A Woman Told Me This

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, "June 1871”

 

One who survived the massacres,
     a woman, arrived and told me this:

“I had to run away.
I held my little daughter tight
against my breast as I ran.
She screamed, and I knew her cries
would give away our hide-out.

 

Imagine darting to and fro
with a baby only two months old,
loud as a siren though she
was as weak as a house-fly.

 

I kissed her mouth to quiet her.
And still, she howled.
Even her moans were audible.
She wanted her mother’s breast.
I had no milk to give.

 

A whole night passed like this.
I crouched behind a driveway gate.
I wept. I saw the shining
rifle stocks go back and forth.
I heard my husband’s name
demanded at every kicked-in door.

 

Perhaps I slept a little.
Dawn was near. No sooner
had some expectant rooster
than I tried to raise myself,
the babe still swaddled close.

 

And then I knew. No breath,
the child as stiff as an armful
of kindling. I touched:
my cold hand on a colder brow.

If they killed me right then,
I could care less. One hand
around the dead child, one hand
thrust out the closed-up gate,

and I was on the street. My eyes
must have looked like those
of a lunatic. Some others,
about their own business,
as desperate as mine, perhaps,

in the not-quite-breaking day,

knew me and called my name;
a few reached out
     to give me aid.
I hurtled on. I ran.
The way to the countryside
was open, unguarded.

 

God help me, I don’t remember.
It’s just as if I walked in blindness.
I could never find that spot again
if I tried a thousand times, the place
where I dug with own hands a grave,
among tree-roots a shallow niche,

a hole just big enough to shove her in.
Oh, there was a fence, that’s all
I can bring to mind, a fence
angled behind and around me.

 

I came to my senses. My feet alone
had carried me there. My hands
were black with blood and soil.
A priest came along. He raised me up,
looked down at my inept burial
and stood and wept with me.
Then shots rang out,
close, and then closer still,
and each of us fled
    in opposite directions.
He had never asked my name,
     nor I, his.

Marched to Her Death through the Streets of Paris

 by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

IX

 

A woman they imprisoned — who knows
her name? — is on the street outside.
Not free, no not at all. They march
her to her execution now. Let’s watch!

 

This promenade of shame
     may take a while.

Her injuries have not yet healed.
She limps along, with who knows what
unsaid confessions on her darkened brow.
Soldiers on either side, and one to push
if she resists — hand-shackles prevent
her lashing out, her feet too lame to run.

She must endure the crowds’ shaking fists.
Their curses seem to roll right off;
beneath her tangled hair, one eye
glares out the way a caged beast regards
tormenters it has grown familiar with.
Her other eye is swollen shut; a bruise
runs down from ear to chin. A witch
she seems, or a surly brute or beast.
All view her through a haze of hate.

 

She is moved about
     like some chessboard pawn,
forward, then turned, and forward again,
for a maximum audience.
A religious procession
     could not be better planned.
What was her crime? What class
of category of offender describe her?
Was there a formal indictment
that listed her offence? Who knows?
Charges fly back and forth amid
the terrible smoke of Paris. Ask her —
has she a clue why she was arrested?

 

They say, “If a man does such-and-such,”
that is a crime, no questions asked.
Is it as blunt as that? Look at an act,
and see the spirit of the thing —
famine, rumors and some bad advice,
a call to arms from the loudest mouth,
some popular bandit so monstrous proud
people love him and do anything he says —
that’s all it takes for some dark agent
to turn and distort a person’s good nature.

 

This swell of violence, once entered on,
this adventure goes one way only,
driven by instinct down an inclined plane,
backed by bad luck’s fatal hurricane,
wrath upon wrath compounding depravity,
hurling itself in fury into civil war,
revealing beneath a well-lit city,
a tangled black forest with no way out.
The Cyclops eye of want and exclusion
provokes a mass howl of envy:
“Others have everything, and I have nothing!”

 

Thinking is dangerous when you sit in rags.
Evil springs up from an empty belly.

You wander why a man becomes terrible,
when he sits at a table that has no bread.
A neighborhood the mice desert
is bound to be a place of wrath.

 

She is made to cross an open square.
Crowds show no mercy as she passes through.
The well-off have their triumph, already
they have enjoyed the thrill of punishment.
Do their tears of joy blind them to her?
Is her bloody silence their kind of victory,
a silence heard all the way out
     to the feasting at Versailles?

 

On every block, the passersby laugh
to see the prisoner stumble by.
A swarm of children chases behind;
their mocking bright cries assault her.
Bubble of bitter spittle line her mouth.
Deaf to their insults, she flinches not.
Various crimes are shouted out,
     a gelid raven-cloud of blame,
fading out only
     when her Gorgon locks pass
     and the corner is turned.

 

Now, in a better neighborhood,
a crowd of women emerge from a park:
nursemaids and courtesans,
schoolgirls and nuns and seamstresses.
They open umbrellas against the sun
and follow along, their eyes
     dark stars of ferocity.
Look! How amusing! Let’s follow!
How close can we get to the execution?

 

A house-door opens — a betrothal party
pours to the sidewalk to see the show.
Look at those diamonds! Who would have thought
there was a war on? A spinster pokes
with her umbrella toward the prisoner’s face.
There! She’s bleeding! Serves her right!

 

I pity the wretch; I condemn the crowds.
I recoil in horror at this day-lit Paris,
as she-dogs come slathering forth
to bite and maim a wild she-wolf.

 

Their laughter is worse
     than her firing squad.

 

The Arsonist

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1870”

One strides before me with a flaming brand.
I call him back. He turns and faces me. I ask,
“Are you the one who just burned down
     the library of the Louvre?”
He wipes his brow, puts down the torch,
extends a fraternal hand toward me.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “That fire you see,
was nearly all my work.” My hand
does all it can to not become a fist.

“But that’s a crime!” I shout. “Incredible!
A crime against yourself, an infamy.
In that black smoke, the ray of your soul
has been extinguished. The very torch
you held so proudly up is canceled
by the horror of what you have done.
What have you burned in this mad rage?
Your property! Your honor! Your dowry!
The whole of your inheritance!”

He would race on; I stop him.
Hands on his shoulders, man-to-man,
I must, I must, I must
     get through to him somehow.

He waits me out, he knows enough
to understand respect
for a distraught old poet, at least.
So I do my best to explain.

“Some of those books
were your masters’ worst enemies.
They worked to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
What is a library but an act of faith
that darker times invest against the coming sun?
By telling the truth, they bear witness for us.

“What seems to you a tomb to desecrate,
is a living repertory, a mass of truths,
out down in masterpieces so fine
that lightning and clarity spark out from them.
Out of the centuries the speak; they tell
of ancient men, in histories that spell
a warning to the future. And in the poets,
thoughts that first came and never ceased
to echo, live on and on. Bibles die here,
lost in the abyss with a thousand authors,
Homers and Aeschyluses, Shakespeares and Jobs,
far off the upper-shelf horizon; they led the way
to Molière, Voltaire and Kant.
Into Reason itself you cast your wretched,
flaming torch, the human spirit up in smoke!

“Books liberate men. Have you forgotten this?
One book can stand above the human fray.
It glows with its own light. Because it shines
its pure white beam of reason, the scaffolds
fall, wars stop, and famine is averted.
A book well-read ends slavery, calls home
the outcasts whom ignorance banished.

“Just open a book. Plato, Milton, Beccaria.
Prophetic texts! Dante, or Shakespeare, or Corneille;
the great soul that dwells within them
awakens in you. Dazzled, you feel transformed.
You tread their steps and think their thoughts,
as though you had been, all along, one person.
Reading makes you serious, thoughtful, and kind.

“You are quite young. Perhaps you doubt ideas
can leap from a page into your own being.
The great men past await your company,
the same way dawn gold-lights a cloister.
Ideas plunge deep into your understanding.
Their warm rays soothe and quicken you.
Your hesitating soul gains confidence.

“At last you recognize yourself as good,
and capable of better — old prides and furies,
evils and prejudices, even the obeisance
you once gave to kings and emperors
melt off like snow at the start of spring,
all because knowing pushes fear aside.

“Then freedom comes.
     Yours were this light and glory,
yours between those walls of stone,
and it’s you who have blacked them out!
All that you dreamt of ever being —
some book in there could show the way.
Books read and thought about
     sever the Gordian knots
that error and truth were tangled in.
Doctor, guide, and guardian, a book!
One would have healed your hatred,
     another your madness —
Not yours! Not now! And it is all your fault!

The book is your wealth. Where but from here
do knowledge, law, truth, virtue, and duty,
progress, and reason, dispel delirium?
How could you have done this? Answer me!”

This is, in so many words,
     what I try to tell him.
The Arsonist regards me. He looks
half-mad, half-god. My words
have stunned him. As eye to eye
he keeps my gaze, he answers:

“No one ever taught me
     how to read.”

I Have No Anger

by Brett Rutherford

After Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

I have no anger, and that surprises you.
Your tiny cough is supposed to sound
like thunder. You growl, and puff away
to make your pale lantern flare, and I
am supposed to feel lightning at my heels.

For all the trouble you take
     to get my attention,
I scarcely notice you’re there.

You, self-styled villain, you sense
there is something in me that forgives you,
and that is like a slap to your face.
In fact, you are already punished
     for the mere act of wanting
          so much to hurt another.

It’s pitiful. Worse yet,
     when in a gang you plot
another’s downfall,
     and attempt to achieve it,
even the honor of a kick is denied you.
That hurts:
     the insignificance of hatred.
Not even a slap in the face in return
for all that plotting — imagine that!

Sometimes the outcast falls, and still
does not acknowledge what was done,
or by whose conniving he was attacked.
He acts as though nothing has happened.

And if the thinker appears to be disturbed,
it is not about you. He has the business
of the universe on this mind, you know.

Will I be irritated, then?
     I doubt I even know
the names of the ones attacking me.

We pensive outcasts
     may seem uncultured.
Before we get angry
     on hearing an insult,
we stop to look down
     at what is beneath us:

down there, among the ants,
     that buzzing sound,
a blur of eye-stalks and tentacles,
tiny, segmented minions
     with a hundred legs.
These are the ones
who have declared war on us,
a centipede conspiracy!

 

 

 

In Good Company (A Letter)

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

Dear lady,
     I say that what I did was good.
And I was punished for it.
That seems to be the order of things.
You, who were so valiant,
     calm and charming,
in the terrible siege and the grim ordeal,
braving this hideous war
     and the hurricane of crime
          that followed it,
beauteous soul
     that heaven made sister
of another lofty soul, my friend,
wife of that proud and gentle thinker
     whose guest I was;
you, who always knew when to give
     support, and how,
you should see what has happened to me!

 

To name a few events:
You saw me return to France,
     almost an apotheosis,
now you see me chased away, reviled.
From that to this, and in less than a year.
Things change so suddenly,
     and for the worse.
Rome, Athens, and Zion endured such times.
Paris has the same right to save itself.
In other places, they have lacked the nerve.
Which ones? No matter. Spare Montague,
and Capulet calls it a crime. Yet Capulet,
given the stronger place, abuses it.

In the same kind of war of factions,
I am now an old buzzard, a criminal.

So be it. Today they insult me, the very
ones who cheered me on a year ago.

Maybe the purpose
     of my late-in-life acclaim,
was to be toppled and taught a lesson.
Not much of a triumph, eh? Does one
in its flimsiness warrant the other’s cruelty?

Madame, I think I have a heart like yours,
the same as those around you, whose minds
sustained by one another, are never dark.
Does the robe of the old outcast fit me best?
Can you bear again to see me this way?
Defending the people, and fighting off
the priests: I would do it again.
Isn’t the abyss a beautiful place to be,
considering the good company?
I am down here with Barbes and Garibaldi,
and I think you like me better since my fall.

So This Is Exile

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     After Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”

 

V

The narrow path is not an easy one.
Ah! Just try it for a while. It takes
a special daring to prove the crowd wrong,
to be upright in one’s own soul
     and stay that way,
to guard the universal sense of right
when all around you trample and bruise it.

When one who tries this is declared “outlaw,”
the outlaw is rewarded with as much
of this thing called exile that the law allows.
You do not exile just anyone you please.
Not house-arrest and not imprisonment,
this punishment is inexpressible,
a terrible and almost holy thing.

 

How many will come and stare
at the front door of your remembered home?
How many, from afar, will squint and scan
the eaves of your old roof, and ask, “Where is he?”
Will there even be an acceptable
reply, that is not a lie, or an evasion?
Imagine him in some desert place, alone,
or crowded in where every step is watched
and no one is allowed to say his name?
What’s on his mind, in a place
where his native tongue is seldom spoken?
The flower he picked with a childish hand?
A dark street corner that one furtive glance
imbued with a spell that would never quite fade?
Old times and lessons learned in school?
Old dawns, fields that were greener then
with far more sonorous birds?
A certain blend of sky and cloud
that curtained one place, and no other?
To learn, by hear-say only
of those who died in his absence,
their bedside unattended, tombs
he would never see as moss
and vines erase familiar names.
This is exile.

 

Exile is a water-torture, infamous,
a timid executioner’s delight,
pangs to the heart
as granite of duty,
rings with the falling drops
and erodes away.

 

Exile is a compound-interest penalty
inflicted on the innocent and just,
so under Tarquin, or Augustus Caesar,
or Bonaparte, condemned men die
because they are innocent and just.

 

Exile, a place of shadow and longing,
is a dimly-seen mist, an expanding silence
made up of stolen glimpses,
     snatches of song and bird-call,
a dark wood glimpsed, a reef
that is there one day and gone the next,
     a breath, a sourceless sound,
all closing in upon a pensive brow.
Oh!  Tell him his homeland still exists!
(This being true is the most terrible fact of all.)

 

By an invisible thread our homeland holds us,
     the one thing which, once lost,
retains its charm for us forever.
The fields of one place only
     seem to belong to us,
its trees not shaped like any others,
     its riverbanks, its lowering sky —
this place alone brings back our steps.

 

Homeless, we shall forever wander,
and if some foreign king should banish us,
     we slough it off,
for banishment is not an exile.

Exile is a form of death,
     taken in slices of clock and calendar,
some letters unsent,
     and many more undelivered.
Alive at his desk with pen in hand,
his words must issue forth so fast
the censors cannot catch and cancel them.

Each exile, unique and solitary,
is given a chance for immortal glory.
As for the kings and tyrants,
full half or more of them are dust,
names scarcely recalled
in the cavalcade of idiots.

I Have No Episcopal Palace

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

I have no episcopal palace in town.
I have no stipend or government salary.
My humility is not offered up a throne
within a temple of stone. No stern
Swiss guards stand watch on either side
of me. I do not go daily forth
beneath a four-plumed canopy,
watched by the wide-eyed imbeciles.
France, even now in its abysmal low,
is still for me defined
by the labor of one great people
from whom the great law emerges.

 

I hate to see my nation bound and gagged,
or covered all over with dainty fleur-de-lys.
I do not tell church visitors
     they haven’t seen Christ
until they’ve paid to see the Van Dyck painting.
My holy place suffices to itself.
Churchwardens and beadles frown not there;
trustees, custodians, and clerks
     neither annoy nor admonish me.
Deacons and vicars I pass on by.
I have no Saints, nor even part of one
     stiffed into a reliquary,
nor under lock and key some flask
     purporting a miracle.
My robe is not festooned with diamonds,
and no one pays me by the line for prayers.

 

At court, I am not really presentable.
It baffles me that dowagers admire
some fellow begging pennies with a wooden bowl.
With no gold cope around my neck,
nor a gleaming miter atop my head,
I have no good women hand-kissing me.
I may have had a glimpse of heaven once;
no fold of bleating lambs it seemed.
The way in was narrow, and I had no key.
No one calls me Monseigneur.
I am out in the fields a lot; incense
is not the whiff you would get from me.
My dresser has no purple stockings.

 

Yes, I have made mistakes,
     each one an act sincerely made.
I keep hypocrisy apart from me:
the things I say are what I think.
I put imprisoned Socrates
     right next to Jesus on his cross.

When, hunted like a beast, a man
cries out, I save him if I can.
If he was my enemy,
     must he remain forever so?
I despise Basil, and disdain Scapin.

 

I give the hungry child some bread.
I fought for what was true, and good,
and honest; and in the howling storm
I suffered two decades’ exile.
God willing, I will start again
tomorrow. And when that voice in me
says “Forward!”, that way I go.
The wind may go against me, but I go.
Because I do my duty thus,
the Bishop of Ghent, bless his heart,
writes here in today’s newspaper
that if I am not indeed a madman,
I should be called a bandit.

 

Holy Water Like a Hail of Stones

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

IV

Was it something I said?
When from my house I offered up
the concept of clemency,
I brought upon myself this town’s
idea of a serenade.
What a sweet romance they bring me,
a chorus whose boisterous refrain
is “Kill him! Kill him now!”

 

The morning news is full of it,
the priestly journals especially
fill columns with a frightening mess
of hateful invective — This man,
who calls himself a poet, of all things,
dares to take pity on a fleeing enemy!

 

The audacity! He takes
our own Christian welcome literally.
He dares us! The ones above
are angry over this;
even the middle class gets riled
(foam bubbles forth
     from their clenched lips).

 

The squires and sacristans
run in the streets like dog-packs.
A waving censer becomes a David sling;
its missile cracks my tiles.
They pray, and from the ends
of bottle-brushes the Holy Water
descends on me like hailstones.
I am so thoroughly exorcised
that they have almost killed me
(or so they would have it,
imagining me belly-full
of demons and mortal sins).

 

In short, and by the grace of God,
I am expelled. To make their point,
the rabble are now shouting
“Get out of town!” adds to the rain
with paving-stones hurled hard
against my closed-up window shutters.
So— man stones! So many styles,
a mason’s gazetteer of Brussels.
I am dazzled as the projectiles fly —
not since the Crusades
has the sky been so assaulted
with rock and point and pike!

 

My name is called, repeated.
When I do not show myself,
an alarm bell rings incessantly
but fails to summon a single
constable. More crowds arrive.

“Brigand!” they shout.

(Has this hand ever threatened another?)
“Incendiary! Arsonist!” they howl.
(It is all I can do to light a fireplace!)
“Assassin! Assassin!” — that hissing lie.
(No death has ever come from my hand!)

 

Now they are gone,
     and we are safe inside.
The notable battle colors us:
they, so true and good, as white
     as a murder of crows, and me,
as black as a solitary, gliding swan.

Some Kind of Monster

 by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

Some want to call me a chimera,
that impossible monster compiled
of bits and scraps of various beasts,
and why? Because I remain fraternal.
To dream of a Europe as free
as the far-flung states of America,
to demand fairness, the examination
of facts and science; indeed, to reason,
makes other say you live in clouds,
your words as meaningless as wind-gusts;
who, witnessing a vast
     and harsh triumph,
refuses to exult, raising his hand
against the worse of two evils,
to lessen on every side the misery.
What am I, then, a monster,
unwilling as I am to sweep aside
the unhappy multitude, to offer up
to butchery one man to another,
or to deny asylum to those condemned to die.

 

What kinds of beasts am I amalgam’d from,
refusing to press upon the weak and blind,
and, as I have a forgiving nature,
will they write me out of evolution’s tree?

 

If I say that we owe the just
     and common law to all,
excepting not the brigands
or the bandits who lurk
at every crossroads, then I
myself am called a criminal!

 

Let’s just ignore the critics —
whose pens hold a lot of brains
but very little courage — and fight.
The dark time of our trial has come.
Our mettle shall be tested now.
Well you might plead your age,
old Veteran of many wars
(I am an old man, too, remember!)
If we are old, so then, we are old.
We must carry on, even when faced
     with denial and failure.

 

The kindest of histories will only say
you acted because your mind was gone.
Others will curse, and mock, and scold.
Get ready for insults, and boos, and pelted stones.
Like me, you shall be hunted down
by the always-ready criminal
slanderers. After the stoning,
banishment. But who in the end
shall history praise, and who condemn?

 

The Hermit's House

 

by Brett Rutherford

So he has raised himself a house—

a squat and brooding carpenter it was

who strung these clapboards in their gambreled

eaves! The twisted spines of elder trees

lean on its walls suggestively, a clutch

of branches fit to snap the heads of birds—

whatever the month they issue the brittleness

of dried-up leaves, to somersault

the wagon-rutted walk, and pile

in bottomless heaps on his untended

lawn. That the gate remains open

is not so much a mark of tenancy

as hingeless ruin, and though

a charcoal breath and sputterings

emerge at the chimney top,

the lampless porch and broken steps

alike suggest abandonment. But here,

thrown up in rustless height to a slit

of reluctant sun, the postman’s box

opens its mouth at the haunted edge,

spells out his name, encourages messages,

a beacon of normalcy at Usher’s door,

beyond whose mundane purpose his house

broods low like a gorged and sleeping owl.

It is only a house among houses,

a curious blotch on a cheery Victorian street.

 

There is no tarn, no hound,

no family crypt,

and yet these swollen clapboards tell

of darker dreams in eldritch books within.

The panes admit no sunlight, I see,

but the moon and the Pole Star’s rays

beam down through cobwebbed corridors.

One window’s barred, the room beyond

an empty blackness, a hermit cell

whose necromantic occupant

has razored off his eyelids

to watch in perpetual wakefulness

for those who will come from the outer orbs,

streaming down ravenous to slay and feed

on all that lives — save him alone.

 

When all this happens, he plans to serve

narcotic tea and delicate pastries

to the arrived new gods. Amid the nods

and smiles, some wry jest he offers up

will prompt a water of eye, a clap

of one tentacle against another,

and he will take his place among them.

Everywhere I Looked, Blood Flowed

by Brett Rutherford

 

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

1

Scattered amid the shadows,
an immense massacre occurred.
Everywhere I looked, blood flowed,
and everyone was killing
someone, it seemed. For what?
Oh, just to be in the business
     of murder wholesale.

 

What misery! Like anyone
who witnessed such horrors I raised
     my voice, I spoke;
having no means to snap
the swords, or send the bullets back
into the guns that fired them,
I had only my tongue, my pen.

 

In ages past, men who spoke up
and stood their ground, made history
(Harlay for France in the Elizabethan
court, Bâville whose edicts abolished
torture, even the war-like Mont-Revel, [1, 2, 3]
     but here and now
dark ignorance and cowardice
redouble the darkness already here.

 

All I affirmed was that some thought
should precede the order to shoot someone,
especially when fire is multiplied
against a line of civilians. To spare
the mad, or even the reckless ones,
shows to those we have overcome
that we are still their brothers —
is this not just and wise? To be
one people, we must get along.

 

I remind you that Someone
     is watching what we do
(and note is surely taken!),
and that the future brightens up
when we show to one another
our natural affections. Why sow
the seed of hate when all that sprouts
from its black husk is even worse?

 

I declared that calm could come to us,
impossible as that seemed, by slow degrees.
I said that the antidote
     to assassination
is not to become an assassin,
the sack of guilt round-robining
from one party to another,
that the answer to the murder of one
was not to machine-gun a score
of hapless women and children.

 

Think of the shame we have brought
to the valiant soldiers coming home,
to turn the guns they shouldered out with
into the tools of execution!

 

Sadly, I droop. My pen falls out
of my shaking hand. This shroud —
who ordered one big enough to wrap
a dozen executed men at once?
Was every single captive guilty,
and must all pay for the crimes of a few?

 

No matter, you say. Chastise
all Paris, admonish the people,
     and terrify
the word into heeding orders!
I answer back: hurl no one
    by chance into the abyss.

 

2

So now it is my turn, it seems,
to be the object of public hate.
The pulpit hurls anathema at me,
     shaking their Bibles aloft;
anyone, seeing me pass, feels free
     to grab and hurl a stone;
children assemble mud-pies to throw
    and garden refuse is reserved
          for special insults.
I thought I heard wolves; bad dogs,
      unleashed, were at my heels.
From all those shouts you’d think
     I was some vanquished tyrant.

 

When I have seen fists,
     back-handed, clenched,
with me as their object of anger?

Some friends I spied among the crowd,
     who once drank honest wine
at my table — their backs are turned.

Eyes that once gladly greeted me,
     now turn away.

 

Killers know when to smile, and clowns
     have a ferocious side, too.
Those fawning followers of the triumphal car
      danced for their supper yesterday,
          but now cut throats.
Their fluted champagne glasses
     clot with blood, now.
These fierce, elegant men,
     like Haynan and Tavanne,
raise menacing sticks festooned
      with black flies,
whose larva hatched from open graves.
Judge Lynch, King Bomba, Mingrat the priest
shouted and called me murderer,
and a Judas hissed “Traitor” into my ear.

 

Notes:

1.    Christoph de Harlay (1570-1615) was French ambassador to the court of Britain’s Elizabeth I.

2.    Several generations of Mont-Revels served France as military leaders, and it is not certain which one Hugo had in mind. Claude François de la Baume, comte de Mont-Revel (1619), or Ferdinand de la Baume (1603-1678), comte de Montrevel. More research needed on this note.

3.    Bâville. Wikipedia: “Chrétien François de Lamoignon de Bâville, also written as Chrétien François de Lamoignon de Basville (1735–1789) was a French statesman and magistrate. Lamoignon was the Keeper of the Seals of France from 8 April 1787 to 14 September 1788. In this position, he was responsible for issuing the Edict of Versailles in 1787, which granted civil status and freedom of worship to France's Protestants, and for the abolition of judicial torture.”

 

Fear of Falling (Revised)

by Brett Rutherford

The man who would be king
avoids high parapets,
hill-tops and cliffs,
lest one swift wind,
or an assisting hand
should tip him over,

a parachute, twice-checked,
is always in reach
of his small hands
when his private jet zooms
from place to place.

In a cold sweat, he dreams
of falling from the stratosphere,
down,     down,     down,
not into some calm sea,
but into the very spot
     where a sink-hole opens,
so eager is Hell to have him. 

 

Preliminary French version:

PEUR DE TOMBER

L'homme qui veut devenir roi
évite les hauts parapets,
les sommets des collines
      et les falaises,

de peur qu'un vent rapide
     ou une main secourable
devrait le renverser,
un parachute,
     doublement vérifié,
est toujours à portée
     de ses petites mains
lorsque son jet privé
virevolte d'un endroit à l'autre.

En sueur froide,
     il rêve de tomber
     de la stratosphère,
     plus bas,
          plus bas,
               plus bas,
non pas dans une mer calme,
mais dans l'endroit précis
où s'ouvre un gouffre;

L'enfer tremble pour le recevoir.

 

Expelled from Belgium

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.