‘My Two Daughters’

  Hugo’s daughters were Léopoldine (1824–43) and Adèle (1830–1914). ‘My Two Daughters’ forms a kind of pair with ‘Happy the man …’

  ‘The poet goes away …’

  Ulemas are scholars or priests trained in traditional Moslem religion and law. The mufti is a judge who interprets Moslem religious law.

  ‘The clarity that fills …’

  In the line ‘The pines next to the ponds spread their green parasol,’ the French is actually not ‘ombrelle’ (parasol), but ‘ombelle’ (umbel, a flat-topped or rounded flower cluster in which the individual stalks arise from about the same point). The image of a parasol is nevertheless evoked in this description, if not through the sound play then via the shape of the umbel.

  ‘To André Chénier’

  André Chénier is an eighteenth-century poet often viewed as a precursor to the romantics. Hugo learned from Chénier some techniques for varying the rhythm of the alexandrine line and thus for rendering poetry prose-like. (See my introduction and the notes to ‘Reply to an act of accusation’.) Ugolino is the damned soul in Dante’s Inferno (Cantos 32 and 33) who chews on another sinner’s skull beneath a frozen lake. Grandgousier is the wild drinker and jester of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. He sires the giant Gargantua.

  ‘Life in the Fields’

  It may seem strange that ‘Mercuries’ appears among the list of Egyptian sphinxes, Ammon Ras, and Anubises, especially given that Hugo goes out of his way to point out that the Egyptian gods are more ancient than those of Olympus. Hugo is probably using Mercury for Thoth, the Egyptian god of the dead.

  ‘Reply to an act of accusation’

  In this poem, Hugo makes various claims about his own poetic achievement. As the title indicates, ‘Reply to an act of accusation’ takes the form of a public letter composed in response to a written attack. Hugo gives the poem the date January 1834, even though he composed the poem in October 1854. It is likely that Hugo found out about the letter to which he is replying well after the fact. In one of the volumes of his History of Dramatic Literature (1854), Jules Janin, an influential critic and friend of Hugo, cites a letter dated January 1834 under the title ‘Concerning dramatic literature: Letter to Mr. Victor Hugo’: ‘I accuse you, then, monsieur, of having caused, through perverse doctrines and means that you alone know how to employ, the loss of dramatic art and the ruin of French theatre.’ The author of the letter was a member of the Academie Française. He goes on to assert that Hugo’s overpassionate disciples ‘have wanted to put [their new aesthetic] into practice … like the soldiers of Mohammed or the followers of Robespierre.’ In ‘Reply to an act of accusation’, Hugo claims that he helped liberate literature in the same way that the French Revolution helped liberate society. Hugo was in fact widely regarded as France’s leading romantic figure, especially after the controversy and triumph of his play Hernani on 25 February 1830, the so-called ‘Battle of Hernani.’ Hugo’s most frequent target in ‘Reply to an act of accusation’ is Nicolas Boileau, whose Art Poétique was considered the bible of French classicism.

  ‘Verse of poetry’ (‘ancien vers françois’) might be more literally rendered ‘ancient French line’ or ‘old French poetry’. Hugo uses an archaic spelling of ‘French’ to poke fun at authors who employed old spellings in their writing. In the lines that speak of trampling ‘the verse of poetry’ underfoot, the pun on metrical feet also exists in the French.

  ‘Let there be darkness’ is a reworking of God’s ‘Let there be light’ in Genesis. The French language was reputed to be naturally clear, as indicated in the popular saying ‘What isn’t clear isn’t French’.

  For ‘Racca’ see Matthew 5:22. The word means something like ‘You fool!’

  The French for ‘it had to be dirt’ is more literally ‘it was only a grimaud’ (a lower-class schoolboy).

  The Pont Neuf is a bridge in Paris.

  The Cid is a play by Corneille; Andromaque, a play of Racine; Mérope, a play of Voltaire. The French literally reads ‘the Phèdres, the Jocastes,’ tragedies by Racine and Corneille, respectively.

  Patois is a regional French dialect, generally associated with the peasantry. Argot refers to a specialized vocabulary or set of idioms used by a particular class or group (sailors, convicts, etc.). Here a low social class is implied.

  Claude Favre, seigneur de Vaugelas, is the author of Remarques sur la langue française (1647), a book that attempts to fix rules for the proper usage of words.

  Convicts in the ancien régime sometimes had a shoulder branded with a fleur de lys. Hugo associates the letter ‘F’ – the first letter of ‘forçat’ (convict) – with the ‘F’ used in certain dictionaries indicating words were ‘familier’ (common, too familiar). By a fortunate coincidence, the English words ‘common’ and ‘convict’ also begin with the same letter.

  ‘And then, like a bandit, I arrived’ (‘Alors, brigand, je vins’) alludes to a famous line from Boileau’s Art Poétique, ‘Enfin, Malherbe vint’ (‘Finally, Malherbe arrived’) used to date the beginning of well-formed, classical verse. Boileau’s claim is that, before the arrival of the poet François de Malherbe (1555–1628), French verse was chaotic and, in a sense, uncivilized. Hugo is claiming that he has accomplished for French poetry something like the opposite.

  The French Academy was, and in many ways still is, notorious for its conservative pronouncements on what counts as good French. For Hugo and other romantics, French classical poetry was overly rhetorical (‘Her topes hiding under her skirt’).

  Alexandrine couplets are square in the sense that they are regular and measured. They resemble massed troops of soldiers in that they are relatively long lines that stretch down the page, occasionally broken by blank spaces.

  ‘I put a red bonnet on the old lexicon’ is probably the most famous line from this poem. ‘Bonnet rouge’ refers to the hat worn by the 1792 revolutionaries.

  Syllepsis, hypallage, and litotes are all rhetorical terms. Syllepsis is related to the figure zeugma and refers to constructions in which one word (usually a verb) is used with two different words or phrases (usually direct objects), as in Alexander Pope’s ‘Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take and sometimes Tea.’ Hypallage occurs when a word is made to refer to some word other than the one it logically qualifies, as in Shakespeare’s ‘This was the most unkindest cut of all,’ where the unkindness is attributed to the cut rather than the person who delivered the blow. Litotes (pronounced ‘lie-toe-tees’) refers either to understatement or to affirmation via the negative of the contrary, as in the expression ‘That’s not half bad’. My definitions and examples are from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 1993).

  ‘Aristotle’s milestone’ is Hugo’s way of referring to the Aristotelian notion that nature is governed by fixed, immovable laws. Hugo is also comparing himself to a revolutionary orator standing on a box or a large rock to speak to a crowd.

  The Dacians, the Scythians, and the Huns were barbarians.

  François Guichardin and Tacitus are historians. Hugo is arguing against the notion that poems are supposed to privilege universal truths over historically specific facts and truths. Guichardin and Tacitus did not hesitate to discuss such brutal rulers as Caesar Borgia and Vitellius, so why should Hugo exclude from his poetry the details of daily life?

  In the couplet ‘The cow and the heifer would converse now at peace,/ The former Margoton and the latter Bérénice,’ Hugo imagines a peaceful coexistence of literary words like ‘heifer’ and everyday words like ‘cow’. Margoton is a peasant’s name and Bérénice a queen’s name.

  For Rabelais, see the notes to ‘The clarity that fills ….’

  Ça ira and La Carmagnole were songs and dances of the 1793 revolutionaries. Pindos is a mountain in Greece said to be sacred to Apollo and the Muses.

  ‘Gongorism shivered in its Spanish frills and stole’ is more literally, ‘Emphasis shivered in its Spanish frills’. Hugo is alluding to the precious style of the sixteenth-century Spanish poet, Gongora. John (Jean) is a common peasant name. Myrtilette (Myrtil) is a typical name for a shepherdess in bucolic poetry. Hugo is claiming to marry the everyday with the classical.

  In Hugo’s play, Hernani, Don Carlos asks ‘What time is it?’ (Act II, Scene 1). In classical French drama, noble characters were not supposed to use common expressions.

  Ivory, alabaster, and snow are literary adjectives for white skin.

  Cyzique or Cyzicus was a town in Asia Minor where Mithradates was defeated by the Roman General Lucullus in AD 74.

  ‘The courtesans became whores’ is more literally ‘The Laïses became whores’. Laïs was a Greek courtesan whose name was a euphemism for her profession in classical French poetry.

  Pierre Restaut was an eighteenth-century author of a French grammar and a treatise on versification, both of which were still in use in nineteenth-century classrooms.

  In the lines about wigs turning red and changing into lions’ manes, Hugo is referring to the practice, common in revolutionary days, of abusing statues and busts from the age of Louis XIV. In a letter from 1837, Hugo talks of the Flemish penchant for mounting such busts above doorways as though they were sculptures of lions. Whether by means of paint or power of suggestion, the white wigs thus become red lion manes.

  Charles-François Lhomond was an eighteenth-century professor who wrote a widely used French grammar. Dominique Bouhours was a seventeenth-century author of a book entitled Doubts Regarding the French Language. Claude Brosette was the friend and editor of Boileau; he wrote some commentaries on grammar. Charles Batteux was an eighteenth-century priest who wrote about the poetics of Aristotle, Horace, and Boileau, among others. Jean Galbert de Campistron was a disciple of Racine; his plays had some success in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

  ‘Make peace with syntax! Wage war on rhetoric!’ plays on the revolutionary saying ‘Guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chaumières!’ (‘War on the châteaux, peace to the cottages!’). Hugo is advocating a plain style and an end to rhetorical excess and inversions of word order.

  You could see the Athos, the ethos, and the pathos’ echoes a verse in Molière’s The Learned Ladies (Les Femmes savantes, Act III, Scene 5). The lines that follow contain other references to Molière, whom Hugo is presenting as apositive aesthetic model and an antidote for classical stiffness. Ethos (Greek for ‘character’ or ‘custom’) and pathos (Greek for ‘emotion’ or ‘suffering’) are rhetorical terms referring to different oratorical strategies or effects. The Athos is a mountain in Greece.

  Cathos is one of Molière’s ‘pretentious petticoats’ (‘précieuses ridicules’) in the play of that name. Pouceaugnac, the title character of Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, is an unwanted suitor of the heroine of the play. César Chesneau Dumarsais was a seventeenth-/ eighteenth-century grammarian and author of a Treatise on Tropes. The ‘comic dancers’ (‘matassins’) are gypsy-like dancers who typically wear bells and other jingling ornaments along with swords. They dance around and chase Pouceaugnac with syringes filled with water (loosely translated ‘squirt guns’). ‘Helicon’s streams’ refers to the river Permessus (or Hippocrene) on Mount Helicon, which was supposed to give inspiration to all poets who drank from it.

  For metrical vocabulary such as ‘caesuras’, see my introduction.

  The dream of Athalie and Théramène’s récit were widely quoted passages from Racine’s tragedies Athalie and Phèdre. In classical French drama, a récit is a reported narrative of offstage action.

  George-Jacques Danton and Maximilien de Robespierre were figures associated with the Terror during the French Revolution.

  César-Pierre Richelet was a seventeenth-century author of a French dictionary. ‘Dangeau’ probably refers to the Abbé de Dangeau, the seventeenth and eighteenth-century author of a book of essays on grammar.

  Periphrasis is the rhetorical figure of circumlocution. The most famous periphrasis in French literature occurs in Racine’s Phèdre, when Phèdre is referred to as ‘the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaé’.

  The lines about the tower of Babel are perhaps intentionally obscure. The tone is quasi-prophetic; the logic of the image relates to the revolutionary comparisons that precede it: Hugo’s democratization of language demolishes the classical ideal of a privileged, pure speech a kind of Tower of Babel in that it is a man-made construction aimed at perfection. With the destruction of this tower, all words are again equal. Hugo even calls into question the alphabetical order of individual letters as a kind of hierarchy.

  Nicolas Beauzée was an eighteenth-century grammarian. Tristan l’Ermite was the provost of Louis XI. The combination ‘Tristan and Boileau’ seems to suggest the collaboration of political and literary authority. There was also a seventeenth-century poet Tristan who was seen as a precursor of Racine.

  Hugo’s claims about liberating the personal pronoun, the participles, and the verbs are somewhat vague. With the personal pronoun, Hugo may be referring to his increased use of the first person.

  ‘The reum confitentem is a proverbial expression meaning ‘the accused [man] who confesses’. The original phrase is from Cicero’s Pro Ligario, ‘Habemus reum confitentem’ translates ‘Let us have the accused man who confesses’. Hugo’s ‘You’ve the reum confitentem’ thus means something like: ‘You have before you the accused man confessing what he did.’

  Polyhymnia is the muse of lyric poetry; Euterpe, the muse of music; and Calliope, the muse of epic.

  For ‘threw off the balance of the even-weighted line’ see my metrical remarks in the introduction. The ‘band of twelve feathers’ refers to the twelve syllables of the alexandrine. The line ‘deceives the caesura by a word’ is more literally ‘deceives the scissors’ where Hugo seems to be playing on the Latin root of caesura (‘to cut’ or ‘to cut off’). The ‘cage of mid-line’ is literally ‘the cage of the caesura’.

  The sentence beginning ‘And thanks to these bandits’ can be parsed as follows: ‘Thanks to these bandits and to these terrorists (Truth, Imagination, and Poetry), the muse, reappearing, leads us back and takes us in.’

  For Hugo, poetry’s ‘triple forehead’ consists of the comic, the elegiac, and the philosophical.

  Plautus’s comedies were popular in ancient Rome (among the plebs) just as Shakespeare’s plays were popular in London (among the crowd or mob).

  Job is renowned for his patience and wisdom. Horace speaks of poetic madness several times in his poetry.

  My translation leaves out the poem’s final verse-paragraph:

  Le mouvement complète ainsi son action.

  Grâce à toi, progrès saint, la Révolution

  Vibre aujourd’hui dans l’air, dans la voix, dans le livre;

  Dans le mot palpitant le lecteur la sent vivre;

  Elle crie, elle chante, elle enseigne, elle rit.

  Sa langue est déliée ainsi que son esprit.

  Elle est dans le roman, parlant tout bas aux femmes.

  Elle ouvre maintenant deux yeux où sont deux flammes,

  L’un sur le citoyen, l’autre sur le penseur.

  Elle prend par la main la Liberté, sa sœur,

  Et la fait dans tout homme entrer par tous les pores.

  Les préjugés, formés, comme les madrépores,

  Du sombre entassement des abus sous les temps,

  Se dissolvent au choc de tous les mots flottants,

  Pleins de sa volonté, de son but, de son âme.

  Elle est la prose, elle est le vers, elle est le drame;

  Elle est l’expression, elle est le sentiment,

  Lanterne dans la rue, étoile au firmament.

  Elle entre aux profondeurs du langage insondable;

  Elle souffle dans l’art, porte-voix formidable;

  Et c’est Dieu qui le veut, après avoir rempli

  De ses fiertés le peuple, effacé le vieux pli

  Des fronts, et relevé la foule dégradée,

  Et s’être faite droit, elle se fait idée!

  [Thus the movement completes its action. Thanks to you, saintly progress, the Revolution vibrates in the air today, in voices, in books; the reader feels her living in the palpitating word; she shouts, she sings, she teaches, she laughs. Her tongue is as nimble as her spirit. She is in the novel, speaking softly to women. She is now opening two eyes where two flames are: the one on the citizen, the other on the thinker. She is taking Liberty, her sister, by the hand, and makes her enter all the pores of every man. Prejudices, formed like coral from the sombre accumulation of the elements’ abuses, are dissolving due to the shock of all of the floating words filled with her will, her aim, her soul. She is prose, she is verse, she is drama; she is expression; she is emotion: a lantern in the street, a star in the firmament. She enters the depths of immeasurably deep language; like a powerful megaphone, she breathes into art; and it is God who wills this, after having filled the people with his pride, effaced the old wrinkles on foreheads, and lifted up again the degraded crowd – and having made herself a right, she makes herself an idea!]