Selected Poetry
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...
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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. Victor Hugo's novels Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are his most familiar works, but he invested his most sustained creative energy in his poems. 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. Here are all the wonderful, inevitable anthology pieces such as 'Tomorrow, at dawn.' and 'Boaz Asleep' as well as lesser-known work. 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.
To My Odes3The Captive5Moonlight9The Djinns11Reverie17Rapture19The Slope of Reverie21Setting Suns (II)29Setting Suns (VI)31To the Column33To Albrecht Durer39'The war that scoundrel wages ...'41The Cow43'Just as in a forest's drowsy pools ... '45Written on the pane of a Flemish window45Olympio's Sadness47Oceano Nox55June Nights59Memory of the Night of the Fourth61What the poet said to himself in 184863The Expiation65To the People85Stella87'Blow forever, trumpets of thought ... '89'It was raining that night ... '91'The poet goes away into the fields ... '95My Two Daughters95'The clarity that fills ... '97To Andre Chenier99Life in the Fields99Reply to an Act of Accusation105Vere Novo115The Party at Therese's115'Happy the man ... '121A Stop in the Middle of a Walk121The Spinning Wheel of Omphale125Letter127Words Spoken in the Shadows129Written on the Bottom of a Crucifix131'Seeing her grandmother occupied spinning wool ... '131Magnitudo Parvi131'I felt I had gone mad ... '135'She had formed this habit ... '135'She was place ... '137'Oh spring! oh dawn! on memories! ... '139Veni, Vidi, Vixi143'Tomorrow, at dawn ... '145At Villequier147Mors155The Beggar157Words on the Dunes159Mugitusque Boum161'I paid the fisherman ... '163Shepherds and Flocks165'I gathered this flower for you on the hill ... '167'Strophe of the poet ... '169'A shade was waiting ... '171'One day the solemn spirit ... '173Clearing173Nomen, Numen, Lumen175To the One Who Stayed Behind in France177Sowing Season, Evening197'The troop of children read and spell ... '197The Lion's Midday Sleep201'I'm setting out to narrate that horrific year ... '203On Top of Paris's Ramparts2031 January205Letter to a Woman205Open Windows211Jeannine Asleep ('She's asleep ... ')211Conscience215Boaz Asleep217Christ's First Encounter with the Tomb223The Hydra229Mohammed229The Parricide229The Work of the Prisoners237The Infanta's Rose241After the Battle253The Sister of Mercy255After the Battle of the Caudine Forks257Et Nox Facta Est259'The hexameter ... '261The Theophile Gautier261Notes267Index of Titles296Index of First Lines301
