by Brett Rutherford
Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "May 1871"
“Mr. Hugo is enjoined by His Majesty
to leave the kingdom of Belgium.”
Very well, I am going. But why?
Why this? Friends, it is simple:
I am the kind of man,
who, ordered to kill another,
is hesitant: even a blow that stuns
is beyond my power.
When the crowd gets carried away,
ready to do anything to anyone,
following, alas, whatever torrent
comes to them that day, I differ.
Retaliation angers me,
and my strange mood
favors the angel and not the tiger,
John Brown and not Pizarro.
I shamelessly blame those
who order large-scale massacres.
Blood does not taste good to me.
When Order gets flagrant and full
of itself, howls, drools, and bites,
this seems to my thinking self
more like Disorder. This joust
of monsters, hideous,
is a tournament without pleasure.
Cissey against Duval, Rigault against Vinoy.
I hate to watch them compete in cruelty.
When barefoot beggars act this way,
and princes accustomed to ride
in their own carriages cannot
control themselves, I have
the very bad taste of weighing
one on my left hand, one in my right,
and throwing both down
into the same storm-drain.
Suppose there is a lady brute in charge
whom one can address informally,
and another, high-born, with all
those titles before her name,
expecting a bow and proper address,
equal in villainy to her peasant rival —
I confess, if I must choose,
crime dyed in mud offends me less
than crime embroidered in gold.
I excuse the ignorant.
I do not hesitate to say
that poverty can cause
an attack of delirium,
that we should not push the poor
to the edge of despair
that when dictators commit
the blackest of crimes
the poor are pulled along
like grains of sand before a gale.
One man thinks his role is nothing
when he follows a dictator’s whim,
yet as the sand grains, caught by wind,
enter some terrible simoun,
it comes to life to burn and kill,
in a mob, an atom of the abyss.
In his clenched fist is the disaster,
but the wind is behind it,
and back of that, the despot.
In such a fight, if one must strike,
smite those above you, not below!
Even if Rigault acts like a jackal,
it is wrong to become a hyena.
What now? Send thousands to Devil’s Island
to swelter in a penal colony,
enough to populate a Paris suburb!
Citizens one day, convicts the next.
Four I can name, who are despicable.
I hate Ile-aux-Pins and I loathe Mazas.
Johannard is cruel and Serisier infamous.
Aside from villainy, there’s more.
You could hang them, but don’t you grasp
the darkness that dwells
inside the soul
of the worker who has no bread
despite its being the height of summer,
whose sees his new-born child go pale,
as naked as an earth-worm,
who struggles and suffers, and gets
only hunger as his pay-check,
who has nothing in his head now
except the idea that he is oppressed,
who, seeing a splendid palace
wants to smash it, as if
in doing so, he crushes a tyrant?
Can you put numbers on this passion?
How many were unemployed last year?
Just try to wrap your mind
around this man’s dilemma.
He is not Job; his patience
has worn to the nub of wrath.
Believe whatever you want,
if that is convenient, but I,
my friends, attend my conscience.
When I hear someone screaming,
“Kill him! Knock him over! Stab his guts!”
I go so far as to think it wrong
to gather a mob to kill at random.
I am surprised that anyone is able,
in this age in which we find ourselves,
in Paris, to go and seize a dozen citizens
and say, they might have been fleeing
from a nearby fire, a fire they set themselves,
and then, without ado, to line them up
en masse against a wall.
The machine-gun does the job —
how dainty that is! — leaving
to the lowest of the low the dirty work
of throwing them alive or dead
into a pit, with quicklime, this
is what we have come to, Paris?
I recoil at the brink of this doleful ditch.
Look! They are down there! Piled up,
one on top of another, engulfed
a tangle of chalky corpses, men,
and women and even —ah! — a child!
Do you think some paving stones
will cover over such bloody spots?
How many steps from the pock-marked wall
to the open ditch where the dying fell?
Around this black, mass-grave my soul
would hover and beat its wings.
The groans of the children
would draw me to it,
and death itself would lift the flagstone,
as voices from beneath the earth
implore their due rites, and passage.
Guilty, innocent, ignorant and mad,
a babel of voices calling out.
You feel them moving beneath your feet,
and the rhythm of your walk
marks time to the groans of the badly-killed.
This is why I, the vanquished one,
I, the proscribed poetic imbecile,
I say I would offer shelter if I could,
to all the vanquished,
to all the banished ones.
If I could, I would take in everyone!
I am odd to the point
that when I see my people fall,
I do not shake my fist at them;
I am of this dangerous party
which gives mercy.
At sunrise tomorrow, my door
will be open, because all glory passes,
to those who tasted victory and are now
defeated. Cicero, come in! Gracchus, welcome!
A side of me, indulgent, gentle, and sad,
beckons towards me the suppliant hand
that has fled, and would starve in the shadows.
Am I a madman? Weak am I, and yet
against the strong I thrown down my gauntlet.
I cry: Have mercy! This makes me a bandit?
“Down with this monster! And in our own house!”
“How dare he think he belongs among us!”
“What gives him the right to call himself
our neighbor, to occupy a house, to pass
as one of us because he pays taxes?” “No more!
He’ll get no peace while hiding here. Each day
he remains, our State is in danger. In short,
we must evict him, lock, stock, and barrel.”
They go on like this. So, I am a scoundrel.
When all around you are mad,
it does no good to invoke Reason.
It seems I am inherently a criminal.
No proof is required.
If I remove a quaking lamb
from the ravening teeth
of a monstrous she-wolf,
and stand it on its feet again,
is this proof of my criminal nature?
Is robbing a beast of its prey a sin?
What makes me unreformable, a menace?
Let’s see. First, I believe,
that everyone has the right to asylum.
I believe in the People, I even cling
to the idea of a merciful God.
This makes the clergy shake with fear;
the thought of me gives senators
bad dreams at night.
Horror! That I proclaim a law
in their hearing, that no one ought
to go around slitting others’ throats!
Who is this wretch who tries to shame
the common lust for fiery vengeance?
Look at him! His head may bow
with age and grief, but he has no anger.
He professes not to hate anyone at all.
Very well, if this is how I stand accused,
my hands are out, palms up. So what?
Are these the things you accuse me of?
My confessions are there for all to see.
What else do you think I write all day?
Out of a thousand grains of wheat I put
aside only the harmful tares, so that
the bread of man is clean and wholesome.
(If evil there is, we still must not
burn down the granary to stop it.)
Honey may heal a wound, while gall does not,
and in fraternity the highest end is served.
Things are in the hands of destroyers.
I would rather that builders go on
with the great work of building up.
You can pile up virtues like army medals,
but charity is better than all the rest.
When those who yesterday
marched off in power,
lay wounded, bandaged, and dejected,
it is Pity whose gaze does not avert
at the mouth of suffering’s abyss,
and I would make this plaid-clad virtue
who nurses and mends so like a servant
into the queen she is entitled to be.
To understand is to forgive.
Does handing a platoon guns, and bellowing,
“Go over there and shoot those prisoners!”
solve anything? Some, only boys, mere boys,
should be at their desks and learning Latin,
and now we shudder to think of them.
As I keep writing and saying such things, my hosts
respond, “Such opinions cannot be tolerated.”
A Mr. Ribeaucourt refers to me, not by my name,
but simply as the offending “individual.” So as
“you know who I mean,” I am further hounded.
Virgil is even cited, as when Mount Aetna quaked,
and “beasts uttered human speech.” There’s more:
one night, beneath one harried roof, I sat,
protecting two small children
and four womenfolk,
from an invading horde,
who shouted out curses infamous,
demanding our death that night.
We got through that. They slunk away.
Now, who is the bandit?
Me, certainly!
There was no reprieve for us. By day,
in front of my battered threshold,
a crowd in white gloves
formed a merry circle.
They shouted: “Too little! The work
was left unfinished! Tear down this house!
Let’s set it on fire!” Hours of this.
The crowd is right, of course.
The good citizens of Brussels
cannot be mistaken.
If the miscreant inside refused
the honor of being killed,
we had might as well do him in.
Good order and public decency demand
we go in and beat this assassin to death.
An old man, he is worse than he appears.
He deserves to have his house in flames;
after all he burned the Louvre, didn’t he?
That was quite a feat, to burn down Paris,
while I never set foot out of Brussels.
I’m right up there with the generals
who starve out cities and line up
unruly citizens for firing squads!
[Honor to Mouravief and glory to Galifet!] [1]
They cast their stones at me,
and now they drive me to the border.
Well done, Your Highness. Law and order.
I still possess the first moments of dawn;
mine the majesty of the whirling stars.
Ghibelline against Guelph,
Yorck against Lancaster,
Capulet, Montague, what do they matter?
What do their crow-cries do to me
when I have the whole deep firmament?
There is room in one soul
for all the world’s vaults,
and their eternal occupants.
Take the ground from beneath my feet,
but not one quill
from one blue feather
of the wings that lift me,
not one of these have I surrendered.
The despots range everywhere,
atrocious and ugly.
Profit makes one a master,
the other his slave.
Pure dawn, good air,
free from the pull of the abyss;
out of great balance, great equity.
Let’s go there, let’s live for once.
Dare to dream and immerse yourself
in the chaste red of the sublime sky,
in the shade of its sacred modesty,
a refuge at last.
A little suffices. God made the banquet,
which bloated men convert to an orgy.
The thinker, sated on a sole delight,
pushes himself away from the table of tyrants.
He sees his own god in deep, clear places,
and, pale and bleeding after countless trials,
he feels welcome in a more solemn depth.
He goes on. His conscience is always there;
nothing contradicts this compass that has
the Ideal as its magnet;
borders, obstacles, boundaries are gone;
above it all, he levitates. In vain
above him the gloomy fatality
stretches its sinister web whose threads
are woven from hatred, pain, and exile.
He does not complain. Above the mire
of the filthy peat-bog, he can stand proud;
it has not soiled him. Losing the world,
he laughs, since Heaven offers itself,
hospitable shelter, to those who can,
and will, leap over the abyss to freedom.
He has tamed fate, he has braved evil,
he has pierced the veils;
now, hunted by men,
he hides himself in plain sight,
a star among its gleaming brothers.
“Mr. Hugo is enjoined by His Majesty
to leave the kingdom of Belgium.”
Very well, I am going.
[1] Footnote: Gaston Alexandre Auguste, Marquis de Galliffet, Prince de Martigues (Paris, 23 January 1830 – 8 July 1909), was a French general, notorious for his role in the repression of the Paris Commune.
Mouravief, or Muravyov, a family line of Russian military figures. One of them, Nikolai (1794-1866), prevailed in the Crimean War at the Battle of Kars, whose defenders were driven to the last extremities of starvation during a siege.
