An Anthology of Czechoslovak Literature/To Theodor Mommsen
To Theodor Mommsen
Brutish, overweening! To you, on the brink of the grave,
Arrogant bastard of Roman emperors and conquering Germania;
To you, dotard, blinded by vainglory,
I chant the infuriate song of a barbarian, aroused by the smiting of hoofs.
Scornfully I smite your enwrinkled visage,
O bestial fanatic of relentless Kaiserdom;
Your shrivelled temples I smite, your turgid Neronic lips I smite,
Covered with foaming of impotent fury.
Which now seeks to lay in store of flesh for the slaughterhouse,
And to shatter the brains of manacled and vanquished victims?
For your unified Imperium to humiliate bondsmen in hordes,
Whom gladly you viewed trampled upon in triumphal arrays,
Humiliated by Roman Cæsars, the bondsmen in hordes,
Meet to be fashioned into saleable myrmidons to enrol for the Imperium.
Do you behold naught else but the blossoming peaks of your country,
And all beyond would you leeringly crunch
Beneath war-chariots of the conquerors
And their uncouth tread?
Now, after battle-triumphs of your Imperium,
You hankered to enslave what of Europe remained,
To enslave, to enslave, woefully to enslave,
Bondsmen predestined for seizure, dung for enriching of soil,
Beasts to be yoked to the chariot of triumph,
And from them you deemed barbarians, to break in levies
For the Imperium, your insatiate Imperium.
We flouted the flabby wisdom of your Luther,
Reformer purveying peace unto contentedly fattened townsmen,
Begetting children with God-abiding spouses,
And stifling freedom,
So now do we flout your crude, senile wisdom!
It is enkindled not by sorrow of us, nor of all humanity;
Therein is not the purity that perishes for its faith;
Therein is not the passion wherewith the martyr at Constance[1] was ablaze;
And therefore, brutish dotard,
Grown hoary in the service of your baneful Imperium,
From whose relentless wisdom are hidden the mysteries of maltreated spirits,
What avail you now your lore and your revered gray hairs?
Your sorry wisdom has conceived not the light of righteousness,
Nor the gladness of youthful nations in their own destining;
Has conceived not that an ancient realm durst not enslave,
Would it warm and illumine,
And not be but a chafing and burdensome
Monstrous millstone about the neck of a galley-slave!
What avail you revered gray hairs, since you babble senile saws.
O dotard, tottering on the brink of the grave;
Since you have forgotten to proclaim unison and humaneness,
Destruction of tyrannies and of hatred;
Since you have forgotten to reconcile your own infirm self with the world,
And to utter a prayer for all-accomplishing compassion?
What avail you revered gray hairs, since you drudge for darkness,
In an age when a myriad slaves hunger with an all-human suffering
And clamour at the gates of retrieval!
Since through the causeways of ancient cities range spirits of anarchy
Scoffing at your Kaiserdom;
Since from down-trodden bondsmen of all castes and all nations,
Flicker the first torches of humanity,
Even as from amid the barbarians impaled upon stakes by Nero,
Blazed forth the lustre of Christendom!
They will glitter, torches ablaze, unto your sightless eyes,
And will lay bare your words, wherein is sealed the downfall of your race;
But ere that, I, with disdainful retaliation
Welling up from the sorrowful soil of this cowering age,
Advance to the rim of your grave,
And fling it upon you, despotical dotard,
That with this grinding reproach you may be burdened eternally, eternally. . . .
(1897)
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1931. The longest-living author of this work died in 1928, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 97 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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| Translation: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1931. The longest-living author of this work died in 1970, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 55 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
