Selected Poems of Victor Hugo
A Bilingual Edition
Translated by E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore
664 pages
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11 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2001
Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet—one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions.
Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions.
Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.
Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions.
Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.
American Literary Translators Associatio: National Translation Award
Won
Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize: Scaglione, Trans. Literary Work
Won
"I have never seen a better-produced volume of poetry in translation. As well as nearly 600 pages of bilingual text, the Blackmores include a general introduction to Hugo's career, brief introductions to each book of Hugo's, and notes on individual poems. All this is clear and informative. Anyone interested in Hugo would do well to buy this volume."
"This splendid collection certainly makes Hugo accessible to a wider audience, and confirms his status as a master of Romantic and political verse. Through skilled and beautiful translations of individual poems, as well as through carefully mannered introductions to each of Hugo's various works, the Blackmores reveal the kaleidoscopic richness of France's greatest nineteenth-century poet. . . . As humble as Hugo was huge, the Blackmores have captured brilliantly the majesty, force, and vision of Hugo's poesy."
"Hugo's two-hundredth birthday has inspired several new translations of his poetry, and the results are by and large quite gratifying. The most impressive, and probably the best, is the huge selection lovingly prepared by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore. This pair of translators has had the audacity to translate much of the verse in strict rhyme and meter, and the results are often surprisingly fine. Arranged chronologically and illustrated throughout by Hugo's own drawings and paintings, their selection for the first time gives the English reader the full range of Hugo's accomplishment as a poet. Even better, they have prefaced each of Hugo's collections . . . with intelligent and informative prefaces which set each work within a biographical and historical context. . . . The Blackmores' devoted and lavish attention to the nuances and subtleties of Hugo's verse should prompt a re-evaluation of this poet, one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century and, in fact, a European genius of the stature of Goethe and Pushkin."
"A monumental achievement of E. H. and A. M. Blackmore, a bilingual edition of more than 140 poems selected from the full range of Hugo's career and containing 4,000 lines never before translated. . . . The translations are made into English verse with outstanding skill and power, the product of the most informed decisions about what at any moment should be sacrificed--with regard to both diction and to formal and metrical matters--to gain something else. It is obvious that the translators know English poetry thoroughly and deeply, and they have managed to catch Hugo's grand tone and his wit, his highly patterned and his more colloquial kinds of line. They have been able throughout, without stylistic fanfare, to rescue so many occasional moments which are usually lost in translation. . . . It is the immense care taken, the knowledgeable love of Hugo's verse, which shines through the whole of this book and which distinguishes it."
"[A] beautifully-produced, large, an bilingual selection of Hugo's poems. . . . A much larger selection of Hugo in English than any that has gone before. . . . The Blackmores have performed a very great service in giving the anglophone reader at least a certain elevation from which to measure the whole mass of Mont Blanc, to use another of Hugo's self-descriptions. They also provide admirable short introductions, complete with illustrations by the poem, that contextualise each major section. The book must be the fruit of many years' work, and their dedicated enthusiasm is in its own way no less than heroic."—Stephen Romer, Guardian
2002 National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association
2003 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work, Modern Language Association
Contents
Lists of Illustrations
Introduction
Chronology
from Odes et ballades / Odes and Ballads (1822-8)
from Les Orientales / Orientalia (1829)
from Feuilles d' automne / Autumn Leaves (1831)
from Les Chants du crépuscule / Songs of the Half-Light (1835)
from Les Vooix intérieures / Inner Voices (1837)
from Les Rayones et les ombres / Sunlight and Shadows (1840)
from Les Châtiments / The Empire in the Pillory (1853)
from Les Contemplations / Contemplations (1856)
from Chansons des rues et des bois / Songs of Street and Wood (1865)
from L'Année terrible / The Year of Horrors (1872)
from Les Quatre Vents de l'esprit / The Four Winds of the Spirit (1881)
from La Légende des siècles / The Legend of the Ages (1859-83)
from La Fin de Satan / The End of Satan (1886)
from Dieu / God (1891)
from Toute la lyre / The Whole Lyre (1888-97)
from Les Années funestes / The Fateful Years (1898)
from Dernière Gerbe / Last Gleanings (1902)
from Océan / Ocean (1942)
Notes
Select Bibliography
List of Poems in Order of Composition
Index of Titles and First Lines
Introduction
Chronology
from Odes et ballades / Odes and Ballads (1822-8)
from Les Orientales / Orientalia (1829)
from Feuilles d' automne / Autumn Leaves (1831)
from Les Chants du crépuscule / Songs of the Half-Light (1835)
from Les Vooix intérieures / Inner Voices (1837)
from Les Rayones et les ombres / Sunlight and Shadows (1840)
from Les Châtiments / The Empire in the Pillory (1853)
from Les Contemplations / Contemplations (1856)
from Chansons des rues et des bois / Songs of Street and Wood (1865)
from L'Année terrible / The Year of Horrors (1872)
from Les Quatre Vents de l'esprit / The Four Winds of the Spirit (1881)
from La Légende des siècles / The Legend of the Ages (1859-83)
from La Fin de Satan / The End of Satan (1886)
from Dieu / God (1891)
from Toute la lyre / The Whole Lyre (1888-97)
from Les Années funestes / The Fateful Years (1898)
from Dernière Gerbe / Last Gleanings (1902)
from Océan / Ocean (1942)
Notes
Select Bibliography
List of Poems in Order of Composition
Index of Titles and First Lines
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Literature and Literary Criticism: Poetry | Romance Languages
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