Progress and Destiny: A Canto of Dark and Light

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "February 1871."

Selections from a 20-page canto-length poem.

1

On one side, the sacrificial victims.
On the other, those who sacrificed them.
This growing-up of the species,
where self-confessed deformities
develop and flourish.
Terrifying fate! everything serves its end,
even shame; prostitution has its fertility;
crime keeps the death rate up;
in a state of corruption, new embryos appear.
Those whom we come to love
     are born from what we deplore.
What we see clearly is that we suffer. For what?
We enter the rout of life with cries of fear;
sometimes we regret surviving
     the worst that has come our way.
The human race climbs a staircase
which turns and plunges into the night
only to re-enter the day again.
In this unnatural progression we lose sight
of the good and the evil in turn.
At last we come to think murder is good;
death saves; the moral law bends
and disappears into the dark spiral.

 

2

But what an obscurity!
     what waves of smoke and foam!
In all this mist, what optical illusions!
Is it a liberator, this tiger that leaps?
Is this leader a hero, or is he a bandit?

Just try and guess. Who knows? in these depths
made of crime and virtue, of murders and parties,
deceived by what we see and what we hear,
how can we find the star in so much floating horror?
This is why everything seemed vain and troubled before;
like an ever-growing and redoubling night;

The vast caving-in of tumultuous facts,
the battles, the treacherous and self-defeating assaults,
on Carthage, and Tyre, Byzantium and Rome,
catastrophes, men falling terribly from high thrones,
all had the appearance of a sterile torment, and,
following as hail follows the wind’s anger,
      and as heat follows cold,
all that occurred seemed to speak forth
only single law: Nothing lasts.

The nations, bowing heads, had no other philosophy
in these ebbs and flows than the velocity
of the chariots passing over them;
no one saw the purpose of these vain quarrels;
and Roman Horace cried: — Since everything is fleeing,
let us love, live, and watch the shadow of the mountains fall;
laugh, sing, pick grapes from the vines to hang them,
O Lydé, behind your ears;

This little thing is everything.
By Bacchus, on the weight of heroes, slackers,
glory and kings, I will question Caron, the passer of shadows! —

Since then we have understood.
Statistics gradually lost their appearance of chaos,
and vaguely revealed a few illuminated spots.

 

3

Has anyone unraveled the germ of life?
Does anyone see the end point of the tunnel
     through which we plummet, space and time?
Does anyone see both ground and sky?
Have we even penetrated nature?
What is light and what is the force
     that emanates from the magnet?

What is the brain? what makes a body move about?
Why does the moon’s rays have no heat?
O night, what is a soul? Is a star one of them?
Is perfume the wandering soul of the pistil?
Does a flower suffer? Can a rock think?
What is the wave? Etnas, Cotopaxis, Vesuvius,
where does the flaming of earth’s enormous vats come from?
Where then is the pulley and the rope,
and the bucket that hang in your well, O black Chimborazo?

“Alive!” What does that mean, anyway?
do we distinguish a thing from a being?
What does it mean to die?
(Say, mortal! what does it mean to be born?)
You ask in fact: Is this the whole law?

Come, whoever you are, you who speak, tell me,
what are you? Do you want to plumb the abyss?
     Have you the strength
to scrutinize the work of the sap beneath the bark;
to watch, in the night, for underground veins,
the wedding of terrestrial water with ocean waves,
and the formation of metals; to hunt down
in their lairs lead, mercury and copper,
so that you could say: This is how
gold is made in the earth
     and dawn in the firmament!
Can you encompass such knowledge? Speak!
No? Well, be then thrifty of axioms about God,
keep mum with sentences on what man is,
and do not pronounce judgments on infinity.

 

 

The Wrong Time to Speak of Brotherhood

 by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “February 1871”

When we are victorious, well, let’s see.
Until then, let us show the disdain
      in a degree that befits our pain.
Defeat is graced best by the bitterly-lowered eye.
Free, one can be an apostle.
A slave, one must become a prophet.
We are garroted! No more “sister nations” talk!
And I predict the abyss for our invaders.

We have been put on a chain.
Hatred must be our dog-house.
Pride alone requires this.
Love the Germans? Oh, that will come,
on the day when by right of victory
we will know the privilege of love.

The devastated never get to make
a declaration of peace. The heart seeks
revenge’s satisfaction first.
Let’s wait our turn to stand in the way.

Just when and how should we extend our hand
to them? Only downward, when they are at our feet.
As long as France cries, I can only bleed.
So, no more talk of concord at this time.
To stammer “fraternité” too soon
and bitterly with half a heart,
makes the enemy shrug their shoulders.
If in some tomorrow, our grudges are shed,
that is tomorrow’s business, and not today’s.
We who have been slapped are not cowards.

Published in Le Rappel, May 22, 1871.

 

 

King of the Whole World

 

By Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “February 1871”

This man is ugly, old and bestial.
What are you putting on his poor head?
A crown? No, two crowns. No, three.
Merge that of emperors with that of kings,
Caesar’s laurel, the cross of Charlemagne,
and then from part of France
     and a lot of Germany.
Under such a heap of crowns once,
     a long time ago, Charles V wavered. [1]
The peace of the world depends on all this,
that this old trembling brow remains in balance.
This old man really would be happier free,
and if he were gone, we would be more comfortable too.

If he has digested badly, the sky is darkened;
his bowel-rumbling is a bitter shock;
we stagger if he spits, we collapse if he coughs;
His ignorance creates a fog on the earth.
Why not leave this old man alone?
If he had neither soldiers, nor dukes, nor constables,
we would gladly receive him at our tables;
Our glasses, under the vine, in the sun, in the open wind,
would click against yours, sire, and you would be alive.

No, we stuff you like an idol, and we petrify you
under a heavy spiked helmet, and,
as we distrust the king above who is jealous of the kings below,
we put up, Sire, a lightning rod in copper at your top;
and your people are so proud that they adore you;
they dress you up with a cloak, like the Pope in his chasuble,
and there you sit, a tyrant,
and we have you over us,
the habit of man being to get down on his knees.

You now carry Etna like Enceladus,
and like Atlas the weighty sky. O master, be sick,
crippled, catarrhal, reigning as old as you wish,
teeth chattering with fever between two sheets.
What does it matter? The universe is no less your thing.
Europe is an effect of which you will be the cause.
Shine forth. No hero stands higher than your ankle.

Bossuet will throw Jehovah under your feet.
You will be proclaimed Most High in the full pulpit.
A king, were he a dwarf, were he a poor wretch,
dropsical, goitrous, crippled, tortuous, exhausted,
less firm on his feet than a cavalryman
     who has drunk too much;
had there been snot and skin eruptions,
     spine, gout and gravel;

even if his mind was shallow, in a shrunken brain,
had he not had much more head than a rat;
even if he, under the splendor of the ceremonial cord,
in the garlanded shadow of a hernial girdle,
remained august and powerful until the last hour
and until the jolt of his final hiccups,
the men who stand at the altar,
     the men of the tribunal, prostrate themselves
      with their grave platitudes.

Though his decrepitude dismays, he is still Caesar;
even in ruins and dying, majesty persists
and covers him, he is great;
and purple is always on him, holy and splendid,
and even austere, when from the scepter and the throne
     he passes to the earthworms’ worshiping.
Agonizing, he reigns; we see him doze off,
we almost fear thunder in his last breath.
Even when he is dead, the crowd with bowed backs
places him in such a temple that it trembles,
and from below admires and contemplates him
when his miserable corpse enters the gaping sepulchre,
they still believes him to be a god
     even though he is already nothing.

 [1] Holy Roman Emperor Charles V renounced his throne and retired into seclusion.