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When, with his children clothed in skins of beasts,
Disheveled, livid in the midst of storms,
Cain had fled from before Jehovah,
As evening fell, the somber man arrived
At the foot of a mountain on a great plain;
His weary wife and his breathless sons
Said to him: “Let us lie down on the earth, and sleep.”
Cain, not sleeping, mused at the foot of the mounts.
Having lifted his head, in the depths of the gloomy skies,
He saw an eye, wide open in the darkness,
And that was gazing at him fixedly in the shadow.
“I am too near,” he said with a trembling.
He woke his sleeping sons, his weary wife,
And set off fleeing again, sinister in the space.
He walked thirty days, he walked thirty nights.
He went on, mute, pale and shuddering at noises,
Furtive, without looking behind him, without respite,
Without rest, without sleep; he reached the shore
Of the seas in the land that was later Assyria.
“Let us stop,” he said, “for this refuge is safe.
Let us stay here. We have reached the bounds of the world.”
And, as he sat down, he saw in the dreary skies
The eye at the same place in the depths of the horizon.
Then he shuddered, prey to the dark chill.
“Hide me!” he cried; and, finger on mouth,
All his sons watched the fierce forefather tremble.
Cain said to Jabal, father of those who go
Under tents of hair in the deep desert:
“Stretch on this side the canvas of the tent.”
And they unfolded the floating wall;
And, when it had been fixed with weights of lead:
“Do you see nothing more?” said Zillah, the fair child,
The daughter of his sons, gentle as the dawn;
And Cain answered: “I see that eye still!”
Jubal, father of those who pass through the towns
Blowing on clarions and beating drums,
Cried: “I shall surely build a barrier.”
He made a wall of bronze and put Cain behind it.
And Cain said: “That eye is still watching me!”
Enoch said: “We must make a ring of towers
So terrible that nothing can approach it.
Let us build a city with its citadel,
Let us build a city, and we will close it.”
Then Tubal-cain, father of the blacksmiths,
Built an enormous and superhuman city.
While he was working, his brothers, in the plain,
Chased the sons of Enosh and the children of Seth;
And they gouged out the eyes of anyone who passed;
And, in the evening, they shot arrows at the stars.
The granite replaced the tent with walls of canvas,
Each block was bound with knots of iron,
And the city seemed a city of hell;
The shadow of the towers made night in the countryside;
They gave the walls the thickness of mountains;
On the gate they engraved: “God forbidden to enter.”
When they had finished closing and walling,
They put the forefather in the center in a tower of stone;
And he remained gloomy and haggard. “O my father!
Has the eye disappeared?” said Zillah trembling.
And Cain answered: “No, it is still there.”
Then he said: “I want to live under the earth
As in his sepulcher a solitary man;
Nothing will see me anymore, I will see nothing anymore.”
So a pit was made, and Cain said: “That’s good!”
Then he descended alone under that dark vault.
When he had sat down on his chair in the shadow
And they had closed the underground on his forehead,
The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain.
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-the-conscience-victor-hugo/