired! Take this one out!"

No one pays heed.

No snipers obey his orders.

None of us have bullet holes.

 

I get off my bus,

head for the poetry reading.

The madman rolls on

with ever more alien

and suspect riders

accumulating, his blood

raised to boiling before

he reaches the place

he sleeps in, safe and white.

 

He could be anyone, really,

someone I went to college with,

maybe; for a moment I thought

that's what my brother

might look like now,

the brother I haven't seen

in half a century.

He could be anyone, really.

His list is long,

and he is getting ready.

 

 

Our Dead

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870"

I am taken to view our dead where they lie
unburied as yet in the terrible and lonely field.
Their blood has made a horrible pool
on the earth around them,
and monstrous raptor birds
rip languidly into their open bellies.
The fierce, cold bodies of our warrior dead,
scattered upon the green meadow,
whom for fear of cannons we cannot touch;
they are black and frightful, and twisted in shapes
that the bodies of the young ought not to have.
The thunder of great guns has riven them,
blind gaping skulls like storm-struck stones.
Snow, taking soft pity, silhouettes them
with its secular white shroud.

 
The hands, oh! not praying! clench lugubrious and harsh,
as though the sword held up against the enemy
were still in their grasp, as though they could fire
their one small bullet against the descending shell.

Anthemless, they have no words,
they are the lipless and eyeless dead.
On the stillness of their haggard sleep
nights pass in horror of the crows to come.
Their bodies have more shocks and sores
that those whom once the rack tormented.
Beneath them crawl the criminal worm,
the fetid larva, and the stinging ant.
Their corpses are already half subsumed in soil,
like a sinking ship tilted into deep water.
Their pale bones, covered in rot and shadow,
are like those to whom Ezekiel spoke.
We see everywhere on them the gaping holes
where cannonballs went through,
the saber-scars, the cruel jab-holes
where a spear went in and out.

The vast icy chill blows over this silence.
A windowless ruin whistles with wind,
dead strewn inside like a doll-house in hell.
O look, and look, and finally look away.
This cannot fade from the eye's under-lid.
Our dead, these boys and men,
naked and bloody under the rainy sky.
O dead for my country, I envy you only
that you did not live to see this.
Rather I were here, and you in your bed.

To France, Abandoned

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870"

VII

No one is for you. They are unanimous. This one,
named Gladstone, said “Thank you” to your executioners.
This other one, named Grant, insults you, and this other one,
his German Minister, Bancroft, insults you, too.
One thinks himself an apostle,
the second a soldier, the third a judge and a tribune.

Beware the priests as well:

your blood, poured in great floods, is not enough
to satisfy them, whether from North or South,
who pass, and seeing you crucified
     stop only to spit in your face.

Alas! what then have you done to these nations? You came
to those who were crying, with these divine words:
Joy and Peace! — You buoyed them with: — Hope! Joy!
Be powerful, America, and be free, O Greece!
Italy was once grand and whole; she must be one again.
France wished all this for you! — She gave this one her gold,
to that one her blood, to all, the light.

You defended the rights of men,
     devoted and dutiful.
Alas, as the ox returns no longer thirsty
from a too-accustomed watering trough,
the men returned to the stable step by step,
sated with you, formidable big sister,
forgetting who protected and fought for them.
Ah! to show oneself ungrateful is to prove oneself small.
Not a kind syllable! not one of them knows you.
Their crowd, whooping and mocking you,
at this very hour when your greatness is crumbling,
laughs at every hammer blow that falls
on you, naked and bloody and nailed to the gallows.
They pity their own sons whom bitter fortune
condemns to rediscover their true mother
and cast in shame this shameful renunciation.
You can’t just die, poor France, and that’s the sorrow.
You bend your radiant forehead into night;
The eagle of the shadow is there;
     it eats away your liver daily,
the one who denies the vanquished; and gives joy
to plundering kings, like the bandits of Adrets,
Kneel if you will at the feet of the eagle,
charm Europe and please the world! ... — Ah! I would like,
if I weren’t French already, to be able to say
that I choose you, France, and that, in your martyrdom,
I proclaim you, you whom the vulture gnaws,
as my homeland and my glory and my only love!