Les Djinns Translation

The Genies
by Victor Hugo
prose translation by Marva Barnett, with stanzas numbered

  1. Walls, town, and port, harbor of death. A grey sea where the breeze breaks; everything sleeps.
  2. On the plains, a noise is born. It’s the breath of night. It moans like a soul a flame always follows.
  3. The loudest voice resembles a little spherical bell. It’s the gallop of a jumping dwarf. It flees, rushes forward, then in cadence dances on one foot at the end of a wave.
  4. The rumor approaches. The echo repeats it. It’s like the steeple bell of a cursed convent; like the noise of a crowd that thunders and rolls and sometimes collapses and sometimes grows.
  5. God! the sepulchral voice of the Genies! What noise they make! Let’s flee under the spiral of the deep staircase. Already my lamp goes out, and the shadow of the banister that creeps up the wall climbs all the way to the ceiling.
  6. The Genie swarm is passing in a whistling whirlwind! The yews, smashed by their flight, crack like a burning pine. Their heavy, rapid troop, flying in the empty space, seems to be a livid cloud that carries lightening in its side.
  7. They’re really near! Let’s keep this room closed, here where we deride them. What a noise outside! Hideous army of vampire and dragons! The detached roof beam is bending like a damp piece of grass, and the old rusty door is trembling off its hinges!
  8. Cries of hell! Voices that shriek and lament! The horrible swarm, pushed by the north wind, without a doubt, oh heavens! is swooping down on my house. The wall yields before the black battalion. The leaning house screams and totters; and one would say that the wind tears the house from the ground, rolling it with their whirlwind, as it might chase a dry leaf!
  9. Prophet! If your hand saves me from these impure demons of the nights, I will prostrate myself before your sacred censers/altars. Let it be that, before these faithful doors, their breath dies in sparks, and that in vain the claws of their wings scratch and screech at these dark windows!
  10. They’ve gone! Their cohort flies away, flees; and their feet have stopped beating on my door with multiple blows. The air is full of the noise of chains; and in the nearby forest all the great oaks quiver, folded beneath their flight of fire!
  11. The beating of their distant wings diminishes: so confused in the plains, so feeble that one seems to hear the locust cry in a frail voice, or hail crackle on an old lead roof.
  12. Strange syllables still come to us; thus does an Arab chant rise up on the beach when the horn is sounded; and the child who dreams dreams golden dreams.
  13. The baneful Genies, sons of death, hurry on into the shadows; their swarm growls: thus profoundly murmurs a wave one doesn’t see.
  14. This vague noise that subsides in sleep is the wave on the shore; it’s the moaning, almost faded away, of a saint for someone dead.
  15. We doubt the night… I listen—everything flees, everything passes away, space erases the noise.