Wednesday, February 14, 2024

The Drum-beat and the Lowered Flag: The Funeral of Charles Hugo


 

by Brett Rutherford

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

From the fields, the animal roar of drum-beats.
Windless, the flags hang limp at half-mast.
From the Bastille we march to the foot
of the dreary hill where the ages past sleep
next to the living century beneath the cypresses.
The mute wind moves no branches.
The people have weapons on their arms;
they are in respite from their own struggles.
The people are sad; somber they stand, and full of thought/
Silently, their large battalions form a hedge around the grave.

The dead son is there,
and the father longing for the tomb is there,
one yesterday still valiant, robust and handsome,
the hiding the tears on his face, is old;
and each legion greets them as they pass.

O people! O majesty of sweetness immense!
Paris, city of sunlight, you whom the invader
assailed and was unable to conquer,
and whom he has incarnadined with blood,
you whom one day we will see, amid a royal orgy,
emerge, with lightning on your forehead,
like the Commendatore,[1] O city, you have this height
of grandeur to pay mind to the pain of one man.

To find a soul in Sparta
     and to see a heart in Rome,
     nothing is more admirable;
and Paris has tamed the universe
by the force through which we feel goodness.
These people are heroes; these people are righteous.
They do much more than conquer: they love.
O august city, that day everything trembled,
when the revolutions rumbled, and in their mist,
through the rays, you saw re-open before you
that terrible shadow which sometimes opens wide
before great peoples; and the man who followed
his son’s coffin paused to admire you,
you who, ready for all proud challenges,
unfortunate, made humanity prosperous.
Dark, he felt like a son at the same time as a father,
a father when thinking of him,
     a son when thinking of this city.

May this illustrious young fighter full of faith,
gone into the deep place that calls for us all,
O people, keep your great soul forever close to him!
You gave it to him, people, in this supreme farewell.
That up in the superb freedom of the blue sky,
he witnesses, holding on high an unseen weapon,
the struggles of duty, and carries them on.
Law is not law only here below;
the dead are living people still fraught in our battles,
sometimes having good, sometimes evil as their targets;
sometimes we feel their invisible arrows passing by.
We believe them to be absent. No, they are present;
we get past the earth, the days, the tears,
but there is no getting past fate.
The tomb is our sublime extension.
We wake up there surprised
     to have thought we ever fell.
As into the deeper azure the swallow migrates,
we enter happier into an even greater duty.
We see the useful with the right parallel;
and on our own wings we are carried out of the shadow.
O my blessed son, serve France,
from the middle of this abyss of love that we call God.
It is not to sleep that we die,
no, it is to do from above
what our humble sphere does below;
only to do it better, only to do it well.
We only have the goal, heaven has the means.
Death is a passage where everything changes to grow;
who was an athlete on earth
is in the abyss an archangel;
on earth we are limited, on earth we are banished;
but up there we grow without hindering the infinite.
the soul can display its sudden scope there;
it is by losing your body that you regain your form.
Go then, my son! go then, spirit! become a torch.
Shine! Glide into the immense tomb!
Serve France. For God places in it a mystery,
for you now know what the earth does not know,
for the truth shines where eternity shines,
for as we see only night, it is light
that leads you forth.

—Paris, March 18.



[1] Royal orgy … Commendatore. I take this to be a reference to the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the corrupt Don Giovanni, amid a wild dinner party, is interrupted by the arrival of the ghost of the Commander whom he had murdered. The earth opens up, and Don Giovanni is dragged into Hell by his ghost-visitor.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Two Poems of Kabir

 The 15th century poet Kabir writes:

I laugh when I hear that the fish in
the water is thirsty :
You do not see that the Real is in
your home, and you wander from
forest to forest listlessly !
Here is the truth ! Go where you
will, to Benares or to Mathura ;
if you do not find your soul, the
world is unreal to you.
 
And another poem:
 
The Yogi dyes his garments, instead
of dyeing his mind in the colors of love :
He sits within the temple of the Lord,
leaving Brahma to worship a stone.
He pierces holes in his ears, he has a
great beard and matted locks, he
looks like a goat :
He goes forth into the wilderness,
killing all his desires, and turns
himself into an eunuch :
He shaves his head and dyes his
garments ; he reads the Gita and
becomes a mighty talker.
Kabir says : " You are going to the doors
of death, bound hand and foot ! "
 
-- Translated by Rabindrath Tagore (1915)

Sleep Not On Your Back

 by Brett Rutherford

     Based on an Old Assyrian Hymn,
(Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judentum
, ii, 413.)

Sleep not on your back, for Lilith comes,
and from your seed her progeny shall rise.
If warts and boils assail you, they are
the lip-prints of Lilith’s kisses, beware!

An evil demon has enveloped your bed.
An evil ghost prevents your rising.
A great devil has taken your breath
and made all your hairs to stand on end.

Bewail at morning the hag-demon’s clutch,
the breath of a ghoul still fresh in our mouth.
The robber-sprite makes dim your eyes
and no mortal human beauty ravishes you;
only the thought of dark pollution pleases you.
Your limbs are wracked by an evil goddess,
the Night-Phantom’s Handmaid
     has made you her groom.

And when you die, alone, unshriven,
the legion of your invisible children,
pale kindred of your nocturnal emissions
shall crowd about and call you ‘Father.’

 

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Charles! Charles! O My Son!

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, March 1871.

Charles! Charles! O my son! O Death, what now?
My son has been taken from me.
All, flying away from me, everything,
     to make me know that nothing can last!
Into the great clarity obscure to us,
     you have vanished in an instant.
I, in my sunset, see Charles, my east, perish.
How we loved one another, father and son.
A man, alas, creates and dreams, and smilingly binds
     his soul to other souls. He tells himself
it shall be always thus, and goes about his way.
Commencing his own descent in years,
he lives, he suffers, the price of being,
and suddenly in the palm of his hand,
he holds nothing but ashes.

It seems but yesterday
     when an emperor proscribed me.
Two decades, hemmed in by the seas,
I stayed away, my spirit bruised.
Fate reaches down to each and all,
striking for reasons all his own.

God took away my homeland.
I have only one son,  one daughter left.
Here I am almost alone in this shadow
within which I walk forward.
God ekes my family away from me.

Oh! stay, you two who still remain with me!
our nests fall down, but your mother blesses you
out of dark death, and I, in bitter life, bless you.
Yes, in the manner of the martyr of Zion,
I will go on and complete my struggle,
and I will continue the harsh ascent
     which feels more like the fall.
Following the truth is enough for me,
seeing nothing but the great sublime goal.
I walk, in mourning, but proud.
Behind duty I march straight to the abyss.

 

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

The Struggle

 by Brett Rutherford

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

All around me, alas, the anger of ignorance.
Hard as it is, we must pity those
beyond the reach of truth’s great radiance.
Besides, my friend, what does it matter.
     Honor is on our side.
Yes, let us pity those, who while insulting us
with jeers, hasten to soil themselves, and kneel
before the horrible peace that strangles France.
The brooms of your disdain, and mine, shall sweep
their idiotic ingratitude aside. History, when it
is written, shall only remember them as jots,
ellipses, initials undecipherable.
They would drive Jesus hither and yon
like a homeless gypsy; Saint Paul would seem to them
a hideous Democrat with dangerous ideals.
They would even say of Socrates,
     “What a terrible jester this one is.”

Their darkened, myopic eye is afraid of dawn.
Is it the people’s fault? No. In Naples, in Rome,
here, always, and everywhere,
it is quite easy for simple folk
to dart envious eyes at the soldiers
(because they suffered the honor of losing?),
or to mutter curses at mitered priests
(because their impotent prayers failed?)
and envy just as quickly transmutes to hate.
The icicles I watched this winter,
passing our river docks pell-mell,
throwing such a dark cold, but just as soon
they fled and melted quickly in the shadows.
The inhuman stabs of these icy blades
like human hate and vanity, here and gone.

I think of those who once, like divine fighters,
came alone to the gates of a city,
without an army to be its deliverance,
and of how the flood of vile clamors
     rolled over them unfelt.
What is the use of all this? Come, let us join hands.
And I, the old Frenchman, and you, the ancient Roman,
let us venture out together. There is no umbrella
against contumely, and we need not dress
for the occasion of our condemnation.

We shall find it a sad place;
we shall be made uncomfortable in what should have been
a place of wine and olive. We shall have recourse
to our high cliff, where, if we are murdered,
at least it is by the sea. There, let us seek
the august insult of the lightning,
the never-low fury and the great bitterness,
the one and true abyss, and let us leave
the slime of the mud for the spume of the sea.

 

Monday, February 5, 2024

If Nothing Else Saves Us

IF NOTHING ELSE SAVES US

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, March 1871.

We always seem to turn to faith, no matter
what happens. (As if we had a choice!)
All around us is agitated, as in the depths
of our worst nightmares. Some march
as if they had a purpose, and some just run,
sliding down rocks to an ill-remembered shore.
Dawn pulls us on from night, from the black
sepulchre we climb to the songbird’s egg’d nest,
not glancing back at the Hydras that follow
we call what is ahead of us a Halcyon.
The wise are bold, they bolt down corridors
on the new paths we call Revolutions.
Prophets worn almost to nothing by fasting,
o poets with your clarions ever-ringing,
all of you coming, the old and the young alike,
I see you, equal parts Isaiah and Byron,
calling us forth to the supreme goal, always
the same, and always new under heaven;
the word you hurl into the wind is the same
as the one uttered by the undying passer-by;
the low bass of your tragic and superb voice rumbles,
but then in triumph you sing it, tenor, soprano;
you take the word from God and pass it
into the tightly-sealed lips of the lurking Sphinx.
The whole itinerary and anthem of man,
that leaves Zion behind, and passes through
and beyond the glorious gates of Rome,
to the priest who flees or falters, seems a failure,
a fall from a lesser to a greater abyss, your lament
of loss a sublime noise that warns in the night.

Faith in the future! You toll the bell
that makes the traitor tremble,
while with your tocsin you summon
the new brave still willing and able to fight.
Your hymns appear and vanish, and come again,
a stormy swarm of sibylline verses. Pilgrim immense,
in song and dream and thought you support the people,
words flowing out like overturned urns
from which brass rhythms drum and sing.
The day on its four-horse chariot approaches.
The curtains will open of their own accord.
All are compelled to head toward dawn, all,
even those who have turned their back to it.
One walks forward; another steps back, in vain.
The power of stepping-forward accumulates.
The future in this dawning light unveils
a mysterious tower for all to see, obscure
but spangled with new-born stars.
Faith’s stanzas ring out from the dark
as its great black bell-tower comes into view.