A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

I HAVE BEGUN by trying to find in English the most effective literal rendition of the French. Most of my versions stay close to the phrasing of the originals.

The main difference between Hugo’s verse and my versions may be my enjambment of lines that Hugo stopped with terminal punctuation. Because the end-stopped line has not been required in English as strictly as in French, to observe French practice of another era ignores the disposition of an ear for poetry in English. What my overflowing line has lost in fidelity to outward form it gains by its fidelity to the suppleness and muscularity of Hugo’s style.

Similarly, for American readers more accustomed to free verse, strict meter and rhyme may misrepresent the tone of a writer whose fluency loosened the alexandrine. Free verse, on the other hand, misses the tenor of Hugo’s formal mastery. My rule of thumb has been to write iambically with no equivalent measure. In place of rhyme, deliberate assonance and consonance sustain the verbal music.

Since the dramatic vitality of verbal music is almost never reproduced in paraphrase, I have pared down especially where the effectiveness of a lofty tone depends on Hugo’s genius for French verse. Often my omissions involve rhetorical figures that feel strained in literal English. Notes say where these changes have been most conspicuous.

While avoiding quaintness, I have tried to find in English the flavor of Hugo’s French. Where liberties serve my version of the poem, I have altered and substituted freely. I have also omitted words or phrases, in some cases sentences at a stretch, that in English fail to suggest the intensity of the original poem.

The greatest possible success for my versions, at their strictest and their freest, is to suggest the power of Hugo’s imagination and, I hope, to send my readers back to him in his own language.