Authors: Victor Hugo, E. H. Blackmore (Translator), A. M. Blackmore
ISBN-13: 9780226359809, ISBN-10: 0226359808
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date Published: April 2001
Edition: 1
"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away," the larger-than-life Victor Hugo once confessed. Indeed, this 19th-century French master's works -- from the epic drama Les Misérables to the classic unrequited love story The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- have spanned the ages, their themes of morality and redemption ever applicable to our times.
Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet—one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions.
Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions.
Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.
This satisfyingly fat collection has some definite virtues in tracking the poetic output of Hugo (1802-1885), France's monumental 19th-century scribe: it is organized chronologically, with prefaces that mark out his various phases, and the original French texts are included, which is a rare if necessary pleasure in understanding European poetry. Unfortunately, in terms of translation, this huge book is almost a total loss. The Blackmores (Six French Poets) are a freelance writer and a faculty member of Australia's Curtin University, respectively, and they have chosen to render Hugo's work by preserving the rhymes. What results loses almost all of Hugo's power, as his delicate combination of the plainspoken and grandiose is upset by the demands of English jingling. Perhaps Hugo's most famous lyric, "Tomorrow, at Dawn...," becomes: "I'll cross the woods, I'll cross the mountain-height./ No longer can I keep away from you.../ Alone, unknown, hands crossed, and back inclined;..." If the "mountain-height" and "inclined" seem odd, that's because they are inventions of the translators, in order to rhyme with "bright" and "mind" respectively. Hugo wrote a far simpler poem, about how he would "go by the mountain" with his "back bent" to pay his respects at his daughter's grave. It is not an isolated incident, and anyone who reads even a little French must wince at the constant unpoetic interventions in English. This is a particular pity, as the translators have clearly worked hard to set the poet's work in biographical context, even if a preface underrates his novels as "by-products of his career... in which his talents were only half involved." The rather skimpy notes and very limited bibliography are added disappointments. (Apr.) Forecast: As far as bilingual selections of Hugo's verse go, this is presently the only game in town, so university libraries and stores with larger poetry collections will be forced to act accordingly. The French versions and good intentions of the translators provide some succor. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
List of illustrations | ||
Introductionv | ||
Chronology | ||
Odes and ballads (1822-8) | 1 | |
Epitaph | 4 | |
Morning | 6 | |
Summer rain | 8 | |
Orientalia (1829) | 15 | |
Moonlight | 18 | |
The child | 20 | |
Anticipation | 22 | |
The captured city | 24 | |
Ecstasy | 24 | |
Bounaberdi | 26 | |
Autumn leaves (1831) | 30 | |
"This century was two years old ..." | 32 | |
The slope of reverie | 36 | |
"I love these calm clear evening hours ..." | 46 | |
"Tonight in clouds the sun has gone to bed ..." | 48 | |
"One last word ..." | 50 | |
Songs of the half-light (1835) | 56 | |
"Lord, if you shelter France beneath your wings ..." | 58 | |
"Never revile a woman for her fall ..." | 60 | |
"Since I have tasted your still-brimming bowl ..." | 60 | |
Trust in God | 62 | |
"Since flowering May is calling us outside ..." | 62 | |
Lilies in tribute | 64 | |
Inner voices (1837) | 71 | |
To Virgil | 72 | |
To Albrecht Durer | 76 | |
"In Virgil, that almost angelic God ..." | 78 | |
"Look at the children next to one another ..." | 78 | |
"Love, child, is first of all a mirror ..." | 80 | |
After reading Dante | 82 | |
Sunlight and shadows (1840) | 86 | |
"In souls, as in pools slumbering beneath trees ..." | 88 | |
Guitar song | 88 | |
Passing through the place Louis XV on a public holiday | 90 | |
"O in my dreams draw near my resting place ..." | 92 | |
The melancholy of Olympio | 94 | |
Night on the ocean | 106 | |
June nights | 108 | |
The empire in the Pillory (1853) | 111 | |
To those who died on the fourth of December | 114 | |
"Since honest men are in the slime ..." | 116 | |
Fable - or history | 120 | |
No | 120 | |
The imperial cloak | 124 | |
Song of the departing seafarers | 126 | |
The expiation | 128 | |
Star | 152 | |
"There was a storm; the tide was at its height ..." | 154 | |
Contemplations (1856) | 159 | |
My two daughters | 162 | |
Reply to a bill of indictment | 162 | |
Continuation | 176 | |
"Blessed is the man rapt in the timeless will ..." | 182 | |
Omphale's spinning wheel | 184 | |
Letter | 186 | |
Written at the foot of a crucifix | 188 | |
Insomnia | 188 | |
Joys of evening | 192 | |
"It was a quirk of hers from earliest childhood ..." | 196 | |
"At dawn tomorrow, when the plains grow bright ..." | 198 | |
Death | 200 | |
"A stream fell from the mountainside ..." | 200 | |
At the feuillantines | 202 | |
Words on the dune | 204 | |
"I picked this flower for you on the hilltop ..." | 208 | |
"Hear me : I, John, have seen dark things ..." | 210 | |
"With our vile pleasures, passions, and disgraces ..." | 210 | |
To the veiled one | 212 | |
"It's all a tomb ..." | 220 | |
Nomen, numen, lumen | 222 | |
To the one who stayed in France | 222 | |
Songs of street and wood (1865) | 246 | |
Maytime dispatches | 248 | |
Reality | 250 | |
"Beware of pretty girls ..." | 250 | |
Seed-time, evening | 252 | |
The lion at noon | 254 | |
"'Be off!' say winter's snows ..." | 256 | |
The year of horrors (1872) | 260 | |
On the ramparts of Paris, at nightfall | 262 | |
Stupidity of war | 262 | |
A night in Brussels | 264 | |
"They serenade me, since I'm so humane ..." | 266 | |
The revilers | 268 | |
The art of being a grandfather (1877) | 270 | |
"There on the grass Jeanne sat, pink, pondering ..." | 272 | |
"The Comte de Buffon, fine fellow ..." | 274 | |
"Animals, see, they talk ..." | 280 | |
What the public says | 280 | |
The immaculate conception | 284 | |
The four winds of the spirit (1881) | 291 | |
For whom the cap fits | 294 | |
Pretty girls | 296 | |
"She went past : and I think she smiled at me ..." | 296 | |
"Because I shun the public marketplace ..." | 298 | |
"Marble and night created me ..." | 300 | |
To my daughter Adele | 304 | |
Walking in the morning | 304 | |
"All, always ..." | 306 | |
Night thoughts | 308 | |
The legend of the ages (1859-83) | 313 | |
To France | 318 | |
The earth | 318 | |
The lions | 326 | |
Boaz asleep | 336 | |
God invisible to the thinker | 342 | |
Supremacy | 344 | |
Inscription | 354 | |
The dragon | 356 | |
To the lion of Androcles | 356 | |
Muhammad | 362 | |
The parricide | 362 | |
Vivar | 372 | |
The insulted bey | 376 | |
The infanta's rose | 378 | |
"I walked at random, went forward ..." | 392 | |
The devourers | 394 | |
"A deep-eyed man went by ..." | 398 | |
The mountains | 400 | |
"All, in the vaulted dark, was vision ..." | 404 | |
1851 - a choice between two passersby | 406 | |
"I thought I had stopped living ..." | 408 | |
"O God, whose work excels all we can think ..." | 410 | |
The end of Satan (1886) | 415 | |
The song of Bethphage | 418 | |
The triumphal procession | 432 | |
The agony begins | 438 | |
Christ sees what will come to pass | 440 | |
Judas | 446 | |
Rosmophim | 450 | |
The crucifix | 450 | |
Beyond the earth III | 458 | |
God (1891) | 463 | |
"May this work, in its blazing flight ..." | 466 | |
The threshold of the abyss | 466 | |
The bat | 478 | |
The raven | 488 | |
The eagle | 500 | |
The light-source | 514 | |
The whole lyre (1888-97) | 538 | |
"Dusk, calm and deep, spreads out across the plains ..." | 540 | |
Night | 540 | |
"Barbey breathes - it's the way things are ..." | 542 | |
For Theophile Gautier | 544 | |
The moon | 548 | |
Birds | 550 | |
"Some day, no longer ruling any land ..." | 552 | |
"Do you take mankind for be-all and end-all? ..." | 552 | |
The fateful years (1898) | 558 | |
"Your honor, let me put it to you plain ..." | 560 | |
Paris "embellished" | 562 | |
Imperial and empirical | 564 | |
Last gleanings (1902) | 566 | |
Chorus | 568 | |
"Eternal, absolute, boundless, immutable ..." | 570 | |
Ocean (1942) | 572 | |
"Night fills the house with its funereal breeze ..." | 574 | |
"Yes, the same infinite - blue sea, deep shade ..." | 574 | |
"Calmly God writes across the glorious vast ..." | 576 | |
Notes | 579 | |
Select bibliography | 615 | |
List of poems in order of composition | 617 | |
Index of titles and first lines | 623 |