01-04-2026, 04:21 AM
I do that thing sometimes with Hugo that some people do where they "translate" a poem into their own "system", rather than translating the actual poem.
I didn't translate this poem. It's true, also, that I don't speak French fluently.
There's a Draft here where I've been tinkering with two Hugo poems off and on.
This poem is simply one I found online. I don't know who did the translation.
Abyss - The Man
I am spirit, living in dead things.
I know how to forge the keys when the doors are closed;
I cause the lion to retreat towards the desert;
My name is Bacchus, Noah, Deucalion;
My name is Shakspeare, Hannibal, Caesar, Dante;
I am the conqueror; I hold the fiery sword,
And I enter, terrifying the shadow that I pursue,
In all the terrors and in all the nights.
I am Plato, I see; I am Newton, I find.
From the owl I give birth to Athens, and from the wolf
Roma; and the eagle said to me: You go first!
I have Christ in my grave and Job on my manure.
I live ! in my two hands I carry in balance
The soul and the flesh; I am the man, finally master and free!
I am the ancient Adam! I love, I know, I feel;
I took the tree of life between my strong fists;
Merry, I shake it above my head,
And, as if I were the wind of the storm,
I wave its laden golden orange branches,
And I shout: "Run up, peoples! Take, eat!"
And I make all the apples fall on their foreheads;
Because, science, for me, for my sons, for men,
Your sap flows down from skies full of goodness,
Because Life is your fruit, root Eternity!
And everything sprouts, and everything grows, and, enlarged furnace,
As in a forest runs the red fire,
The beautiful vermeil Progress, the eye fixed on the azure,
Walk, and while walking devours the past.
I want, everything obeys, inflexible matter
yield; I am almost equal to the great Invisible;
Coteaux, I make wine as he makes honey;
Like him, I drop globes into the sky.
I am making a palace out of what was my jail;
I tie a living thread from one pole to the other pole;
I make the spirit fly on the wing of lightning;
I stretch the bow of Nimrod, the divine bow of iron,
And the whistling arrow and the flying arrow,
And that I send to the end of the world, is my word.
I make the Rhine, the Ganges and the Oregon talk
Like three travelers in the same car.
The distance is no more. From the old giant Space
I made a dwarf. I go, and, in front of my audacity,
The jealous black titans raise their withered brows;
Prometheus, in chained Caucasus, lets out a cry,
Surprised to see Franklin steal the thunderbolt;
Fulton, whom a Jupiter would once have powdered,
Ride Leviathan and cross the sea;
Galvani, calm, embraces death with bitter laughter;
Volta takes in his hands the sword of the archangel
And dissolves it; the world at my voice trembles and changes;
Cain dies, the future looks like young Abel;
I reclaim Eden and complete Babel.
Nothing without me. Nature outlines; I finish.
Earth, I am your king.
Hugo and Wordsworth can be worked with to instill an Egotistical Sublime. Speaking for Humanity as one human person.
Burying oneself in others is one path. Seeding others with oneself is another. Seeding oneself with oneself emerges from this dynamic, as well.
The latter can be the Romantic Villain or the Confessional Poet. Maybe both, depending on how well one can illustrate disassociation with self-love.
The two I was working on are God and The End of Satan.
To Victor Hugo
Algernon Charles Swinburne
IN the fair days when God
By man as godlike trod,
And each alike was Greek, alike was free,
God’s lightning spared, they said,
Alone the happier head
Whose laurels screened it; fruitless grace for thee,
To whom the high gods gave of right
Their thunders and their laurels and their light.
Sunbeams and bays before
Our master’s servants wore,
For these Apollo left in all men’s lands;
But far from these ere now
And watched with jealous brow
Lay the blind lightnings shut between God’s hands,
And only loosed on slaves and kings
The terror of the tempest of their wings.
Born in those younger years
That shone with storms of spears
And shook in the wind blown from a dead world’s pyre,
When by her back-blown hair
Napoleon caught the fair
And fierce Republic with her feet of fire,
And stayed with iron words and hands
Her flight, and freedom in a thousand lands:
Thou sawest the tides of things
Close over heads of kings,
And thine hand felt the thunder, and to thee
Laurels and lightnings were
As sunbeams and soft air
Mixed each in other, or as mist with sea
Mixed, or as memory with desire,
Or the lute’s pulses with the louder lyre.
For thee man’s spirit stood
Disrobed of flesh and blood,
And bare the heart of the most secret hours;
And to thine hand more tame
Than birds in winter came
High hopes and unknown flying forms of powers,
And from thy table fed, and sang
Till with the tune men’s ears took fire and rang.
Even all men’s eyes and ears
With fiery sound and tears
Waxed hot, and cheeks caught flame and eyelids light,
At those high songs of thine
That stung the sense like wine,
Or fell more soft than dew or snow by night,
Or wailed as in some flooded cave
Sobs the strong broken spirit of a wave.
But we, our master, we
Whose hearts, uplift to thee,
Ache with the pulse of thy remembered song,
We ask not nor await
From the clenched hands of fate,
As thou, remission of the world’s old wrong;
Respite we ask not, nor release;
Freedom a man may have, he shall not peace.
Though thy most fiery hope
Storm heaven, to set wide ope
The all-sought-for gate whence God or Chance debars
All feet of men, all eyes—
The old night resumes her skies,
Her hollow hiding-place of clouds and stars,
Where nought save these is sure in sight;
And, paven with death, our days are roofed with night.
One thing we can; to be
Awhile, as men may, free;
But not by hope or pleasure the most stern
Goddess, most awful-eyed,
Sits, but on either side
Sit sorrow and the wrath of hearts that burn,
Sad faith that cannot hope or fear,
And memory grey with many a flowerless year.
Not that in stranger’s wise
I lift not loving eyes
To the fair foster-mother France, that gave
Beyond the pale fleet foam
Help to my sires and home,
Whose great sweet breast could shelter those and save
Whom from her nursing breasts and hands
Their land cast forth of old on gentler lands.
Not without thoughts that ache
For theirs and for thy sake,
I, born of exiles, hail thy banished head;
I whose young song took flight
Toward the great heat and light
On me a child from thy far splendour shed,
From thine high place of soul and song,
Which, fallen on eyes yet feeble, made them strong.
Ah, not with lessening love
For memories born hereof,
I look to that sweet mother-land, and see
The old fields and fair full streams,
And skies, but fled like dreams
The feet of freedom and the thought of thee;
And all between the skies and graves
The mirth of mockers and the shame of slaves.
She, killed with noisome air,
Even she! and still so fair,
Who said “Let there be freedom,” and there was
Freedom; and as a lance
The fiery eyes of France
Touched the world’s sleep and as a sleep made pass
Forth of men’s heavier ears and eyes
Smitten with fire and thunder from new skies.
Are they men’s friends indeed
Who watch them weep and bleed?
Because thou hast loved us, shall the gods love thee?
Thou, first of men and friend,
Seest thou, even thou, the end?
Thou knowest what hath been, knowest thou what shall be?
Evils may pass and hopes endure;
But fate is dim, and all the gods obscure.
O nursed in airs apart,
O poet highest of heart,
Hast thou seen time, who hast seen so many things?
Are not the years more wise,
More sad than keenest eyes,
The years with soundless feet and sounding wings?
Passing we hear them not, but past
The clamour of them thrills us, and their blast.
Thou art chief of us, and lord;
Thy song is as a sword
Keen-edged and scented in the blade from flowers;
Thou art lord and king; but we
Lift younger eyes, and see
Less of high hope, less light on wandering hours;
Hours that have borne men down so long,
Seen the right fail, and watched uplift the wrong.
But thine imperial soul,
As years and ruins roll
To the same end, and all things and all dreams
With the same wreck and roar
Drift on the dim same shore,
Still in the bitter foam and brackish streams
Tracks the fresh water-spring to be
And sudden sweeter fountains in the sea.
As once the high God bound
With many a rivet round
Man’s saviour, and with iron nailed him through,
At the wild end of things,
Where even his own bird’s wings
Flagged, whence the sea shone like a drop of dew,
From Caucasus beheld below
Past fathoms of unfathomable snow;
So the strong God, the chance
Central of circumstance,
Still shows him exile who will not be slave;
All thy great fame and thee
Girt by the dim strait sea
With multitudinous walls of wandering wave;
Shows us our greatest from his throne
Fate-stricken, and rejected of his own.
Yea, he is strong, thou say’st,
A mystery many-faced,
The wild beasts know him and the wild birds flee;
The blind night sees him, death
Shrinks beaten at his breath,
And his right hand is heavy on the sea:
We know he hath made us, and is king;
We know not if he care for anything.
Thus much, no more, we know;
He bade what is be so,
Bade light be and bade night be, one by one;
Bade hope and fear, bade ill
And good redeem and kill,
Till all men be aweary of the sun
And his world burn in its own flame
And bear no witness longer of his name.
Yet though all this be thus,
Be those men praised of us
Who have loved and wrought and sorrowed and not sinned
For fame or fear or gold,
Nor waxed for winter cold,
Nor changed for changes of the worldly wind;
Praised above men of men be these,
Till this one world and work we know shall cease.
Yea, one thing more than this,
We know that one thing is,
The splendour of a spirit without blame,
That not the labouring years
Blind-born, nor any fears,
Nor men nor any gods can tire or tame;
But purer power with fiery breath
Fills, and exalts above the gulfs of death.
Praised above men be thou,
Whose laurel-laden brow,
Made for the morning, droops not in the night;
Praised and beloved, that none
Of all thy great things done
Flies higher than thy most equal spirit’s flight;
Praised, that nor doubt nor hope could bend
Earth’s loftiest head, found upright to the end.
Swinburne is somebody I read and then forget about. He comes up sometimes, and then I wonder why I try to read him. Then I read him again with joy, then have no interest in him at all.
In A Series of Unfortunate Events and Magick, Swinburne is alluded to through a type of allusion someone has called Decadence.
Decadent Allusion is a bric-a-brac, pseudoserious use of other poems.
Lemony Snicket does this for humor.
In Magick, this is done for purposes of Invocation. Which Holderlin and Hugo do in some of their poems.
I didn't translate this poem. It's true, also, that I don't speak French fluently.
There's a Draft here where I've been tinkering with two Hugo poems off and on.
This poem is simply one I found online. I don't know who did the translation.
Abyss - The Man
I am spirit, living in dead things.
I know how to forge the keys when the doors are closed;
I cause the lion to retreat towards the desert;
My name is Bacchus, Noah, Deucalion;
My name is Shakspeare, Hannibal, Caesar, Dante;
I am the conqueror; I hold the fiery sword,
And I enter, terrifying the shadow that I pursue,
In all the terrors and in all the nights.
I am Plato, I see; I am Newton, I find.
From the owl I give birth to Athens, and from the wolf
Roma; and the eagle said to me: You go first!
I have Christ in my grave and Job on my manure.
I live ! in my two hands I carry in balance
The soul and the flesh; I am the man, finally master and free!
I am the ancient Adam! I love, I know, I feel;
I took the tree of life between my strong fists;
Merry, I shake it above my head,
And, as if I were the wind of the storm,
I wave its laden golden orange branches,
And I shout: "Run up, peoples! Take, eat!"
And I make all the apples fall on their foreheads;
Because, science, for me, for my sons, for men,
Your sap flows down from skies full of goodness,
Because Life is your fruit, root Eternity!
And everything sprouts, and everything grows, and, enlarged furnace,
As in a forest runs the red fire,
The beautiful vermeil Progress, the eye fixed on the azure,
Walk, and while walking devours the past.
I want, everything obeys, inflexible matter
yield; I am almost equal to the great Invisible;
Coteaux, I make wine as he makes honey;
Like him, I drop globes into the sky.
I am making a palace out of what was my jail;
I tie a living thread from one pole to the other pole;
I make the spirit fly on the wing of lightning;
I stretch the bow of Nimrod, the divine bow of iron,
And the whistling arrow and the flying arrow,
And that I send to the end of the world, is my word.
I make the Rhine, the Ganges and the Oregon talk
Like three travelers in the same car.
The distance is no more. From the old giant Space
I made a dwarf. I go, and, in front of my audacity,
The jealous black titans raise their withered brows;
Prometheus, in chained Caucasus, lets out a cry,
Surprised to see Franklin steal the thunderbolt;
Fulton, whom a Jupiter would once have powdered,
Ride Leviathan and cross the sea;
Galvani, calm, embraces death with bitter laughter;
Volta takes in his hands the sword of the archangel
And dissolves it; the world at my voice trembles and changes;
Cain dies, the future looks like young Abel;
I reclaim Eden and complete Babel.
Nothing without me. Nature outlines; I finish.
Earth, I am your king.
Hugo and Wordsworth can be worked with to instill an Egotistical Sublime. Speaking for Humanity as one human person.
Burying oneself in others is one path. Seeding others with oneself is another. Seeding oneself with oneself emerges from this dynamic, as well.
The latter can be the Romantic Villain or the Confessional Poet. Maybe both, depending on how well one can illustrate disassociation with self-love.
The two I was working on are God and The End of Satan.
To Victor Hugo
Algernon Charles Swinburne
IN the fair days when God
By man as godlike trod,
And each alike was Greek, alike was free,
God’s lightning spared, they said,
Alone the happier head
Whose laurels screened it; fruitless grace for thee,
To whom the high gods gave of right
Their thunders and their laurels and their light.
Sunbeams and bays before
Our master’s servants wore,
For these Apollo left in all men’s lands;
But far from these ere now
And watched with jealous brow
Lay the blind lightnings shut between God’s hands,
And only loosed on slaves and kings
The terror of the tempest of their wings.
Born in those younger years
That shone with storms of spears
And shook in the wind blown from a dead world’s pyre,
When by her back-blown hair
Napoleon caught the fair
And fierce Republic with her feet of fire,
And stayed with iron words and hands
Her flight, and freedom in a thousand lands:
Thou sawest the tides of things
Close over heads of kings,
And thine hand felt the thunder, and to thee
Laurels and lightnings were
As sunbeams and soft air
Mixed each in other, or as mist with sea
Mixed, or as memory with desire,
Or the lute’s pulses with the louder lyre.
For thee man’s spirit stood
Disrobed of flesh and blood,
And bare the heart of the most secret hours;
And to thine hand more tame
Than birds in winter came
High hopes and unknown flying forms of powers,
And from thy table fed, and sang
Till with the tune men’s ears took fire and rang.
Even all men’s eyes and ears
With fiery sound and tears
Waxed hot, and cheeks caught flame and eyelids light,
At those high songs of thine
That stung the sense like wine,
Or fell more soft than dew or snow by night,
Or wailed as in some flooded cave
Sobs the strong broken spirit of a wave.
But we, our master, we
Whose hearts, uplift to thee,
Ache with the pulse of thy remembered song,
We ask not nor await
From the clenched hands of fate,
As thou, remission of the world’s old wrong;
Respite we ask not, nor release;
Freedom a man may have, he shall not peace.
Though thy most fiery hope
Storm heaven, to set wide ope
The all-sought-for gate whence God or Chance debars
All feet of men, all eyes—
The old night resumes her skies,
Her hollow hiding-place of clouds and stars,
Where nought save these is sure in sight;
And, paven with death, our days are roofed with night.
One thing we can; to be
Awhile, as men may, free;
But not by hope or pleasure the most stern
Goddess, most awful-eyed,
Sits, but on either side
Sit sorrow and the wrath of hearts that burn,
Sad faith that cannot hope or fear,
And memory grey with many a flowerless year.
Not that in stranger’s wise
I lift not loving eyes
To the fair foster-mother France, that gave
Beyond the pale fleet foam
Help to my sires and home,
Whose great sweet breast could shelter those and save
Whom from her nursing breasts and hands
Their land cast forth of old on gentler lands.
Not without thoughts that ache
For theirs and for thy sake,
I, born of exiles, hail thy banished head;
I whose young song took flight
Toward the great heat and light
On me a child from thy far splendour shed,
From thine high place of soul and song,
Which, fallen on eyes yet feeble, made them strong.
Ah, not with lessening love
For memories born hereof,
I look to that sweet mother-land, and see
The old fields and fair full streams,
And skies, but fled like dreams
The feet of freedom and the thought of thee;
And all between the skies and graves
The mirth of mockers and the shame of slaves.
She, killed with noisome air,
Even she! and still so fair,
Who said “Let there be freedom,” and there was
Freedom; and as a lance
The fiery eyes of France
Touched the world’s sleep and as a sleep made pass
Forth of men’s heavier ears and eyes
Smitten with fire and thunder from new skies.
Are they men’s friends indeed
Who watch them weep and bleed?
Because thou hast loved us, shall the gods love thee?
Thou, first of men and friend,
Seest thou, even thou, the end?
Thou knowest what hath been, knowest thou what shall be?
Evils may pass and hopes endure;
But fate is dim, and all the gods obscure.
O nursed in airs apart,
O poet highest of heart,
Hast thou seen time, who hast seen so many things?
Are not the years more wise,
More sad than keenest eyes,
The years with soundless feet and sounding wings?
Passing we hear them not, but past
The clamour of them thrills us, and their blast.
Thou art chief of us, and lord;
Thy song is as a sword
Keen-edged and scented in the blade from flowers;
Thou art lord and king; but we
Lift younger eyes, and see
Less of high hope, less light on wandering hours;
Hours that have borne men down so long,
Seen the right fail, and watched uplift the wrong.
But thine imperial soul,
As years and ruins roll
To the same end, and all things and all dreams
With the same wreck and roar
Drift on the dim same shore,
Still in the bitter foam and brackish streams
Tracks the fresh water-spring to be
And sudden sweeter fountains in the sea.
As once the high God bound
With many a rivet round
Man’s saviour, and with iron nailed him through,
At the wild end of things,
Where even his own bird’s wings
Flagged, whence the sea shone like a drop of dew,
From Caucasus beheld below
Past fathoms of unfathomable snow;
So the strong God, the chance
Central of circumstance,
Still shows him exile who will not be slave;
All thy great fame and thee
Girt by the dim strait sea
With multitudinous walls of wandering wave;
Shows us our greatest from his throne
Fate-stricken, and rejected of his own.
Yea, he is strong, thou say’st,
A mystery many-faced,
The wild beasts know him and the wild birds flee;
The blind night sees him, death
Shrinks beaten at his breath,
And his right hand is heavy on the sea:
We know he hath made us, and is king;
We know not if he care for anything.
Thus much, no more, we know;
He bade what is be so,
Bade light be and bade night be, one by one;
Bade hope and fear, bade ill
And good redeem and kill,
Till all men be aweary of the sun
And his world burn in its own flame
And bear no witness longer of his name.
Yet though all this be thus,
Be those men praised of us
Who have loved and wrought and sorrowed and not sinned
For fame or fear or gold,
Nor waxed for winter cold,
Nor changed for changes of the worldly wind;
Praised above men of men be these,
Till this one world and work we know shall cease.
Yea, one thing more than this,
We know that one thing is,
The splendour of a spirit without blame,
That not the labouring years
Blind-born, nor any fears,
Nor men nor any gods can tire or tame;
But purer power with fiery breath
Fills, and exalts above the gulfs of death.
Praised above men be thou,
Whose laurel-laden brow,
Made for the morning, droops not in the night;
Praised and beloved, that none
Of all thy great things done
Flies higher than thy most equal spirit’s flight;
Praised, that nor doubt nor hope could bend
Earth’s loftiest head, found upright to the end.
Swinburne is somebody I read and then forget about. He comes up sometimes, and then I wonder why I try to read him. Then I read him again with joy, then have no interest in him at all.
In A Series of Unfortunate Events and Magick, Swinburne is alluded to through a type of allusion someone has called Decadence.
Decadent Allusion is a bric-a-brac, pseudoserious use of other poems.
Lemony Snicket does this for humor.
In Magick, this is done for purposes of Invocation. Which Holderlin and Hugo do in some of their poems.