A translation of Victor Hugo's Ă Villequier for @riotstarruika, who won it in this year's Bishop Myriel fundraiser. Thanks for giving me the chance to translate this absolutely heartrending work! This is from Hugo's poetry collection "Les Contemplations"; Villequier is the town where his daughter Leopoldine - nineteen, newly married, and expecting her first child - drowned with her husband in a boating accident.
Now Paris, with its cobblestones and marble,
Its fog, its rooftops, is well out of sight;
Now that I stand beneath spreading trees,
I can muse on the beauty of the skies;
Now from that grief which made my soul so dark,
I emerge, a pale victor.
And I can feel again great Natureâs peace
Sinking into my heart;
Now, sitting beside the waters, I can feel
Moved by the proud horizon in its calm;
Can study profound truths within myself,
Can look at flowers blooming in the grass.
Now that - my God! - I have that lightless calm
I think I finally can
Turn my own eyes on the stone where I know
She sleeps in endless shade.
Now that these holy sights have made me soft,
Plains, forests, valleys, rocks, this silver stream
Knowing how small I am, how great your works,
I come to my senses facing their sheer size.
I come to you, Lord, father I have to trust,
Pacified, bringing you
The fragments of this heart full of your glory
Which you have pulverized.
I come to you, Lord! confessing you to be
Good, merciful, mild, sweet, o living God!
I accept that you alone know what you mean
And man is naught but a wind-shaken reed.
I say the tomb which closes on the dead
Opens the heavens wide,
And what we here below take for the end
Is only the beginning.
I accept, on my knees, that you alone
Possess the real, the true, the absolute
I accept that it is good, that it is just,
That my heart bled because God willed it so.
I will put up no fight, whatever comes
To me, through your high will.
Souls from grief to grief, as men from shore to shore
Pass to eternity.
We only ever see one side of things,
The other plunged in night and mystery.
Man bears the yoke and never learns the cause.
All that he sees is useless, fleeting, brief.
You ensure loneliness keeps coming back
No matter where he goes.
You did not choose he should have certainty,
Or joy, not here below.
He has some good - fate snatches it away.
Nothing is given him, in his fleeting days,
To let him build a shelter, and declare:
Here is my home, my field, all I love.
Nothing he sees will last more than a moment.
His age finds no support.
Because these things are so, so they must be,
I accept. I accept.
The world is dark, o God! The changeless music,
Is made of tears as much as songs of joy.
Man is an atom in the vast black void,
Night where the good rise and the wicked fall.
I know that you have other things to do
Besides lament with us.
And if a child dies, if its mother weeps,
Whatâs that to you?
I know the fruit falls, shaken by the wind
Birds lose their feathers, flowers lose their scent.
I know creation is a giant wheel
Which, as it turns, must crush someone or other.
The months, the days, the waves, the tears roll past
Under the bright blue sky.
It must be so. Grass grows and children die.
I know it, o my God!
Up in your heaven, beyond the sphere of cloud,
In the blue depths of still and sleeping space,
Maybe youâre making strange and unknown things,
In which manâs pain is an ingredient.
Maybe your nameless plans somehow must need
These lovely living things
To fly off, torn away by that black storm
Of happenstance.
Our shadowed fates are ruled by massive laws
Which nothing softens, nothing even slows.
You canât allow a sudden fit of grace
To throw the world in disarray, o God!Â
I beg you, God, to look upon my soul
And take a little thought.
Meek as a child, gentle as a wife,
I come and I adore.Â
Consider, also, that I have, since dawn
Labored and thought and struggled and moved on.
Explaining nature to the ignorant,
Illuminating all things with your light;
That in the face of hate and rage, I have
Done my work here below;
That I have not deserved reward like this;
And that I never could
Have guessed that you would let your conquering arm
Fall heavily upon my bending head;
And that you, seeing how my joys were small,
You would so quickly snatch my child back from me.Â
A soul so struck might be inclined to scream,     Â
And I, to curse your name,
And hurl my cries against you like a child
Skipping stones at the sea.
We doubt, my God, when we begin to hurt.
An eye grows blind when it has wept too much.
A creature plunged by grief in the abyss
Sees you no more, and cannot think on you.
There is no way that man, while sinking down
Into his agony,
Could have a spirit of dark serenity
Calm as the stars!
Today I am as helpless as a mother
And kiss your feet before your open skies.
I feel enlightened in my bitter pain,
Taking a good look at the universe.
Lord, I acknowledge that man has gone mad    Â
If he dares to complain.
I cease from casting blame. I will not curse.
But leave me here to weep.
Alas! Let tears flow, let them overflow.
It seems that this is what you made man for!
Let me curl up against this chilly stone
And say to my child, âCan you tell Iâm here?âÂ
Let me speak to her, leaning on her grave
At dusk, when all is hushed
As if my angelâs eyes might once again
Open inside her night.
Casting my yearning eyes across the past
With nothing here below to comfort me,
Iâm always looking back towards that moment
I saw her spread her wings and fly away.
That instant will be with me till I die.
That instant (useless tears)
When I cried âMy child, the child I had just now
What do you mean â sheâs gone?â
Donât be too angry when I get like this,
Oh God, the woundâs been bleeding for so long!
Pain is the strongest thing inside my soul,
My heart submits, but it cannot let go.
Donât be too angry! Our brows claimed by grief,
We mortals, ruled by tears
Cannot so easily withdraw our souls
From these great sorrows.
You see, we really do need our children.
Lord, if perhaps, some morning in your life
Despite your cares and pains and misery,
Despite the shadow cast on us by fate,
A child arrives, its sacred head so dear,
A little joyous thing,
So lovely that its coming might have opened
A door into the skies;
For sixteen years you watch your second self
Growing to lovely grace and to sweet reason;
You know the way this child whom you love
Brings daylight to your soul and to your home;
This child, the only joy that still remains
Of every dream youâve dreamed -
Consider it is really something sad
To see her go.
