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What a beautiful place! There the cedar whispers with the elm,
The donkey is lyrical and seems to have seen Don Quixote,
The tiger in its cage looks like a king in his palace,
The pachyderms are frightfully ugly;
And then it’s literary, one dreams of idylls
By Viennet while watching the crocodiles yawn.
There, while the baboon is sold to the monkey,
While the donkey contemplates the scholar,
And the vulture gives the owl a friendly look,
Certainly, it is a use of time worthy of a sage
To go dreaming in this shade, among
These trees full of nests, where everything seems asleep
And watches, where refusal consents, where love struggles,
And to listen to the wind, that sweet flute player.
Let us learn, let things be, let us love, the heavens are vast;
And let us become learned, and remain ignorant.
Let us be under the infinite honest listeners;
Nothing is mute or deaf; let us see as many beasts
As we can; let us draw profit from their lessons.
Because everything around us dreams, we think.
Ignorance is somewhat like prayer;
Man is great in front and small behind;
He is, from Euclid to Newton, from Job to Réaumur,
An indiscreet one who wants to see over the wall,
And nature, at bottom very mocking, initials
Our science with the giraffe’s neck.
Try to see, that’s good. Spy. Our mind
Pushes our science to watch; God smiles,
Old sly one.
I have said it, God is open to criticism.
He is not sober. He is overflowing, frantic,
Inconvenient; here the dwarf, there the giant,
All at once; enormous; he lacks nothingness.
He abuses the abyss, he abuses the prism.
Everything is too much. His sun goes as far as Gongorism;
Excessive light. Yes, God truly is unequal;
Here Siberia, and there Senegal;
And everywhere antithesis! One must resign oneself to it;
If he makes the raven black, it’s because he made the swan white;
Today God freezes us, yesterday he heated us.
As at the academy they would tell him his faults!
What does the comet want with us? What is the meteor for?
When one is a serious and solid pedant, The more dazzled one is, the less satisfied one is;
The ferule to Batteux, the saber to Galifet
Do not tolerate God without some impatience;
God troubles order; he wears out science;
Hardly has one finished when one must start again;
It seems one feels in one’s hand slipping
Some serpent all scaled with dawn.
As soon as you have said: enough! he says: again!
This demagogue gives to the poor as many flowers
As to the rich; he does not know how to limit himself; his colors,
His rays, his lightnings, it’s more than one wishes.
Ah! all that hurts the eyes! says the owl.
And the owl is wisdom.
It is certain
That God shapes the world at his pleasure in the midst of azure;
He mixes irony with his epic thunder;
If one soars he strikes with lightning and if one grazes he stings.
(I am not surprised that Planche looked stung.)
The wind, voice without reason, a sort of failed noise,
Without ever explaining itself and without ever concluding,
Repeats, and the ocean is not exempt from bombast.
As for me, I would be, I confess it here,
Curious to know what would be said of God,
Of the world he governs, of the sky he exaggerates,
Of the infinite, sinister and confused shelf,
Of all that this God lavishes, of the heaps
Of stars of every kind and every format,
Of his way of filling the telescope with stars,
Nonotte and Baculard in the Café Procope.
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-god-again-but-with-restrictions-victor-hugo/