Bright rooms, towers and laboratories
With, on their fringes, evocatory sphinxes,
And tilted skyward, golden telescopes.
Blocks of light broken in treasures,
Monumental crystals and mottled minerals,
Broadswords of virgin sun, in tempered prisms,
Ardent crucibles, red jars, fertile flames,
Where subtle dusts transform;
Clean and delicate instruments,
As well as insects,
Taut springs and correct scales,
Cones, segments, angles, squares, compass
Are all there, living and breathing in the atmosphere
Of struggle and conquest of matter.
’Tis the house of science,
Penetrated from afar by facts, down to ideas.
Say! what times poured into the abyss of years,
And what anguish, what hope of destinies,
And what brains freighted with noble lassitude
Did it take to produce a mote of certitude?
Say! the error darkening the brows; the drudgery
Of belief where savoir went apace;
Say! the first screams, high upon the mountain,
Dispatched by the insensible roar of the crowd below.
Say! the fires and the pyres; say! the gridirons;
Crazed regards, of faces white with terror;
Say! the martyred bodies, say! the wounds
Shouting out truth, with their bloody mouths.
’Tis the house of science,
Penetrated from afar by facts, down to ideas.
With eyes
Meticulous or monstrous,
One catches growths or disasters unawares
Stretching from atom to star.
Life is ruffled there, immense and united,
In its surface or its miraculous folds,
Like the sea and its stormy gulfs,
By the sun and its myriad hands of gold.
Each works there eagerly,
Methodical and slow, in a joint effort;
Each unknots a knot, in the complexity
Of the problems one assembles there;
And all scrutinize and watch and prove,
All are right—but only one discovers.
Ah, that one, tell me! from what distant festivities
Hails he, full of clarity and of day,
Say! with what flame in the heart and what love
And what hope lighting up his head;
Say! as when he advances and at times
Feels himself vibrating and fermenting
To the same rhythm as the law that
He defines, and makes known.
How simple and unassuming before things,
How humble and attentive, when night
Slips the enigmatic word to him,
Manages to crack his closed lips;
And how in listening inward, suddenly, he reaches,
In the ever more swarming and green forest,
The bare white virgin discovery,
And promulgates it to the world as destiny.
And when others, like unto him, yet more than himself,
With their luminancy will have torched the earth
And rung the bronze bell at the gates of mystery,
—After how many days, how many nights,
How many cries pushed towards the annihilation of all,
How many extinguished voices, canceled intentions,
And bad oceans casting back the probes—
Will come a moment, where so many savant ingenious
efforts,
So much genius and so many brains straining towards
the unknown
Spite of all, will have built upon deep substructures
And, spurting skyward, the synthesis of worlds!
’Tis the house of science, penetrated from
Afar, towards the union of all ideas.
Jacob Siefring's literary translations from the French include several books by Pierre Senges, including The Major Refutation (Contra Mundum, 2016) and Studies of Silhouettes (Sublunary, 2020). He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, where he works at the public library. “Research” is from Tentacular Cities by Emile Verhaeren, forthcoming in full translation in the Empyrean Series of Sublunary Editions in early 2023.
Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916) was a Belgian critic, poet, and playwright who rose to prominence during the final decades of the nineteenth century. He is considered an important member of the French Symbolist movement in poetry. In 1898, he moved to Paris, where many of his works were published by Mercure de France, helping them to become known across Europe and to be translated into Russian and German. He died in 1916 in an accident while boarding a train at Rouen station.
Portait of E. Verhaeren by Nikola Perscheid, Berlin, 1913 (Musée E. Verhaeren, Sint-Amands)