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You’ve just set fire to the Library?
– Yes.
I set the fire there.
– But that’s an unheard-of crime!
A crime committed by you against yourself, infamous!
But you’ve just killed the ray of your soul!
It’s your own torch you’ve just snuffed out!
What your impious and mad rage dares to burn,
Is your own good, your treasure, your dowry, your heritage
The book, hostile to the master, is to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
A library is an act of faith
Of generations still in darkness
Who bear witness in the night to the dawn.
What! in this venerable heap of truths,
In these masterpieces full of lightning and clarity,
In this tomb of the ages become a repertory,
In the centuries, in ancient man, in history,
In the past, a lesson spelled out by the future,
In what began never to end,
In the poets! what, in this gulf of bibles,
In the divine pile of terrible Aeschyluses,
Of Homers, of Jobs, standing on the horizon,
In Molière, Voltaire and Kant, in reason,
You throw, wretch, a flaming torch!
Of all human mind you make smoke!
Have you then forgotten that your liberator,
Is the book? The book is there on the height; It shines; because it shines and illuminates them,
It destroys the scaffold, war, famine
It speaks, no more slave and no more pariah.
Open a book. Plato, Milton, Beccaria.
Read these prophets, Dante, or Shakespeare, or Corneille
The immense soul they have in them, in you awakens;
Dazzled, you feel yourself the same man as all of them;
You become in reading grave, pensive and gentle;
You feel in your mind all these great men grow,
They teach you as the dawn lights a cloister
As it plunges deeper into your heart,
Their warm ray soothes you and makes you more alive;
Your soul questioned is ready to answer them;
You recognize yourself as good, then better; you feel melt,
Like snow in fire, your pride, your furies,
Evil, prejudices, kings, emperors!
For science in man arrives first.
Then comes liberty. All this light,
It’s yours understand then, and it’s you who put it out!
The goals dreamed by you are by the book attained.
The book enters your thought, it undoes in it
The bonds that error mixes with truth,
For every conscience is a Gordian knot.
It is your doctor, your guide, your guardian.
Your hatred, it heals it; your madness, it takes it from you.
That’s what you lose, alas, and through your own fault!
The book is your wealth! it’s knowledge,
Right, truth, virtue, duty,
Progress, reason dispelling all delirium.
And you destroy that, you!
– I don’t know how to read.
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-whose-fault-is-it-victor-hugo/