The French word Cygne connotes both Swan and Symbol
to Victor Hugo
I.
Andromache, I think of you! Formerly resplendent,
This small river, this poor and sad mirror, on which once lay
The immense majesty of your bereavement,
Your tears streaming from this Simois' lie
My memory teems with pity
As I cross the new Carrousel.
Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal);
I don't see but in spirit all that was here before,
This rubble of columns, outlines, shafts, capitals,
A brilliant chaos of ruins across the floor,
The weeds, the large blocks turned green by the puddles.
There a menagerie sprawled where now are stumps;
There I live, where, any morning, under the skies
The cold light of industry wakes, the refuse dump
Heaves a dark, sombre hurricane into air so quiet.
A swan that had escaped from its cage
Rubs the pavement with its webbed feet,
And trails over the rough ground its white plumage.
Near a dry gutter the animal opens its beak,
Bathes its wings nervously in the powder,
And says, heart full of its native lake:
"Water, when will you rain? When will you thunder?"
I see this hapless myth, strange, fatal, fake,
Bend towards the sky sometimes, like the man of Ovid,
Toward a sky ironic and cruelly blue,
Its convulsive neck stretching a greedy head,
As if its reproaches to God would accrue!
II.
Paris has changed! But my melancholy
hasn't budged! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old wards, all have turned into allegory,
And my memories are heavier than rocks.
And so, in front of the Louvre I'm oppressed by an image:
I think of my large swan, with the gestures of a fool,
Like an exile, ridiculous, sublime, disengaged
And gnawed by a desire without end! And then to you,
Andromache, your arms around your great fallen husband,
Abject cattle, under the hand of glorious Pyrrhus,
By an empty grave in the raptures of grief you can't withstand;
Widow of Hector, alas! and woman of Hellas!
I think of the Negress, asthmatic and gaunt,
Haggard-eyed, in mud she slogs
Seeking superb Africa's coconuts, absent
Behind the immense wall of fog;
With whoever is lost and not found
Never, never! With those who steep in tears
And suckle as at a she-wolf the Pain, spellbound!
With the meager orphans drying like flowers!
Thus in the forest, my exiled spirit's land,
An old Memory sounds with full breath of its horn!
I think of sailors forgotten on an island,
The prisoners, The vanquished!... for the good of others once more!
The virginal, vivid, the beautiful today
Will it tear us to cray with a drunk stroke of wing
Forgotten in the frost on the hard lake floor rings,
Haunted by glaciers of flights that couldn't convey?
A swan from long ago remembers: It is he
Magnificent without hope who is delivered
For not having sung about the flowing river
When the sterile cold offered resplendent ennui.
His long questioning neck writhes in white agony
In the void occupied by the bird that denied
All but his shock at how the earth took his feather.
In place of his brilliance, this phantom's all one sees,
Immobilized with a cold, contemptuous eye
That dresses useless swans for the exile weather.
