The Vast and Incomparable Epic Poetry of Victor Hugo

For 20th century readers of English with even some knowledge of French literature, Victor Hugo’s monumental poetic oeuvre comprising well over 155,000 lines--and this aside from the verse of his dramas--has stood like a vast shadowed mountain, unvisited and unclimbed, celebrated and ignored. It became the object of averted gaze in an age of modernism, when the agenda outlined in Marcel Raymond’s “From Baudelaire to Sur-realism” became requisite for the assimilation of French literature. A young person starting out to write poetry in English in the 20th century might easily translate Baudelaire as part of a self-imposed apprenticeship, but modernist taste would never point him or her to Hugo. Who was the greatest poet of the 19th century? “Hugo, helas!” allowed Andre Gide in a famous letter to Paul Valery. And young modernists and post-modernists all delighted, if they knew it, in Jean Cocteau’s not-quite-Wildean “Victor Hugo was a man who believed himself to be Victor Hugo.”

But what they did not know was not only that Hugo was magnificently correct in so thinking but that the “Victor Hugo” in question was, for later French literature, paralyzingly great. Poets as different as Algernon Charles Swinburne (who published a fine little book about Hugo the year after his death as well as addressing a good number of poems to him at various times, as he had to Baudelaire and Whitman) and Valery acknowledged his power, and certainly Hardy (who translated a short poem of Hugo’s) knew his work well. But aside from one or two set pieces that one might have learned at school, such as the beautiful “Booz endormi” (Boaz Sleeping), his poetry has been neglected by French literature today, let alone by English translation.

Hugo’s body of verse is not only vast but seems to move, after his earlier work, toward comprising one huge epical poem composed of cycles of subcycles of shorter ones. A considerable amount of it was published after his death in 1885. Like “Leaves of Grass,” it was a body subjected to additions and revisions. Its analogues in English poetry can be found variously in Blake and Shelley, and--particularly in Hugo’s late great “Le Seuil du gouffre” (The Threshold of the Abyss)--in the darker Coleridge of “Ne Plus Ultra.”

Born in 1802 and growing up in familial turmoil that took him in childhood from France to Italy to Spain, Hugo showed amazing poetic gifts early on. At 20, his first book of poems was published, and he got married; his beloved elder daughter Leopoldine was born two years later. At 30, he had published five books of verse--some of them involving revisions, even at this early age, of previous material--as well as “Notre Dame de Paris” (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and “Hernani,” a historical drama in verse. Its first performance produced a famous brouhaha at the theater, in good part because of its verse, whose misplaced caesuras and excessive enjambment effected what was felt to be a subversion of the neo-classical alexandrine line whose syntactic framing had been in place since Racine.

Hugo’s meditative lyrical work continued to fill volume after volume during the years he was writing plays and conducting a lifelong love affair with Juliette Drouet. His daughter Leopoldine drowned shortly after her marriage in 1843, which plunged him into grief, and he wrote no verse for more than three years. He grew more concerned politically after the 1848 revolution. The coup d’etat of 1851 bringing Louis Napoleon to presidential--and then, the next year, to imperial--power, drove him to a monumental satiric enterprise whose rhetorical force verged on the visionary. The 1853 volume called “Les Chatiments” (The Castigations) makes clear in its opening poem, “Nox,” his devotion to a new “Muse Indignation,” “beloved of Juvenal [the great Roman satirist],” whose brilliance “shone from Dante’s fixed glare.” Hugo asks this muse to set up, “in this happy and glowing empire,” “pillories enough to build an epic with.”

She helped him set up a multitude of them--nearly 100 poems, some of considerable length. In many of these, Hugo elaborates what is almost a mytho-poetic--albeit starkly satiric--parallel to Marx’s famous opening sentence of “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” qualifying Hegel’s observation about history repeating itself by adding that the first time around was tragedy, the second time farce. Marx was addressing the ideological and iconographic trappings of the Second Empire, as, in his thunderous and biting satire and from another kind of political perspective, was Hugo.

For his views and activities, he was exiled in 1852, and moved in that year to Jersey, where he held table-rapping seances during which he communicated with the dead (I regret now never having discussed these with James Merrill, whose time spent with the Ouija board was poetically far more fruitful; still, there are long instructive lectures from a bat, a raven and an eagle in Hugo’s late “Le Seuil du gouffre,” which call to mind some of the tutorials in part three of “The Changing Light at Sandover.”) A few years later, Hugo moved to the neighboring island of Guernsey, where he lived and worked until the proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870.

While on Guernsey, he assembled what are perhaps his two greatest works, the first of these being the large collection of poems of 1856 titled “Les Contemplations” (Contemplations). It is arranged in two parts, each with three subdivisions. He affixed dates to each of the 156 poems that associate them not so much with times of composition but with moments in the poet’s life he felt to be reflected in them: the death of Leopoldine and his love of Juliette, with his own poetic vocation and work. The poems are varied in their concerns with inner and outer, public and private life, and in their subgenres--short and longer lyrics, personal narratives, largely in rhymed alexandrines and often in stanzas composed of two 12-syllable couplets with a six-syllable line, rhyming with one another, after each.

This was followed three years later by the great “La Legende des Siecles” (The Legend of the Centuries), a cyclical epic of epochs, consisting of episodic stories ranging from biblical Creation (the Bible had become increasingly important for him) up through the middle of the 19th century. Additional series were added in 1877 and 1883; subsequent visionary works like “La Fin de Satan” (The Death of Satan) were outgrowths of it. After bringing out a book of essentially occasional and even light verse, “The Art of Being a Grandfather” (1877), Hugo’s subsequent publications, such as “The Four Winds of the Spirit” (1881)--a collection classified generically--were all of earlier work that had been excluded from previous volumes: He had a stroke in 1878 and wrote mostly fragments--although some of them remarkable--thereafter.

Hugo’s oeuvre has barely been touched by responsible poetic translation into English. Dreadful late 19th century versions compiled for complete “sets” of Hugo in English aside, after World War I only occasional poems done by poets for themselves, with no regard to the acute political incorrectness for the tastes of modernism, would occasionally show up. One of Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” freely reworked the first section of Hugo’s “l’Expiation”; of contemporary poets, Louis Simpson and Rachel Hadas have produced excellent rhymed versions of a few Hugo poems (Simpson of “Paroles dans l’ombre” and section two of “l’Expiation,” Hadas of “Booz endormi” and a short poem from “Les Contemplations”). Twenty years ago, Harry Guest published a volume in England of 66 poems selected from most of Hugo’s books of poetry (although with nothing from the long visionary “Le Seuil du gouffre”). It deliberately deployed an eclectic formal mode--sometimes rhyming, sometimes keeping to metrical stanza forms that are unrhymed, sometimes using free verse for expressive purposes.

Guest was a noble pioneer, but he has finally been followed by what is in its way the monumental achievement of E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, a bilingual edition of more than 140 poems selected from the full range of Hugo’s career and containing 4,000 lines never before translated. The poems are arranged by the various books in which they appeared during Hugo’s lifetime and posthumously, with notes to the poems and a most useful and elegant introduction to each book.

But most important, the translations are made into English verse with outstanding skill and power, the product of the most informed decisions about what at any moment should be sacrificed--with regard to both diction and to formal and metrical matters--to gain something else. It is obvious that the translators know English poetry thoroughly and deeply and they have managed to catch Hugo’s grand tone and his wit, his highly patterned and his more colloquial kinds of line. They have been able throughout, without stylistic fanfare, to rescue so many occasional moments which are usually lost in translation: in the fierce “Mors” ([Latin for “Death”) from Book IV of “Les Contemplations”:

Man followed every scythe-flash with his gaze,

Heroes beneath the arches of their praise

Fell; she turned Babylon to desert stones,

Thrones into gallows, gallows into thrones.

L’homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de la faulx.

Et les triumphateurs sous les arcs triomphaux

Tombaient; elle changeait en desert Babylone,

Le trone en echefaud et l’echefaud en trone.

As can be seen here, the French alexandrine line handles patternings like chiasmus--the a-b-b-a reversals of word or part of speech--more easily than the English pentameter, which can manage parallels more easily. (Thus Boaz in the Blackmores’ “Booz endormi,” thinking of his dead first wife: “Elle a demi vivante et moi mort a demi” says in English “For she is half alive, and I half dead”). In “Mors,” at the reasonable price of adding the “stones” their translation preserves the chiasmus of the last line. It also importantly keeps the force of the enjambment of “Fell,” so prominent in the original (I think here of the end of Shelley’s “England in 1819,” a most Hugo-like poem, which concludes a list of the evils of Castlereagh’s repressive government with “... Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may/Burst to illumine our tempestuous day ... “).

Two versions of a poem from “Les Contemplations” (IV. 14, dated 1847), invoking one of Hugo’s continual visits to Leopoldine’s grave, provide an exemplary glimpse into the kind of rhetorical economy--a feel for the appropriateness of trade-offs--that mark the major poetic translator. The Blackmore version in the present volume follows the metrical and stanzaic form (as usual, using English pentameter for the French alexandrine):

At dawn tomorrow, when the plains grow bright,

I’ll go. You wait for me: I know you do.

I’ll cross the woods, I’ll cross the mountain height.

No longer can I keep away from you.

I’ll walk along with eyes fixed on my mind--

The world around I’ll neither hear nor see--

Alone, unknown, hands crossed and back inclined;

And day and night will be alike to me.

I’ll neither see the gold of evening gloom

Nor the sails off to Harfleur, far away;

And when I come, I’ll place upon your tomb

Some flowering heather and a holly spray.

Another translation of the same poem puts it into irregular stanzas each of which might resemble one in a poem by Hardy, and with a softened Hardy-esque tone throughout (the first version sounds a bit like one of the few great poems of Emily Bront):

Tomorrow, when the meadows grow

Bright with the dawn, I’ll leave. I know

That you’ll be waiting for me. Through

Forest and mountain-pass I’ll go.

No longer can I keep from you.

I’ll walk with eyes fixed on my heart,

Seeing nothing all around,

Hearing not the slightest sound,

Back curved, hands crossed, sad, unknown, and apart.

And day will be

Like night to me.

I’ll watch neither the fall of evening fraught

With gold, nor with far sails go down to port;

And when I come,

There on your grave I’ll

set a wreath:

Fresh holly-sprays and flowering heath.

In this instance, the more improvisatory-sounding stanzas marked an expressive dimension. In fact, both of these versions are the Blackmores’, the second from a group of excellent translations of Hugo poems in an anthology they edited titled “Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century” (Oxford University Press). I’d like to think (but I can’t assume) that the first one quoted was the result of second thoughts; but in any case, the considerations lying behind those very choices--which will themselves limit options as the translation goes along--are not made lightly.

The second stanza in French--”Je marcherai les yeux fixes sur mes pensees,/Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,/Seul, inconnu, le dos courbe, les mains croisees,/Triste, et pour le jour moi sera comme la nuit”--reveals the beautiful patterning of the last two lines’ list of attributes, with the building number of syllables cut short with the enjambed “sad” starting the last line.

It is not that the Blackmores wouldn’t have been able to handle this but that in both instances there were other priorities, and attention to them never seems silly nor results in clumsiness but rather in extremely self-assured and easily flowing English verse. (Hadas, who did this poem in stanzas of three fourteeners and one pentameter with assonance instead of rhyme, has this for the middle stanza (opting for neither “mind” nor “heart” and using the extra line-length she gets to save the “Triste.” At the beginning of the last line): “I’ll walk along and look at nothing but what’s in my head,/Hear nothing either, and see nothing else on either side,/Alone, unknown, arms folded, bowed down like a heavy weight,/And sad--for me each day will seem like night.”)

The kind of bad verse translation that Hugo suffered a hundred years ago is exemplified by what happens to a stanza of “Booz endormi” (“Et se songe etait tel, que Booz vit un chne/Qui, sorti de son ventre, allait jusqu’au ciel bleu;/Une race y montait sur une longue chaine;/Un roi chantait en bas, en haut mourait un dieu.”) William Alexander in 1900 gives us archaic and awkward diction and a breaking of his metrical contract to give an exact rhythmic equivalent in the last line: “And in his dream, to heav’n, the blue and broad,/Right from his loins an oak-tree grew amain;/His race ran up it far in a long chain./Below it sang a king, above it died a God.” But consider, again, the two Blackmore versions, the first from the Oxford book: “And this was the dream: Boaz saw an oak/Sprout from his loins and rise into the sky,/And up it climbed a mighty chain of folk./A king sang here; up there a god would die.” The second is from “Selected Poems of Victor Hugo”: “And, dreaming, Boaz saw an oak tree grow/Out of his loins, and reach up to the sky,/Where a long chain of people climbed; below/A king sang, and a god was slain on high.” The splendid last line here gladly abandons the strict parallelism of the French caught in the other treatment. In neither case is the choice careless. And it is the immense care taken, the knowledgeable love of Hugo’s verse, which shines through the whole of this book and which distinguishes it as so much more than agreeably competent work.

The Blackmores’ selection has been so carefully considered, and--aside from the amazingly high quality of the translations themselves--presented with such elegantly framed and useful apparatus that it would seem grudging to list poems that one felt should have been included. I would indeed have liked to see this volume include “Ecrit sur la plinthe d’un bas-relief antique” with its strange, almost Whitmanian, catalog of sounds of nature’s music; and the meditation on Palestrina, “Que la Musique date du seizieme siecle”; “Paroles dans l’ombre”--an acknowledgment rare, for Hugo, of what his mistress Juliette’s position must have been; the evocation of the world of Watteau in the lovely “La Fte chez Therese,” a favorite of my teacher, Jacques Barzun; and the “Nox” mentioned earlier. But among those most missed, the Blackmores have indeed previously translated and included in the Oxford University Press volume, the early “Les Djinns,” “Cette nuit-la,” “Souvenir de la nuit du 4,” “Pasteurs et Troupeaux,” “La Conscience,” “A Villequier,” “Le Pont,” “La Trompette de jugement,” and an alternate version of the long opening section of “Le Seuil du gouffre,” and they supplement handsomely the poems in this major volume.

But I should prefer to note these omissions in another way, in terms of a request to the translators, who have already earned our gratitude, to consider another volume that might present some of these. And, particularly, a plea to anyone presently contemplating verse translations of Hugo not to reattempt what the Blackmores have so grandly done but rather to work on presently unexplored regions--as of “La Legende des siecles” and “Les Contemplations”--in Hugo’s poetry. And, too, a hope that he or she will understand that a benchmark or touchstone or whatever has--almost as unequivocally as in the case of Richard Wilbur’s magnificent English versions of Moliere--now been established.