WHO WAS THE GREATEST FRENCH POET of the nineteenth century? André Gide’s immortal comment—”Victor Hugo, alas!”—is as true today as it was when Gide wrote it in a letter to Paul Valéry almost a century ago. But English readers have had to take it on faith. Few French poets of equivalent magnitude have been so bereft of worthy translators. Molière has Richard Wilbur, and Baudelaire has Richard Howard. For Racine and Rimbaud, there are whole schools. Even lesser poets like Nerval, Verlaine, and La Fontaine are accessible to English-only readers in versions that convey some idea of why we are supposed to applaud. But with Hugo what has chiefly come across is his gall. Lines of verse that are familiar quotations en française seem sheer humbug in English: Mes chants volent à Dieu, comme l’aigle au soleil—which is to say, My songs fly to God, like the eagle to the sun. Do they, indeed? But now E.H. and A.M. Blackmore have produced Selected Poems of Victor Hugo, a bilingual sampling from the lifetime output of a poet who was a teenager in the Napoleonic era and nearly outlasted Rimbaud. Hugo was twenty when his first collection of poems appeared, Odes and Ballads of 1822, and before his second, the Byronic Orientalia of 1829, he was a royal pensioner, and a famous playwright. He was even a tabloid superstar avant la lettre, thanks to his brother, who—having fallen in love with the bride—went mad at Victor’s wedding. Who could ask for more? But more kept coming, to such a degree that Hugo’s biographies are as fascinating, and almost as abundant, as the books he wrote himself. His life would be filled with scandals as egregiously melodramatic as the plots of his bestselling novels—The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables—and the plays that would hold the musical stage to the present day: Hernani (made into the opera Ernani), Le roi s’amuse (made into Rigoletto), Angelo, tyran de Padoue (made into La Gioconda). After that ill-fated wedding day, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of the era, called on Hugo—and promptly joined Hugo’s brother by falling in love with Mme. Hugo. Sainte-Beuve would later be censured by Proust for his insistence that we can understand a writer only when we have learned all we can about his life. But few authors have been so helpful as Hugo in providing a life to learn about. While he was turning out his immortal potboilers, he was in a recurrent frenzy of volcanic eruption as a poet. He produced not only narrative, lyric, and vatic utterance as varied, and almost as abundant, as all the other poets of his century combined. He also gave us one of art’s great self-portraits, Les Contemplations, an autobiography as self-absorbed and self-adoring as Goethe’s, Rousseau’s, and Raphael’s rolled into one, and no less irresistible at the level of the Higher Gossip. Among the highlights of Hugo’s long life (born in 1802, he died in 1885) are his triumph at the premiere of his play, Ernani, where the clacquers in the balcony included Sainte-Beuve, eighteen-year-old Théophile Gautier in a satin vest and green silk trousers, Hector Berlioz, Gérard de Nerval, and pretty much tout le monde. It may be that Goethe made a bigger splash with The Sorrows of Young Werther, but short of provoking another mass suicide Hugo could scarcely have done better. Like Goethe’s, Hugo’s love life would also become the stuff of schoolroom study. Most enviable was his affair with the actress Juliette Drouet, who starred in the plays he wrote for her, then quit the stage to become his amanuensis and to follow him to his exile in the Channel Islands when he had to flee the vengeance of Napoleon III in 1851. But for the next two decades, all the excitement Hugo would know (and he had been accustomed to cyclones) had to be generated by his own pen. And it was—in a steady stream of novels (including forgotten page-turners like Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs, either of which could be a blockbuster as big as Les Misérables), diatribes, tracts, and tirades that earned him a reputation as the “Jove of the Third Empire,” a lonely, unstopping hurler of thunderbolts. And all through the years of exile the flood of poetry increased—poems calculated to appeal to the same popular taste that could not get enough of his fiction and to outrage the embryonic aesthetic that would coalesce into modernism. Hugo was everything that Baudelaire and Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and Pound and Eliot as well, would crusade against, deplore, and, at last, studiously ignore. Yet, unlike Longfellow and the other popular poets he resembles, Hugo had an Orphic voice that rocks and wild animals, he thought, had to obey. If he was France’s Longfellow, he was also, and no less, its Whitman, singing the wonder of Himself—and its Swinburne, chiming like a carillon; its Tupper, laying down the moral law like a Sousa march; and its Rod McKuen, writing Valentine sentiments for village maidens to embroider on samplers. Anything anyone could do, he could do better. Page after page, decade after decade, the poetry is ravishing—and there is no end to it, nor to its shifts and surprises and new directions. Alas, indeed, for anyone who has taken modernist vows of poetic chastity; but for the rest of us, what a good time to be postmodern and wallow in what the Blackmores offer. The place to begin in the Blackmores’ translation may be the hundred-page stretch of poems drawn from The Legend of the Ages (La Légende des siècles), a sequence of historical evocations and vignettes that reads like a cross between Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, a summing up of World Civilization from biblical times (“Boaz Asleep”), through the Vedic and early Christian eras, and on to the early modern. Hugo varies his narrative strategies so deftly that one can read through the whole sequence without any sense of there being a Hugolian formula. Ballads alternate with trim little sermons. A verse panorama like “The Infanta’s Rose,” an account of the launching of the Armada, is intercut with an intense, dour study of a Velázquez infanta. The cumulative effect is like visiting the Louvre, an ark freighted with the treasure of the ages, one room after another. It is nothing less than godlike in its sweep and cool authority. And that is precisely what Hugo was after. He called a later volume of narrative poems God, and the title was not without self-reference. Hugo considered himself an authority on the subject of the deity by virtue of his own awful and unfailing creative energies. We have come to be used to writers of great fecundity, but they are usually novelists. Prolixity in poets is rarer and often considered suspect. That is the received wisdom with regard to the abundant autumnal poesy of Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne; there are emeritus poets among us today whose unceasing flow compels the same doubts. But Hugo is more like William Butler Yeats or Robert Penn Warren. He did not go bad as he went on; he just kept ripening. The poems from Hugo’s Les Contemplations of 1856 can entirely satisfy a contemporary taste in poetry that asks for epiphanies and intensely focused bursts of emotional truth-telling with just the nicest misting of irony, like the sfumato of Mona Lisa’s smile. Les Contemplations is that favorite chimera of ambitious poets, a “structured” collection, which admits any poem the poet fancies while arranging them into numbered hierarchies, as though by philosophic design. The overall design may be thought of as a spiritual life of the poet like Wordsworth’s Prelude, or as a long elegy like Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Hugo is mourning the loss of his nineteen-year-old daughter Léopoldine in a boating accident in 1843. Léopoldine’s death had the immediate effect of stopping the poet in his tracks for two and a half years, and the long-term effect of inspiring in Hugo a passion for spiritualism and séances. (His book on the subject, Conversations with Eternity, is available in English translation.) Les Contemplations kicks off with a long Whitmanian “Song of Himself”—turned into a poetic manifesto. Translated as “Reply to a Bill of Indictment,” it has the bard in full afflatus proclaiming his youthful triumph over the deadly decorum of the alexandrine and a staid vocabulary that turns up its nose at the language of “the beggarly rabble”: chained in hulks / Of slang, fond of the lowest kind of company, / Torn to rags in the marketplace. The tirade goes on, and Hugo conflates his revolution in poetry with the French Revolution itself. The Blackmores print the French: Et j’ai battu des mains, buveur du sang des phrases, Quand j’ai vu, par la strophe écumante, et disant Les choses dans un style énorme et rugissant, L’Art poétique pris au collet dans la rue, Et quand j’ai vu, parmi la foule qui se rue, Pendre, par tous les mots que le bon goût proscrit, La lettre aristocrate à la lanterne esprit. Oui, je suis ce Danton! je suis ce Robespierre! And across the page their English translation: I, the well-known drinker of verbal blood, Clapped my hands when I saw the Art of Poetry Trapped in the streets by some huge roaring ode; And when I saw among the seething crowd Aristocratic Letters hung on lampost Spirit, by every word void of good taste. Yes, I am that Danton, that Robespierre! Higher and higher the rhetoric soars—not in the Blackmores’ highly irregular blank verse, but in a cascade of the gallumphing alexandrines that Hugo could write in his sleep: Nous faisons basculer la balance hémistiche…./ Tous les mots à présent planent dans la clarté. / Les écrivains ont mis la langue en liberté. (We’ve toppled the seesaw of heroic verse…. / Today all words are soaring in the daylight; / Writers have given language liberty.) In their glorious excess and drunken-boat madness, such lines prefigure not just the rock ’n’ roll effusions of Rimbaud but the rambunctious blossomings and rants of teenagers of all ages and eras. In their giddy indiscipline, they are not unlike Walther’s Prize Song in Die Meistersinger, another youthful rhapsody written by an artist of late middle age. Like an aged rock star, Hugo never thought of growing old. There is another poem, “Letter,” early in Les Contemplations, in which Hugo stakes his claim to a perpetual springtime in a sublimer vein—an ideal Wordsworthian village childhood, the Platonic ideal of rustic youth that all poets should enjoy—from which he segues to a glimpse, beyond the rooftops of the village of “a winged ship” heading off to sea, as though to say, “Excelsior!” And after that eagle has flown off to God and great adventures, there is “Insomnia,” a poem in which the poet cannot sleep because his muse is nagging him, dogging him, flogging him with new inspirations. As a complaint, that has to be the definition of disingenuous, but as a snapshot from the life of a genius, it carries conviction. Much of the appeal of Hugo’s oceanic swells of verse is the chance for mere mortals to share in the divine self-esteem of genius that never doubts itself—a thrill common enough in music or architecture but rare in literature. There is, besides Gide’s snide one-liner, another great gibe at Hugo: Jean Cocteau’s observation that Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo. As with Hamlet or the Emperor Nero, this nimbus of divine madness has its comic side—which provides a further wonder of this Wunderkind: Hugo can be funny, a clown and court jester, the original of Quasimodo and Rigoletto. “Muhammed,” a quatrain in The Legend of the Ages, sets forth the poet’s theory of buffoonery: Sacred Muhammed rode alternately On Doldol and Yafur, his ass and mule, Because a sage himself is apt to be Stubborn the one day, and the next a fool. The humor is often forced, as though it were a duty Hugo felt he had to perform for the sake of a well-rounded persona. But even if he is never Rabelaisian, he can still be droll, and charming in an avuncular way, most memorably in The Art of Being a Grandfather, which he published at age seventy-five, a chronicle of his experience as the babysitter and legal guardian of his two grandchildren. It is a portrait gallery of his beloved Jeanne and Georges, a zoo full of animals, and assorted kids who say the darnedest things. (One poem is entirely a collection of such eavesdroppings, perhaps the first “found poem.”) Hugo shares Lewis Carroll’s knack of entering the mindset of a child without forfeiting his elder wisdom. Other poets of childhood—Longfellow and Stevenson, for instance—seem fuddy-duddies by comparison. Then there is Victor Hugo the rabble-rouser, firebrand, and author of Les Châtiments (The Empire in the Pillory), seven thousand lines of impassioned invective directed against the poet’s arch-enemy, Napoleon III, as a result of which Hugo endured his two decades of exile in the Channel Islands. American readers, with an ocean and a century separating them from the events that inspired Hugo’s wrath, will need a certain amount of footnoting to appreciate this, the Dantean side of the man’s art. The Blackmores have supplied the necessary information in bare sufficiency, with a separate short preface for each of the nineteen books of poetry. (These prefaces are often embellished by another aspect of Hugo’s art: He was a more than capable draftsman.) Like so many of his English contemporaries Hugo was a closeted heterosexual and wouldn’t write a word that might bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek. Sex was the elephant in the living room whose existence no writer might mention except encrypted at one or two removes. Hugo’s early erotic inventions have the campy allure of Delacroix’s “Oriental” drawings, but with age he became ever less candid and more Tennysonian. This lack of a fleshy presence in Hugo is what D.H. Lawrence complained of in the poetry of Shelley—that the man was all butterfly and ectoplasmic spirit. This may be the touchstone difference between the tastes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also the reason Hugo remains a hard sell, populist and pot-boiling though he is. Yet, the Hugo that the Blackmores’ translation reveals is an altogether meatier and juicier writer than the Hugo known to most of us through the movie versions of his novels, which get more cornball with each remake. Hugo’s fiction does deserve better than Disney, but it is not significantly weightier or livelier than Alexandre Dumas’s or Eugène Sue’s—which puts it a long way behind Honoré de Balzac’s. That’s not to say that one shouldn’t bother. Just don’t expect a lot of points in the Heaven of Extra Credit Reading. As to Hugo’s dramas, I have seen only one on stage (other than at the opera), Mary Tudor, and it would have been creaky and ponderous even with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. Which leaves the poetry, if Hugo is to have a good seat at the Last Judgment. The Blackmores’ translation is much better than the few earlier versions in English (chiefly Harry Guest’s from 1981, the best of a bad lot). Without trying slavishly to render each verse-form in French into the same form in English, they do not simply throw up their arms in despair and settle, as Guest does, for flat, loosely iambic lines with hit-or-miss rhymes. When Hugo gets off a zinger, they find its equivalent. When he soars into the ineffable, they achieve a similar flight. (For those with a bit of French still left from school, Hugo’s poems offer an added dividend: Their agreeable simplicity makes them an ideal vehicle for bringing one’s French up to speed.) To acknowledge the greatness of Victor Hugo in poetry seems the equivalent of claiming that Beaux Arts painters like Meissonier or Bouguereau were actually the supreme masters of their time. What about Impressionism? What about Modernism? Nonetheless, in French poetry, it is undeniable: Victor Hugo was the great poet of the nineteenth century—which is why poor André Gide was forced to add, Hélas! For us today, freer than Gide and the modernists, Hugo’s example can only be liberating. Thomas M. Disch is the author of The Castle of Indolence (1995) and the forthcoming The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry.
