Selected Poems

Victor Hugo, Steven Monte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136068508
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This generous, varied selection of poems by one of France's best-loved and most reviled poets is presented with facing originals, detailed notes, and a lively introduction to the author's life and work.

Steven Monte presents more than eighty poems in translation and in the original French, taken from the earliest poetic publications of the 1820's, through collections published during exile, to works published in the years following Hugo's death in 1883. The introduction provides helpful background information about Hugo's life and work, the selection, and what is involved in translating a poet whose effortless rhymes are central to the poetry's power. Detailed notes at the back of the volume offer information about the poems and their publishing and historical contexts. This is an ideal introduction to a poet whose work, for all its renown, remains for Anglophone readers undiscovered.

From Contemplations

Former Times

‘The poet goes away into the fields …’

The poet goes away into the fields. He admires,

He adores, he listens to his inner lyres,

And seeing him arrive, the flowers, all of them,

Those whose colours would make the brightest rubies dim,

Those whose petals outshine even a peacock’s tail,

The little gold flowers and the blue ones, the pale

(As each of them greets him by shaking its bouquet)

Take on submissive or coquettish airs, and say

Familiarly, for that manner suits beauties well:

‘Oh look! our little lover is passing this way!’

And then the shadow-filled and glowing trees that dwell

In the woods, resounding with the voices they let loose,

All of those ancient men, the maples and the yews,

The lindens, wrinkled willows, oaks hallowed by the years,

The black-branched elms overburdened with moss

Like ulemas when the mufti appears

Greet him with grand gestures, and slowly bow down

Their large leafy heads and ivy beards to the ground,

Then contemplate his forehead shining in the sun,

And murmur quietly: ‘It’s him, the dreamy one!’

My Two Daughters

In the flickering twilight that falls from above

One looks like a swan and the other a dove:

Beautiful, alive, they catch the light of the sun.

You can see the big sister and the little one

Sitting at the gateway to a garden. Over them

A bouquet of carnations with long, fragile stems

Shaken by the wind in a marble urn

Leans forward, looks at them – fixed and living in turn –

And shivers in the shadows where it appears to be

A flight of butterflies frozen in ecstasy.

«Le firmament est plein de la vaste clarté …»

Le firmament est plein de la vaste clarté;

Tout est joie, innocence, espoir, bonheur, bonté.

Le beau lac brille au fond du vallon qui le mure;

Le champ sera fécond, la vigne sera mûre;

Tout regorge de sève et de vie et de bruit,

De rameaux verts, d’azur frissonnent, d’eau qui luit,

Et de petits oiseaux qui se cherchent querelle.

Qu’a donc le papillon? qu’a donc la sauterelle?

La sauterelle a l’herbe, et le papillon l’air

Et tous deux ont avril, qui rit dans le ciel clair.

Un refrain joyeux sort de la nature entière;

Chanson qui doucement monte et devient prière.

Le poussin court, l’enfant joue et danse, l’agneau

Saute, et laissant tomber goutte à goutte son eau,

Le vieux antre, attendri, pleure comme un visage;

Le vent lit à quelqu’un d’invisible un passage

Du poëme inouï de la création;

L’oiseau parle au parfum; la fleur parle au rayon;

Les pins sur les étangs dressent leur verte ombelle;

Les nids ont chaud. L’azur trouve la terre belle;

Onde et sphère; à la fois tous les climats flottants;

Ici l’automne, ici l’été, là le printemps.

O coteaux! ô sillons! souffles, soupirs, haleines!

L’hosanna des forêts, des fleuves et des plaines,

S’élève gravement vers Dieu, père du jour;

Et toutes les blancheurs sont des strophes d’amour;

Le cygne dit: Lumière! et le lys dit: Clémence!

Le ciel s’ouvre à ce chant comme une oreille immense.

Le soir vient; et le globe à son tour s’éblouit,

Devient un œil énorme et regarde la nuit;

Il savoure, éperdu, l’immensité sacré,

La contemplation du splendide empyrée,

Les nuages de crêpe et d’argent, le zénith,

Qui, formidable, brille et flamboie et bénit,

Les constellations, ces hydres étoilées,

Les effluves du sombre et du profond, mêlées

À vos effusions, astres de diamant,

Et toute l’ombre avec tout le rayonnement!

L’infini tout entier d’extase se soulève.

Et, pendant ce temps-là, Satan, l’envieux, rêve.

‘The clarity that fills …’

The clarity that fills up the heavens is immense.

Everything is joy, happiness, hope, innocence.

Lakes sparkle from the valley’s depths that wall them in.

Fields will be fertile, grapes will cluster on the vines.

The world overflows with the vigour and the din

Of life, with branches, azure, water that shines,

And birds that are quarrelling with others their own size.

What do the grasshoppers have? And butterflies?

Grasshoppers have the lawn, and butterflies the air,

And both have this April that is laughing everywhere.

All of nature exhales a joyous refrain,

A hymn that builds softly and soon becomes a prayer.

A small chick runs, a child plays and dances, a lamb

Jumps, and, letting water drip gently like rain,

An old cavern, saddened, seems to cry like a face.

The wind reads to someone invisible a page

Of the unheard poem of the whole creation;

The birds speak to air-scents; the flowers to the sun.

The pines next to ponds spread their green parasol;

The nests are hot; the sky finds the earth beautiful,

The waves, the airy sphere, the lands adrift and shimmering:

Here is the autumn, here the summer; there the spring.

Oh hills! fur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• from Odes and Ballads
• from Orientalia
• from Autumn Leaves
• from The Songs of Daybreak
• from Inner Voices
• from Sunbeams and Shadows
• from Punishments
• from Contemplations
• from Songs of the Streets and the Woods
• from The Horrific Year
• from The Art of Being a Grandfather
• from The Legend of the Centuries
• from The End of Satan
• from All the Lyre
• Notes
• Index of Titles
• Index of First Lines