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XXXVI
It seemed to shiver, for the north wind was harsh.
It was, beneath a heap of leafless branches,
A poor statue, with black back and green foot,
An old faun isolated in the old deserted park,
Who, with his bowed forehead touching the tree branches,
Was lost to mid-body in his marble sheath.
He was there, pensive, bound to the earth,
And, like everything motionless, — forgotten!
Trees surrounded him, whipped by an icy wind,
And like him grown old in that same place;
Giant chestnut trees, without leaves, without birds,
Beneath their heights blurred into shadowy networks,
Pale, he appeared, and the earth was brown.
A harsh winter night, without star and without moon,
Fell in broad patches into the diffuse fog.
Other trees farther off crossed their dark trunks;
Farther still others, softened by space,
Pushed into the gray sky where the evening wind passes
A thousand little black branches, twisted and mingled,
And settled everywhere, one by the other veiled,
On the horizon, lost in formless vapors,
Like a great russet troop of enormous hedgehogs.
Nothing more. This old faun, a bleak sky, a black wood.
Perhaps in the mist far off one could see
Some long terrace with greenish bases,
Or, near a great pool, uncertain nymphs,
Ashamed with good reason in this abolished park,
Once of glances, now of oblivion.
The old faun laughed. — In their doubtful shadows
Leaving the sad pool and the shameful nymphs,
The old faun laughed, it was to him I came;
Moved, for without pity all these divine sculptors
Condemn forever, content that they be admired,
The nymphs to shame and the fauns to laughter.
I, I have always pitied the poor obscure marble.
Man less often, because he is harder.
And, without bruising with a word his wounded ear,
For marble hears well the voice of thought,
I said to him: “You were in love with the beautiful age.
Sylvan, what did you see when you were happy?
Were you of the court? Did you attend the festivities?
It is to amuse you that these nymphs were made.
It is for you, in these woods, that learned hands
Have mingled the Greek gods and the Roman Caesars,
And, in the clear waters mirroring the rare vases,
Twisted this whole garden into bizarre labyrinths.
When you were happy, what did you see, Sylvan?
Tell me the secrets of that too vain past,
Of that charming past, full of discreet flames,
Where among great kings grew great poets.
How many fresh memories you still laugh at!
Speak to me, beautiful Sylvan, as you would speak
To the tree, to the blowing wind, to the untrodden grass.
From one end to the other of this thick avenue,
Have you sometimes, ancient and Greek mocker,
When near you passed with the handsome Lautrec
Marguerite with gentle eyes, the queen of Béarn,
Cast your oblique eye at the Farnese Hercules?
Alone under your green grotto of wet foliage,
O obliging Sylvan, have you advised,
Turning toward each one the side that attracts him,
Racan as a shepherd, Regnier as a satyr?
Have you sometimes seen, on this bench, toward noon,
Vincent de Paul sweating to shape Gondi?
Faun! have you followed with that strange gaze
Anne with Buckingham, Louis with Fontanges,
And did they turn back, with redness on their brows,
Hearing you laugh at the corner of the deep wood?
Were you consulted on the thyrsus or the ivy,
When in a great ballet of singular form
The court of the god Phoebus or the court of the god Pan
With the name of Amaryllis intoxicated Montespan?
Fleeing the stone ears of courtiers,
Did La Fontaine come, with tears in his eyelids,
To tell you the regrets of his nymphs of Vaux?
What did Boileau say to you, what did Segrais say to you,
To you, lettered faun who once in eclogue
Had with Virgil a charming dialogue,
And who made leap, on the nascent grass,
The heavy spondee at the step of the dancing dactyl?
Have you seen beauties play in the grasses,
Chevreuse with drowned eyes, Thiange with superb airs?
Did they sometimes with their vermeil group
Surround you madly, so that the sun
Suddenly cut out, piercing some cloud,
Your lascivious profile on their ingenuous breast?
Has your tree received beneath its serene shelter
The scarlet shroud of the pale Mazarin?
Have you had the honor of seeing Molière dream?
Has he sometimes, with a familiar voice,
Suddenly throwing you a melodious verse,
Addressed you informally, as one does among demigods?
Returning one evening from the depth of the avenues,
This thinker, who, seeing souls all naked,
Could not be afraid of your nudity,
Has he confronted you with man in his mind?
And has he found you, you the cynical specter,
Less sad, less wicked, less cold, less ironic,
When he compared, stopping on the way,
Your marble laugh to our human laugh?”
Thus I spoke to him under the thick foliage.
He did not answer even with a murmur.
I listened, leaning over the icy marble,
But I heard nothing move from the past.
The pallid gleam of the withdrawing day
Vaguely whitened the motionless satyr,
Mute to my words and deaf to my pity.
To see him there, sinister, and coming halfway out
Of his sheath blackened by the damp foliage,
One would have said the handle, in carved torso,
Of an old rusted sword left in its scabbard.
I shook my head and moved away from him.
Then from the black bushes, from the dried branches
Like sisters in mourning bent over his head,
And from secret grottoes scattered in the woods,
It suddenly seemed to me that a voice came out,
Which in my dark and vaguely sonorous soul
Awakened an echo as at the bottom of an amphora.
— “O imprudent poet, what are you doing? leave in peace
The forsaken fauns under the thick trees!
Poet! do you not know that it is always impious
To go, to the deserted places where slumbering shadow sleeps,
To shake, even if you were led by love,
This moss that hangs on ruined centuries,
And to trouble, with the vain noise of your indiscreet voices,
The memory of the dead in their dark retreats!”
Then into the gardens buried under the mist
I plunged, dreaming of vanished days,
While the branches filled with mystery,
And while behind me the solitary faun,
Obscure hieroglyph of an ancient alphabet,
Continued to laugh at the falling night.
I went, and contemplating with a still sad gaze
All those sweet memories, beauty, spring, dawn,
In the air and under my feet scattered, mingled, floating,
Leaves of the other summer, women of the other time,
I glimpsed far off, under the dark branches,
Marbles in the wood, in the past shadows!
March 19, 1837.
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-statue-victor-hugo/