NOTES

One-Year-Old: This poem, from Les Feuilles d’automne, is a celebrated early expression of parental love for a small child, a more important subject in Hugo’s work than in that of any major poet in France before him. My English version is a stanza shorter than the French, since I have collapsed the third-from-the-last stanza and folded it into the next-to-last stanza to avoid rhetorical flourishes that felt wooden in my voice.

Napoleon’s Army After the Fall of Moscow: This excerpt is from one of Hugo’s most famous poems, “The Expiation.” This version translates most of the first of the seven sections of that poem, omitting, most conspicuously, a few lines at the beginning and a few more at the end. The translation is slightly freer than most of the others in this collection. Because of lines omitted near the beginning of the English version, line numbers for the French and English texts are very different.

How It Happened: For the biographical context of this poem, see the Introduction.

All Souls’ Day, 1846: Hugo’s daughter Leopoldine drowned shortly after she was married in 1843. Many of his most moving poems, including this and the next few poems here, express his grief after her death.

The Seven Oxen of the Northern Plough: The title of this poem in English defines the final word, which is a Greek loan word in English as in French. Hugo’s title for this poem is Latin, “Nomen, Numen, Lumen”: name, command, light.

Mugitusque Boum: The title is a Latin phrase from one of Hugo’s favorite poets, Virgil: “and the lowing of cattle.”

Dawn at the Edge of the Woods: This is section eleven from “Eviradnus,” a narrative poem of eighteen sections. I have altered the tone and meaning of the last three stanzas in the song to make the end of the poem sufficient outside its context in the series.

Orpheus: English phrases that identify the gods have been substituted for the Greek names in this poem, because of the different flavor these names have now, in a world where grammar-school education in Greek and even general familiarity with the Greek gods are no longer commonplace.

The Trumpet of Judgment: In The Penguin Book of French Verse, 3, The Nineteenth Century, Anthony Hartley argues that “of all the Romantics, Hugo is without doubt the greatest.” He directs the reader toward the later visionary poems as Hugo’s ultimate achievement and gives this poem as an example.

During Sickness: Hugo nearly died of anthrax in the fall of 1859.

Whose Fault Is This?: For the tone of this poem the reader needs to remember Hugo’s sympathy for the Commune and his position as his country’s most effective advocate of social justice. Because my paraphrase of this poem felt repetitious, I have omitted about a tenth of it. Because of lines omitted near the beginning of the English version, line numbers for the French and English texts are very different.

Et Nox Facta Est: This version translates only the last two of the nine sections of the French poem.

To Théophile Gautier: Since the rhetoric of this poem, considered one of Hugo’s best, lost power in my English paraphrase, this translation omits nearly half of the original. For this reason, line numbers for the French and English texts are very different.

Sonnet: For the biographical context of this poem, see the Introduction.

The Latin title for the original poem is a variation on the gladiators’ traditional salutation before combat: “Hale, goddess, he who is about to die salutes you.”