Selected Poems

Hugo, Victor (1802–1885), translated by Kline, A. S. (contact-email)

This anthology comprises translations of Victor-Marie Hugo’s lyric poetry, emphasising personal and contemplative dimensions over political rhetoric. The selection focuses on seasonal change, erotic encounters and confrontation with mortality rather than the explicitly political or theological positions that marked his public role during the upheavals of nineteenth-century France.

The poems encompass Hugo’s career, from early Romantic compositions to later writings composed during his two-decade Channel Islands exile following Napoleon III’s 1851 coup d’état. Central to the selection is the theme of mourning - ranging from his daughter Léopoldine’s 1843 drowning, alluded to in “Tomorrow, At Dawn” (Demain, dès l’aube) to his poetic tribute offered at Gautier's Grave in “To Theophile Gautier” (Á Theophile Gautier). Additional themes include pastoral examinations of natural process, investigations of romantic psychology, and philosophical inquiry into consciousness, time, and the nature of art.

The translations preserve Hugo’s formal range - alexandrines, octosyllabics, varied stanzaic patterns - while making accessible the technical innovations that established him as architect of French Romanticism.

Author Details

Victor-Marie Hugo (1802 –1885) novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, artist, and politician, became a leading light of the French Romantic literary movement, witnessed by the turbulent opening night of his play Hernani in 1830, which portrayed the Romantic hero as a figure in conflict with society, dedicated to love and driven by fate; and supported by the lengthy preface to his play Cromwell, which championed freer forms closer to Shakespearean drama, interweaving tragic, comic, and grotesque elements, rather than the rigid rules of previous French theatre. He later achieved wider fame with his poetry, and the novels Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables.

With the Revolution of 1848, Hugo was elected a deputy for Paris in the Constituent Assembly and later in the Legislative Assembly, where he adopted a position increasingly critical of the ruling powers. When in December 1851 a coup d’état inaugurated the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Hugo, opposed to political absolutism and authoritarianism, left France for Brussels. A twenty-year exile, mostly spent in the Channel Islands, ensued; initially enforced then voluntary. The French defeat in the Franco-German War, and the proclamation of the Third Republic in 1871, brought Hugo back to Paris, where he was received as a living symbol of republicanism and a national hero.

His poetry ranges over personal, philosophical, political and social themes. The personal aspects were deepened by the premature loss of his recently-married daughter in 1843 and his internal religious and philosophical struggles; the political and social aspects by his republican sympathies and the turbulent events of French nineteenth-century politics. In this selection the personal dominates, rather than the political or religious, revealing the calmer more introspective aspect of the poet invoked in Les Misèrables, particularly in the figure of Jean Valjean with whom he identified spiritually, rather than the polemical and rhetorical aspects which guaranteed his fame.

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Kline, A. S.

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