Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
By dint of insulting the valiant and the just,
By dint of flattering august betrayals,
By dint of being abject and fitting heaps
Of hideous sophisms to the blackest attacks,
This man hopes to attain greatness; he wears himself out
Trying to pass for a villain, he who is but a scoundrel.
This pedant aspires to the rank of rogue.
This rhetorician, worm of earth and of letters, clown
Who harps on us and at whom we have always laughed,
Tries to be promoted accomplice of great crimes.
He mocked art, and that is quite simple in truth,
Ugliness is blind and deaf to beauty.
But being an idiot can no longer suffice him,
He is jealous of the tiger to whom fear says: sire!
He wants to be himself a senator of the forests;
He wants to have, like Montluc or Verres,
His cavern or his cage with bars and traps
In the enormous menagerie of satraps.
Ah, you are wasting your time and your trouble, clown!
Aliboron does not easily become Behemoth;
The burlesque is not easily sinister;
Were you a murderer, you would remain a pedant.
When those bloody beings whom you please to envy,
Mammons that Tacitus hates and Cuvier admires,
Are there, brigands and gods, one does not enter at once
Into their frightful and royal assembly.
To become historic! Impossible for you.
To leave simple contempt and count in dread,
You, never! Your low brow excludes that black plume.
Your lot is to be, young, inept; and, old, a dotard.
Toward true advancement you have not made a step;
You swell yourself, toad, but you do not grow;
If Myrmidon grew, it would be disorder;
You manage to crawl without managing to bite.
Nature has no strength to spend
To make you grow and to make you swell.
What then! Is she not impassive nature?
Because tadpoles, nourished on rot,
Wish to become dragons and caimans,
She would consent to these enlargements!
The worm would be a boa! The oyster would become the hydra!
Locust poisoned wine, and not cider;
Hell made Aretino terrible, and not Brusquet.
A runt can only miscarry. The lapdog
Strives to be a wolf, but it stops along the way.
Mysterious heaven surely makes cheetahs,
Proud brigand lions, worse than demons,
Elephants, bears; but it gives the mountains,
The caves and the woods to their bleak majesty!
But it needs space and boundless sands
And the immense desert to unmuzzle them!
The cat that wants to roar can only meow;
In vain it would copy the great lyrical jaguar
Wandering on the cliff by the shores of African seas,
And the horrible panther, and the spotted lynx;
God does not raise up to the dignity
Of crime, of fury and of villainy,
This wickedness made of pettiness.
The mountains, gables and walls of black granite
From which dreadful torrents fall, would laugh to see
This mouser prowling on their gutter.
A dwarf does not become a giant in the cloakroom.
To be a dangerous and powerful animal,
A great ray must fall upon you; evil
Does not always attain its hideous glory.
God tolerates, it is true, the black creation,
But those as flat as you are not granted their wish.
You will not manage, clown, to swell enough
To be a vast and somber python in the depths of the mire;
You will not equal those strange reptiles
Whose eye is like the air holes of hell.
You will remain ugly, weak and soft. The sun
Disdains the lizard, candidate crocodile.
Be a monstrous heart, but remain a vile soul.
Victor Hugo
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-anima-vilis-victor-hugo/