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That I take a moment of rest? Impossible.
Koran, Zend-Avesta, Sibylline books, Bible,
Talmud, Toldos Jeschut, Vedas, laws of Manu,
Bloody Brahmins, santons bending the knee,
The tales, the novels, the terrors, the beliefs,
Superstitions rummaging through consciences,
Can I not feel these deep burrowings?
I have my share. Golden calves, sphinxes, chimeras, griffins,
The princes of demons and the princes of priests,
Synods, sanhedrins, vile muftis, treacherous scribes,
Those who blessed the soldiers of emperors,
Those paid by Tiberius and who paid Judas,
Those who would still hand Socrates the cup,
Those who would give Jesus Calvary again,
All those Sadducees, all those Pharisees,
Those angels, whom Satan acknowledges as his own,
All that is everywhere. It is the obscure power.
Enormous wound made by an abject sting!
This absurdity: true God, false dogmas; burning
Of the lie that has slipped into reason!
Bleeding itch, incurable, eternal,
That man feels in his soul and the bird under its wing!
Oh! The infamous labor! Here Mohammed; there
This head, Wesley, on this body, Loyola;
Cisneros and Calvin, whose burns one feels.
O false revealers! O jugglers! Your ways
Are shifty, and your steps are tortuous; dread,
And not love, such is the foundation of your law;
You make the eternal face grimace;
You are born of the sepulcher, and one feels that the augur
And the soothsayer are full of the shadow of the tomb,
And that all these dreamers, companions of the raven,
All these fakirs of Ombos, of Stamboul and of Rome,
Could not have made so many fables fall upon man
Except by shaking the sinister folds of shrouds.
God being perceived only by the stars alone,
Thinkers, knowing well that he is there beneath his veils,
Have always advised to believe the stars;
God is a closed place whose key is the dawn,
And religion is the contemplated sky.
But you do not want, priests, this church.
You want the earth to read in your book
All your dreams, Moloch, Venus, Eve, Astarte,
Instead of reading the truth on the brow of the heavens.
Hence faith changed into credulity; the soul
Eclipsing reason in a dark flame;
Hence so many dark beings serpentining in the night.
Imposture, by which the true temple is destroyed,
Is a colossus made of a heap of pygmies;
Locusts are frightening armies;
O Greek, Roman, pagan, Hindu, Hebrew magi,
The human race, covered with shadowy gnawers,
Feels your invisible hordes widening upon it;
You make it dream all possible hells;
The unfortunate people sees in its nightmare
Torquemada rise when Omar disappears.
No respite. You love the useful darkness,
And you prowl there, vile and victorious, O reptiles!
Over all this earth, in all places, in the woods,
In the nuptial bed, in the alcove of kings,
In the fields, beneath the sacred altar, in the cell,
What crawls, broods, hatches, comes, goes, swarms,
Is you. You want everything, you know everything; to damn,
To bless, to take, to swear, to deceive, to serve, to reign,
Even to shine; crawling does not prevent glowing.
Hideous whispering! I hear you murmuring.
You eat your enormous prey with delight,
And you call one another monseigneur.
The acarus must give eminence to the mite.
Whatever your shadow and your smallness,
I divine, despite your efforts to hide yourselves,
That you are upon us, and I feel you walking
As one feels the miners moving in the mine,
And I cannot sleep, so much I hate the vermin!
You are what hates, what bites, what lies.
You are the implacable and black swarming.
You are that dreadful prodigy, the ungraspable.
Suppose all the vile grains of sand alive,
That will be you. Nothing, everything. Zero, millions.
Horror. Less than worms and more than lions.
The formidable insect. O monstrous contrast!
No dwarfs more puny, no power more vast.
The universe is yours, since you fill it.
You possess the future days, the past days,
Time, eternity, sleep, insomnia.
You are the innumerable, and, in the infinite shadow,
Fetid, mingling your little steps on our skins,
You multiply; and I do not understand
For what purpose God delivered the empires, the world,
The souls, the children raising their blond heads,
The temples, the hearths, the virgins, the spouses,
Man, to the dreadful immensity of lice.
July 26, 1874.
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-bonzes-victor-hugo/