Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
It is a strange emotion for my soul
To see the child, still in the woman’s arms,
Flower ignorant of winter, angel ignorant of Satan,
Shaking a rattle before Leviathan,
Approach gently terrible nature.
The beautiful blue seraphim who pass through the Bible,
Flying from some mysterious heaven unknown,
Have not a purer dawn in their eyes
And have not on their brow a holier flame
Than the innocent child laughing at the infamous monster.
Black sky! What a vast cry is that roaring!
When the beast, blind soul and foaming face,
Hurls afar, anywhere, into hostile space
Its mournful voice, like a dark projectile,
It is the whole dreadful gulf of forces without light
That howls; it is obscene and savage Astarte,
It is abject and cursed nature that rumbles;
It is Nemea, and Stymphalus, and deep Africa,
It is ferocious Atlas, it is Athos more haunted
By thunderbolts than a lake by summer flies;
It is Lerna, Pelion, Ossa, it is Erymanthus,
It is fatal and black Calydon, which laments.
The child looks at the shadow where the tawny lions are.
The beast gnashes; to whom is this wrath addressed?
The child babbles; do we know whom children call?
The two voices, the tragic and the gentle, mingle
The child is hope and the beast is hunger;
And both are waiting; it coos endlessly
And sings, and the animal foams without letup;
They each have within them a mystery that tries
To say what it knows and to have what it wants
Their tongue is caught and seeks to untie the knot.
Do they speak to each other? Each makes its attempt, the one sad
The other charming; the child joyfully exists;
Though before it the frightful Being stands
It has its mother, it has its nurse, it has everything;
It laughs.
From what night do these two sketches emerge?
One comes from the azure; the other from those debauches,
From those couplings of the dwarf and the giant,
From that hideous kiss of the abyss to nothingness
That one calls chaos.
Yes, that filthy cave,
Whose pale air-hole appears beneath the world,
Chaos, those black collisions, those dances of hurricanes,
The elements spoiled and turned brigands
And changed into plagues in the immense cesspool,
The universal rut marrying madness,
The fertilization of All producing Nothing,
That engulfing of the true, the beautiful, the good,
Which Orpheus calls Hades, which Homer calls Erebus,
And which makes fixed the fatal eye of the sphinxes of Thebes,
That is it, it is the mad and evil action
That in making chaos made creation,
It is the attack of shadow on venerable sun,
It is the convulsion of the wretched gulf
Trying to oppose the formless to the ideal,
It is Tisiphone offering her belly to Belial,
It is that obscure ensemble of escaped forces
Where lightnings rage and draw their swords,
Where perished Janus, the golden age and Rhea,
Who, if we believe the magi, procreated
The animal; and the frightful beast was roared
And vomited into the midst of the nights by that orgy.
From there comes to us the unsettling monster.
The child, for its part, pure dreamer reassuring and content,
Is the other enigma; it comes from blue obscurity.
All the little birds, titmouse, wagtail,
Warbler, sparrow, chatterers with fresh voices,
Are its brothers, while these urchins of the woods
Feel their wings grow, it feels its soul grow
From the azures scented with myrrh and cinnamon,
From the intercrossings of flowers and rays,
Those sacred dazzlements we see
In our deep sleeps when we are the just,
An obscure jumble of august branches
Whose birds are the angels with divine flight,
A glimmer like the clear reflection of waters
When, in the evening, in the pond the trees are overturned,
Living lilies, a sky that laughs, songs that lull,
That is what the child, pink, has behind it.
It awakens here below, vaguely dazzled;
It has just seen Eden and God; nothing frightens it,
It does not believe in evil; neither the wolf, nor the osprey,
Nor the tiger, spotted demon, nor that deceiver,
The fox, make it tremble; it is not afraid,
It sings; and what is more touching for thought
Than that confidence in paradise, pushed
To the point of coming close to smile at dark hell!
What an angel the child is! Everything, evil, dark sea,
The hydras that vile Avernus rolls in its waves,
The claws, those forests, the maws, those caverns,
The cries, the howls, the death rattles, the barking,
The hoarse visions, the wild horror of the woods,
Everything, Satan, and his gloomy and ferocious power,
Vanishes in the depths of the blue of innocence!
It is beautiful. To see Caliban and remain Ariel!
To have in one’s humble soul so marvelous a heaven
That the indignant and savage apparition
Of the beings of night makes no ravage there,
And to feel oneself so full of light and so gentle
That their breath extinguishes no star in you!
And I dream. And I think I hear a dialogue
Between frightful tragedy and eclogue;
On one side dread, and on the other love;
In neither does day yet break;
The child seems to want to explain something;
The beast growls, and, monster leaning over the rose,
Listens… — And who could understand, O firmament,
What the stammering says to the roaring?
Whatever the secret may be, everything stands and meditates,
The blessed flower as well as the cursed thorn;
Everything becomes attentive; everything quivers; a shiver
Stirs the air, the wave, the branch, the bush,
And in the chiaroscuros and in the twilights,
In that shadow where once the Herculeses fought,
Where the Bellerophons flew, where hovered
The immense Amos crying: A new world is born!
One feels some sacred emotion, one knows not what,
And it is, for nature where eternal God creates,
It is for the whole mystery a tenderness
As if one saw the dawn with calming ray
Taking shape above formless promontories,
When the white soul comes to speak to black souls.
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-it-is-a-strange-emotion-victor-hugo/