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I, whom a little child makes utterly foolish,
I have two; Georges and Jeanne; and I take one for guide
And the other for light, and I run to their voices,
Since Georges is two years old and Jeanne is ten months.
Their attempts at existing are divinely awkward;
In their speech, where sketches tremble,
One thinks one sees a remnant of heaven dissolving and fleeing;
And I who am evening, and I who am night,
I whose pale and cold destiny fades,
I have the tenderness to say: They are the dawn.
Their obscure dialogue opens horizons for me;
They understand each other, give each other their reasons.
Judge how that scatters my thoughts.
In me, desires, plans, senseless things,
Wise things, everything, at their tender glow,
Falls, and I am no more than a dreaming old man.
I no longer feel the troubled and secret shock
Of the evil that draws us and the fate that pushes us.
Staggering children are our best supports.
I look at them, and then I listen to them, and then
I am good, and my heart calms in their presence;
I accept the sacred counsels of innocence,
I was so all my life; I have never
Known anything, in mourning as on summits,
Sweeter than the oblivion that invades our soul
Before pure beings from whom a humble flame rises;
I contemplate, in our times often black and tarnished,
This break of day that comes from cradles and nests.
In the evening I go to see them sleep. On their calm brows,
I distinguish, dazzled, the shadow cast by palms
And like a clarity of a star at its rising,
And I say to myself: What can they be dreaming of?
Georges dreams of cakes, of beautiful strange toys,
Of the dog, the rooster, the cat; and Jeanne thinks of angels.
Then, on waking, their eyes open, full of rays.
They arrive, alas! at the hour when we flee.
They babble. Are they speaking? Yes, as the flower speaks
To the woodland spring; as their father Charles,
As a child, once spoke to their aunt Dedé;
As I spoke to you, flooded with sun,
O my brothers, in the time when my father, a young man,
Watched us play in the barracks, in Rome,
On horseback on his great sword, and we so little.
Jeanne, who has forget-me-nots in her eyes,
And who, to grasp the shadow opening her frail fingers,
Has almost no arms, still having wings,
Jeanne harangues, with songs in which a word floats,
Georges handsome as a god who would be a brat.
It is not speech, O blue sky, it is the Word;
It is the infinite, innocent, and superb language
That the winds, the forests, and the waves sigh;
The pilots Jason, Palinurus, and Typhlos
Heard the siren with this sweet voice
Murmur the obscure hymn that the deep water dulls;
It is the music scattered in the depths of May
That makes one say: I love, and the other, alas: I loved;
It is the vague and luminous language of beings
Newly born, whom life draws to its windows,
And who, before April, bewildered, hesitating,
Buzz at the immense windowpane of spring.
These mysterious words that Jeanne says to Georges,
It is the idyll of the swan with the robin,
They are the questions that the bees ask,
And that the naive lily poses to the profound sparrow;
It is that divine underside of vast harmony,
The whispering, the ineffable and blessed shadow
Chattering, stammering sounds of vision,
And perhaps giving an explanation;
For little children were yesterday still
In heaven, and knew what the earth ignores.
O Jeanne! Georges! voices that seize my heart!
If the stars sang, they would stammer thus.
Their forehead turned toward us enlightens and gilds us.
Oh! from where do you come, then, unknown ones whom we adore?
Jeanne looks astonished; Georges has bold eyes.
They stumble, still drunk with paradise.
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-georges-and-jeanne-victor-hugo/