VICTOR HUGO was born in 1802 at Besançon, now capital of the department of Doubs in eastern France. His father, a career officer in Napoleon’s army, was at that time a major, but he rose eventually to the rank of general and was created a count. His various garrison appointments occasioned a number of removals, and the education of the youthful Victor-Marie was in consequence diversified, taking place in Italy and Spain as well as in Paris, at the Maison des Feuillantines. This was certainly good for him. There may be some doubt as to whether he could really read Tacitus at the age of seven, as he claimed, but he received a very thorough grounding in the humanities.
Hugo was, in short, the precocious son (the youngest of three brothers) of well-to-do middle-class parents. His literary vocation was very soon manifest. A poem written while he was still at school won a literary prize, and in 1819, with his brother Abel, he launched the Conservateur Littéraire, a review which, although it survived for only two years, achieved some prominence as a mouthpiece of the Romantic movement.
He shared with nearly all major writers the quality of abundance. The works poured out in an uneven flood, good, bad and indifferent, splendid at their best and, at their worst, lamentable: some twenty volumes of poetry, of which the best known are Les Châtiments (1853) and Les Contemplations (1856), nine novels, ten plays, mostly in verse (Hernani, Ruy Blas) and a huge amount of general writing, literary, sociological and political. Hugo was always, in the French word, engagé, deeply concerned with the social and political developments of his time. His politics might change in the light of events and as a reflection of his own growth, but his essential position remained unchanged. He was first and foremost, by nature as well as by conviction, a romantic. It was an attitude to life expressing itself in all life’s activities, above all in the arts but also in politics, where it bore the name of liberalism. As time went on and he outgrew the Bonapartism inherited from his father and the royalism inherited from his mother, this liberalism took the form of outspoken republicanism. Universal suffrage and free (compulsory) education were to become the basic tenets of his political creed.
He was greatly afflicted by the death, in 1843, of his daughter, Léopoldine, and for some years there was a pause in the flow of purely literary work; but his political career and his growth as a national figure both continued to progress. Although he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with monarchism he contrived to be on good terms with Louis-Philippe, for whom, as his account in Les Misérables shows, he had both liking and respect. He was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1837, was elected to the Académie Française in 1841 and created a pair de France (a life peer and member of the Upper House) in 1845.
Three years later, when the revolution of 1848 drove Louis-Philippe from the throne, he became a member of the Constituent Assembly of the newly formed republic; but he could not stomach Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1851), and since his condemnation of it was too loud to be overlooked he was forced to leave France. After staying for a time in Brussels, he moved to the Channel Islands, first to Jersey and then to Guernsey, where he lived with his wife and family for fourteen years, with the actress Juliette Drouet, his lifelong mistress, close at hand. It was here that he wrote, among other things, Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) and completed the novel which is generally considered to be his masterpiece, Les Misérables, published in 1862.
The brothers Goncourt, at that time the high priests of literature in France, were not impressed by Les Misérables. ‘The lack of firsthand observation,’ they wrote, ‘is everywhere painfully manifest. Hugo has built his book, situation and characters alike, on the appearance of reality, not on reality itself.’ This was their conclusion after reading the first volume. Having read the whole book they likened the author to ‘those English preachers who harangue strollers in the parks on a Sunday’.
Professor Marius-François Guyard, from whose meticulously edited and annotated text (Garnier Frères, 1963) this translation has been made, and to whom the present translator is immensely indebted, answers the Goncourts by citing some of the novel’s more unforgettable characters – Jean Valjean, the Thénardiers, Fantine, Javert and, above all, the splendid street-urchin Gavroche. He is silent however on the subject of Marius, that singularly lacklustre young man who is supposedly a portrait of the youthful Victor Hugo himself.
The Goncourts were both right and wrong, right in the narrow sense but not in the large one. They were right about the realism which Hugo strove so laboriously and, on the whole, so unsuccessfully to achieve. No one could have worked harder at it. He read and read, he pored endlessly over maps and documents, and the fruits of his researches so encumber his book that many readers beside the Goncourts must have found themselves unequal to the effort of pursuing it. But this factual realism is constantly at war with the poet. Imaginative realism is another matter. Les Misérables, with its depth of vision and underlying truth, its moments of lyrical quality and of moving compassion, is a novel of towering stature, one of the great works of western literature, a melodrama that is also a morality and a social document embracing a wider field than any other novel of its time, conceived on the scale of War and Peace but even more ambitious.
That is the trouble. The defects which the Goncourts saw, and which no one can fail to see, since they are as monumental as the book itself, may be summed up in the single word, extravagance. Hugo, although as the final result shows he was masterly in the construction of his novel, had little or no regard for the discipline of novel-writing. He was wholly unrestrained and unsparing of his reader. He had to say everything and more than everything; he was incapable of leaving anything out. The book is loaded down with digressions, interpolated discourses, passages of moralizing rhetoric and pedagogic disquisitions.
One reason for this is that it was written over a period of nearly twenty years. A first unfinished novel entitled Misères was written during the three years from 1845 to 1848; it was then put aside for twelve years, to be completed in 1860–62 as Les Misérables. (An untranslatable title: the first meaning of the French misère is simply misery; the second meaning is utmost poverty, destitution; but Hugo’s misérables are not merely the poor and wretched, they are the outcasts, the underdogs, the rejected of society and the rebels against society.)
As to the digressions, many of them are in fact interpolations. Much had happened in the world during the twelve years that the book was laid aside and much had happened to Hugo himself. He had moved steadily away from his right-wing bourgeois origins to the point where he was not only an avowed republican but could openly proclaim himself a socialist. It is not surprising that that earlier work required considerable amendment if it was to conform to the changed viewpoint of the Hugo who returned to it in 1860.
But some of the digressions, or interpolations, are still indefensible, the most flagrant being the account of the Battle of Waterloo, which occupies the third book of Part Two. It is subdivided into nineteen chapters filling sixty-nine pages of the closely printed French text, and only the last chapter, seven pages long, has any real bearing on Hugo’s story. The rest is entirely concerned with the battle. Hugo, as he tells us, had tramped over the battlefield, presumably when he was living in Brussels in 1853; he had studied maps and army-lists and such professional records as were available to him, and out of this he concocted his own elaborate and poeticized layman’s version of an event which, tremendous though it was, had no more to do with the story of Les Misérables than any other major historical event that had occurred during the century.
This is the largest of the digressions, and it is reasonable to assume that the bulk of it was written long before Hugo returned to his novel. The present English version has retained it, very slightly abridged, in the place it occupies in the novel, partly because it is a magnificent piece of writing and also because the episode described in that final chapter is crucial to the story.
Two other long digressions, however, have been treated with less respect. The first is in the seventh book of Part Two, entitled Parenthèse, in which Hugo discourses upon the subject of strictly enclosed religious orders, of which he disapproved (he himself, although he was broadly and sincerely religious, subscribed to no particular orthodoxy). This parenthesis follows immediately upon another, the meticulous (and fascinating) account of life in the Petit-Picpus convent, so that the story, at a highly dramatic point, is left in mid-air for some fifty pages. Hugo’s publisher, Lacroix, feeling that this would be trying the reader’s patience altogether too high, urged him to take it out; but Hugo refused, as it seems for purely personal reasons: his cousin Marie, to whom he was attached, had taken the veil in 1848. This section has accordingly been removed from the body of the book and transferred to the end as Appendix A.
The discourse on argot (Book Seven, Part Four) has been similarly treated and is relegated to Appendix B in Volume II. Here little explanation is needed. In so far as it related directly to the argot (Paris underworld slang) of Hugo’s day, his discourse, with its numerous examples, can be of interest only to specialists; where it spreads into the wider field of the general significance of thieves’ cant (a digression within a digression!) it is more interesting; but in any event it does nothing to advance the story.
The other digressions, homilies and disquisitions, or simply over-large elaborations, have been left where they were, but in some cases, particularly those of over-elaboration, they have been somewhat abridged. And here I must abandon any suggestion of the editorial ‘we’ and state as plainly as I can my personal approach to the translation of Les Misérables and the liberties I have felt justified in taking with Hugo’s text.
There are three earlier English renderings of Hugo’s novel, of which I have seen only one. I shall not disclose which one, or make any comment except to say that I found it very heavy going. It was made at the turn of the century and the translator, conscientiously observing the principles of translation at that time, has made a brave attempt to follow Hugo in the smallest detail, almost literally word for word. The result is something that is not English, not Hugo and, it seems to me, scarcely readable. It reads, in short, like a translation and it does no service to Hugo. I am told that the other English versions, which I have not seen, are not very different.
The principles of translation have greatly changed in the past twenty or thirty years. It is now generally recognized that the translator’s first concern must be with his author’s intention; not with the words he uses or with the way he uses them, if they have a different impact when they are rendered too faithfully into English, but with what he is seeking to convey to the reader. This, of course, embraces a great deal more than literal meaning or the plain statement of fact: feeling, colour, poetry, humour, irony, all these are elements which the translator may on no account ignore; he must catch them as best he can. But there is an overriding intention, larger than all others. The author – each and every author – writes because he wants to be read. Readability must be the translator’s first concern. Sometimes he is set an impossible task. There are writers who may fairly be termed unreadable. But Victor Hugo is not one of them. He is in many ways the most exasperating of writers – long-winded, extravagant in his use of words (it is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun), sprawling and self-indulgent. At times (the vanity for which he was famous may account for it) he was, with all his high-minded earnestness, extraordinarily lacking in self-criticism. There are passages of mediocrity and banality in Les Misérables, as in all his work, which may cause the reader to lose all patience with him and put the book aside, without having ever reached the nobility of spirit that inspired it.
The translator (and here I am referring specifically to myself and Les Misérables) can, I maintain, do something to remedy these defects without falsifying the book, if he will nerve himself to treat Hugo not as a museum piece or a sacred cow but as the author of a very great novel which is still living, still relevant to life, and which deserves to be read. He can ‘edit’ – that is to say abridge, tone down the rhetoric, even delete where the passage in question is merely an elaboration of what has already been said.
I have edited in this sense throughout the book, as a rule only to a minor degree, and never, I hope, so drastically as to be unfaithful to Hugo’s intention. I must cite the most extreme case in illustration of what I mean. This is the third book of Part One entitled ‘In the year 1817’. Hugo has sought to convey the social climate of that particular year by compiling a lengthy catalogue of personalities and events, most of them of no great importance – people and happenings, in short, that got into the news at the time. One has the impression that he did it by skimming through the newspaper headlines. What is certain is that most of his allusions would have meant nothing to any except his oldest readers even when the book was published in 1862. As for the present day, Professor Guyard has found it necessary to append sixty-two footnotes for the enlightenment of contemporary French readers – incidentally pointing out, not infrequently, that Hugo got his facts wrong. I have dealt with this section by drastically reducing it, cutting out references that would be meaningless to English readers and including only those that serve Hugo’s purpose of conveying the atmosphere of Paris in that year. The footnotes have either been incorporated in the text or abolished where they no longer applied, except in the case of a very few which had to go at the bottom of the page. I may mention incidentally that the footnotes throughout the book are to be attributed to Professor Guyard except where I specifically acknowledge them – ‘trs.’.
This foreword is unavoidable if the reader is to know exactly what he is getting – not a photograph but a slightly modified version of Hugo’s novel designed to bring its great qualities into clearer relief by thinning out, but never completely eliminating, its lapses. It must stand or fall not by its literal accuracy, although I profoundly hope that I have been guilty of no major solecisms, but by its faithfulness to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He was above all things, and at all times, a poet. If the fact is not apparent to the English reader then this rendering of his work must be said to have failed.
NORMAN DENNY
While through the working of laws and customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains possible; in other words, and in still wider terms, while ignorance and poverty persist on earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value.
Hauteville House, 1 January 1862