INTRODUCTION

EXACTLY TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, while Napoleon flourished at the first height of his dictatorial power, Victor-Marie Hugo was born with weak limbs and a large head. His mother had little interest in her three boys, least of all in him, whose sickliness she found repugnant. Bored with her husband, a carpenter’s son risen through the ranks of the Republican army, she abandoned her family and went to live in Paris with her husband’s superior officer. Later, she came back and left again, came back, and left, finally, with the children.

The baby, which one doctor said would need a miracle to survive, died eighty-three years later, an old man well known for his stamina and for the vigor of his mind and body. For most of his life he was the most famous writer in the world. His legacy includes the century’s most celebrated works of drama, fiction, memoir, criticism, and poetry. Because his novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame have now entered their third century of continuous success, we may forget that Hugo was a poet first. His poems have been judged by many great writers among the finest in French, though for several generations they have been neglected in France and virtually unknown to readers of English.

Of course, no serious reader would consider such a lapse at all reliable as a measure of the poems themselves. The best of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, seem to us among the finest poems ever written, but we know that almost no one for two hundred years appreciated them. Even a poet as keen on sonnets as William Wordsworth wrote that the twenty-eight poems at the end of Shakespeare’s sequence are “worthless” because of their “sameness, tediousness, quaintness, and obscurity.” This supposedly worthless group includes many masterpieces. Wordsworth’s inability to read those poems resembles our own recent oblivious-ness to the poetry of Hugo.

Hugo himself, as one of the most influential critics of Shakespeare, argued that shifts in the history of tastes and styles accounted for audiences’ difficulty with Lear. The play in its original form had been restored to the stage in Hugo’s lifetime after a two-hundred-year hiatus. We no longer need the world’s most famous writer to lead us past our prejudices into an awareness of Shakespeare’s greatest writing. But we may need a critic of Hugo’s stature to help us see Hugo. The passionate vision in the poems themselves will take us past a superficial sense of datedness, but only if we feel the greater receptivity and practice the sharper attention that good writing celebrates.

During his exile on Guernsey, as a leader in the opposition to Napoleon III, Hugo often wrote a hundred lines of poetry per day. From the cot in his study, which was a solarium overlooking the sea, Hugo rose every day before dawn, drank cold coffee from the night before, and stood at his table writing until noon. After a five-course lunch, with several fine wines from his private cellar, he spent two hours hiking, in sunshine or full gale, and swimming in the sea. In the afternoon he returned to work long into the evening. Then, late at night, he ate an even larger meal with his mistress, for whom he had bought the neighboring house, and went to sleep.

Œuvres Poétiques Complètes, without the plays in verse or the far vaster prose, is half again the length of the complete Shakespeare, enough to fill ten volumes as thick as The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. At Guernsey alone, Hugo wrote twice as many lines as Whitman wrote in his whole life. Meanwhile, he also wrote the vast Les Misérables and thousands more pages of prose.

Though much of Hugo is overwritten, the best of it still represents in French “a kind of superhuman power,” in the words of Jean Paul Sartre, who judges Hugo as a poet “unquestionably the sovereign of the whole century.” Hugo’s loosening of the strictures of French poetry is distinct even to a foreign ear. He used common words, without the so-called nobility of poets before him. He broke new ground in his direct engagement with personal experience; for example, in the straightforwardness of the exposition in the opening of this poem about the massacre of 1851:

The boy had taken two shots in the head . . .
Speechless, his gray lips fell open. Death
had drowned out in his eye the last wild look.
His arms hung limp, as if they needed to be held.
He had in his pocket a boxwood top and string.
My forefinger would have fit in either wound.
Have you seen blackberries bleed? His skull
had been punched through easily as punkwood.

 

By the time he wrote this poem in his forties, Hugo was the most famous writer in France, the host of the most renowned salon, a personal friend of the former king, a member of the Academy, and a peer. Still, he considered himself a poet of the people. Six months before the coup of 1851, he denounced his former friend, Louis Bonaparte, as an enemy of freedom. On December 3, at the beginning of the violence in which more than four hundred men, women, and children were shot dead by Bonaparte’s soldiers, the famous poet climbed the steps of the Bastille and made a passionate plea to the army to join the people in their resistance to tyranny. His mistress begged him to come down before he was shot, and he shouted back, “I am willing to die for the cause of freedom.”

The self-glorification in this moment of bona fide heroism is distinct. Hugo’s eagerness to celebrate his own accomplishments and virtues is legendary. He declared repeatedly in old age that his poems would live as long as the French language itself, a claim some may find the more distasteful because it is true.

His work expanded in all directions the range of subject matters and tones admitted into French poetry. He wrote with passion about history, erotic experience, familial love, philosophy, nature, social justice, art, and mysticism. This range of interests, his enormous vocabulary, and his singular skill in various styles make him the most protean of all French poets.

Without having read the celebrations of childhood in the poems of Blake and Wordsworth, Hugo discovered children as a subject for poetry in France. Some of his best poems were written in memory of his daughter Leopoldine, who, six months after she was married at the age of nineteen, drowned with her husband in a boating accident, believed by some to be a suicide:

 

Consider how, in doubt, my Lord, in suffering,
with eyes too full of tears, gone blind, plunged
into the blackest depth of grief, in sight of nothing,
wracked, a mind might lose its blessedness . . .

 

My God, I understand it, that the man is mad
who dares object.
I quit accusing you. I quit the cursing.
Please, though, let me cry!

 

At least let tears still blur my sight,
since you designed the flesh for this!
Just let me lean against this stone and ask
my child if she can feel that I am here.

 

These translations mean, above all, to communicate intensity of feeling. French poetry after Villon and Ronsard turned from dramatic energy toward wit and ideal beauty, with rigorous attention to sound, diction, and lucidity of style. Hugo was master of these strict conventions, winning a prize from the French Academy at the age of fifteen. Even so, intense dramatic energy characterized his poems almost from the start, as André Gide has written about the second book, Les Orientales, published when the poet was twenty-seven: “Everything is there—strength, grace, a smile, and the most moving sobs . . . What a poetic earthquake!”

Hugo’s sensory and dramatic acuity take his poems beyond traditional beauty into a sublime inclusiveness and energy still thrilling to the modern reader. This later poem, for example, dwells on the erotic charge in the biblical story of Ruth’s visit to Boaz sleeping:

 

Ruth was dreaming. Boaz slept. The grass looked black. And little bells of sheep were trembling on the verge of silence. Goodness came down clear as starlight into the great calm where the lions go to drink.

 

All slept, all, from Ur to Bethlehem.
The stars enameled the deep black of the sky.
A narrow crescent in the low dark
of the West shone, while Ruth wondered,

 

lying still now, eyes half opened,
under the twinging of their lids, what god
of the eternal summer passing dropped
his golden scythe there in that field of stars.

 

Hugo’s friend Sainte-Beuve, a minor poet and one of the century’s most powerful literary critics, was an early champion of Hugo’s work. But when Sainte-Beuve and Madame Hugo entered into a longtime sexual liaison in September 1831, the critic began to cast aspersions on Hugo’s writings and character.

Until this betrayal, Hugo seems to have been monogamous. His first mistress, the actress Juliette Drouet, remained his companion for fifty years until she died in his arms. While maintaining his arrangements with his wife and mistress, he also had many hundreds of brief sexual encounters. One young woman whom he saw for several months was Sarah Bernhardt, shortly thereafter to become the world’s most celebrated actress. She was twenty-six and he, in his seventies, was maintaining a simultaneous affair with the beautiful, already married daughter of his old friend, the poet Théophile Gautier. Judith Gautier was later an inspiration to Wagner and a prominent woman of letters in her own right. Hugo speaks in the following sonnet to Judith Gautier and publishes the poem as a direct challenge to conventional assumptions:

 

Death and Beauty, being deep, the both of them,
both jeweled with obsidian and azure, I would say
the two were sisters, fierce and rich
with the same promise, and enigma. Women,
shine to me!—voices, glances, black hair,
blond—for I am dying! I, who see your brilliance,
like the sheen of pearls that tumble in the breakers,
or like birds that flash far off in a dark woods.

 

Judith, our two fates have brought us closer
than we seem, to see your face and mine;
in your eyes a divine abyss appears, and I feel

 

in my soul a gulf plunged through with stars;
both of us belong to that same sky,
since you are beautiful and I am old.

 

When Hugo died, he lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe, the whole of which was draped for the occasion in black velvet. He was mourned by millions, a crowd larger, it was said, than the entire population of Paris. Then attacks on his work and on his character became more and more common, first in France and later in other countries. After his death, Hugo, already a controversial figure, was much more widely attacked and much more seldom defended.

But however real the weaknesses in Hugo’s character, including his obvious self-indulgence and vanity, and however stirring his heroism at the ramparts in 1851 and again after his return to Paris during the troubles of 1871, finally, we judge him as a writer by the work. His poetry, to many of the best writers in France, appears unsurpassed. As for its moral character, his writing did as much as anyone’s to expose the horrors of capital punishment, poverty, and social injustice.

For the past century, Hugo as a poet has been absent from the minds of American readers. These translations are an effort to bring speakers of English closer to an amazing poet and human presence. Without his groundbreaking genius, others like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and those who followed in France and elsewhere could not have written as they did. Much of what seems best in twentieth-century American poetry would have been inconceivable, and the world of imagination would have been less rich and free.

As Baudelaire wrote in 1861, even before the publication of much of Hugo’s most exploratory later work:

 

When you think of what French poetry was before he appeared and what a rejuvenation it has undergone since his arrival, when you imagine how insignificant it would have been if he had not appeared, how many deep and mysterious feelings which have been put into words would have remained unexpressed, how many intelligent minds he has brought into being . . . it is impossible not to consider him as one of those rare and providential minds who in the domain of literature bring about the salvation of us all. . . .