‘Vere Novo’

  The Latin title means ‘With the new spring’ or ‘With the return of spring.’ It is probably borrowed from Virgil’s Georgics (Book I, line 43).

  ‘The Party at Thérèse’s’

  An early reviewer of Contemplations asserted that this poem sparkled like a Watteau painting. The atmosphere of The Party at Thérèse’s’ is very much that of a Watteau or a Fragonard, but it is difficult to pin down Hugo’s tone – could he be mocking Thérèse? Critics are not sure to whom the Thérèse of the title refers, if Hugo has someone in mind at all. The two best candidates are Laura, the Duchess of Abrantès (an earlier version of the poem has Laura instead of Thérèse) and Léonie Biard, one of Hugo’s mistresses who sometimes went under the pseudonym Thérèse de Blaru. It may be that Hugo is being purposely ambiguous; he often sent the same love poems to different women.

  The shepherd Aminta is the hero of Tasso’s pastoral play of that name. Leonore is a common name in Italian novels. For Plautus, see the notes to ‘Reply to an act of accusation’.

  Alcantor is a character in Molière’s The Forced Marriage. Aberand (Arbate) is a character in Racine’s Mithradates. Trivelin, Columbine, Scaramouche, and the rest are stock characters in Italian sixteenth– and seventeenth-century comedy (the commedia dell’arte). Pierrot is a clown.

  ‘Happy the man …’

  This poem is a kind of companion piece to ‘My Two Daughters’.

  ‘A Stop in the Middle of a Walk’

  This is the final poem of ‘Dawn’, the first book of Contemplations. In it, Hugo mentions some of the figures whose suffering or martyrdom Hugo identified with. Dante was exiled from Florence; Socrates was condemned to death; Scipio Africanus, the Roman general, died in exile; Milton died blind, poor, and forgotten; Thomas More was beheaded; Aeschylus, according to legend, left Athens as a result of Socrates’s victory in a dramatic contest; Aristides was banished from Athens by Themestocles; Jean Huss was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burnt at the stake. Caiaphas was the high priest who, fearing the influence of Jesus, helped arrange for his arrest and crucifixion. The ‘stop in the middle of the walk’ refers simultaneously to the poet’s stop at the source and the sudden halt of the dazzled man at the end of the poem.

  ‘The Spinning Wheel of Omphale’

  Omphale was the queen of Lydia who purchased Hercules as a slave and, according to one version of the myth, made him wear women’s clothes and spin wool. The spinning wheel is Hugo’s embellishment and an anachronism at that: the ancients did not have spinning wheels. Atrium is also an anachronism: it is a Latin architectural term and has nothing to do with Greek homes or palaces.

  Jupiter took the form of a bull and kidnapped Europa, then transported her to Crete to satisfy his sexual desires. The hydra of Lerna, the Nemean lion, Cacus, and Geryon are monsters that Hercules defeated in the course of his twelve labours. The water sprites are also presented as monsters that Hercules subdued, though the reference is vague. The ‘typhons des eaux’ may perhaps represent whirlpools. Hugo may also have in mind Typhon, the giant and half-brother of Geryon.

  ‘Letter’

  The woman addressed in this letter may be Juliette Drouet. ‘A river that is neither the Ganges nor the Nile’ is more literally ‘A river that is neither the Ganges nor the Cayster.’ Hugo is drawing on Virgil’s Georgics (Book I, lines 383–4). The Cayster is a river in Asia Minor.

  ‘Words Spoken in the Shadows’

  The woman who speaks is modelled on Juliette Drouet.

  ‘Magnitudo Parvi’

  The Latin title means ‘the greatness of the small’. I have translated only the first part of a very long poem in four parts. After an extended meditation on the ‘different worlds’ of the star and the shepherd, the poem eventually returns to the initial scene (Hugo’s memory of a walk with his daughter Léopoldine). The poet concludes, among other things, that ‘a soul is greater than a world’. ‘Magnitudo Parvi’ is the final poem of ‘Former Times’.

  ‘She was pale …’

  The two girls in this poem are Hugo’s daughter’s Adèle and Léopoldine.

  ‘Veni, Vidi, Vixi’

  The title reworks Julius Caesar’s famous ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered) into ‘I came, I saw, I lived’, where Vixi’ is tantamount to saying ‘I am dead’.

  ‘Tomorrow, at dawn …’

  This poem and ‘At Villequier’ (which directly follows) are among the most famous pieces in the collection. ‘Tomorrow, at dawn …’ begins as though it were a poem addressed to a lover, only to turn into an elegy by the end of the second stanza. Harfleur is a small town about three kilometres from Le Harvre. Critics have debated whether Hugo imagines an itinerary going from Rouen to Villequier or from Le Havre to Villequier. In the latter case, the journey would be thirty-five miles as the crow flies, more on foot.

  ‘At Villequier’

  This elegy was immediately hailed as one of the most moving pieces in Les Contemplations and remains one of Hugo’s most famous poems. Hugo draws on the book of Job in his lament for his daughter, but also questions the consolations of religion.

  ‘Mors’

  The title is the Latin word for death. Much of the atmosphere of this poem is drawn from the Book of Revelation.

  ‘The Beggar’

  This poem makes an interesting comparison to Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’.

  ‘Words on the Dunes’

  The composition date and published date suggest that this poem was written a year after Hugo, exiled from France, arrived at Jersey.

  ‘Mugitusque Boum’

  The title is from Virgil’s Georgics (Book II, line 470) and occurs in a passage where the poet is praising the life of farmers: ‘mugitusque boum mollesque sub arbore somni’ (‘[They enjoy] the mooing of cows and soft sleep under the trees’).

  ‘Shepherds and Flocks’

  Hugo dedicated this poem to Louise Colet, a woman perhaps best known today because of her relationship and correspondence with Flaubert. Colet helped Hugo send letters to his friends in France during his exile. At the time when he composed ‘Shepherds and Flocks’, Hugo was trying to promote Colet’s poem ‘The Servant Woman’ (‘La Servante’).

  Hugo’s descriptions in this poem are drawn from his experiences of the micro-climates on the island of Jersey. At the end of the poem, Hugo’s imagination transforms the promontory rock into a giant shepherd resting on his elbows and looking out at sea. The final line, ‘La laine des moutons sinistres de la mer’ (‘The wool of all the sinister sheep of the sea’), is one of the most memorable in Hugo’s œuvre. It plays on the two senses of the word ‘mouton’ (whitecaps and sheep) and invests the image with an eerie, threatening power.

  ‘I gathered this flower for you …’

  Hugo offered this poem to Juliette Drouet.

  ‘Strophe of the poet …’

  In this poem, strophe (pronounced ‘Stroaf-ee’) seems to mean more than a stanza: it stands in for something like poetry in general. The elaborate comparison to Proserpine (pronounced ‘Pro-sur-peen’) invites and resists allegorical interpretations.

  According to myth, Hades abducted and raped Proserpine, then made her queen of the underworld. Through the intervention of her mother, Demeter (the goddess of agriculture and fertility), Proserpine was eventually allowed to return to the earth for half of each year. Demeter’s grief for Prosperpine’s absence is supposed to account for the change of the seasons. The strophe’s shift from carefree poetry to elegiac verse parallels the shift in Contemplations between ‘Former Times’ and ‘Today’. Apparently Hugo is equating Léopoldine’s death with Proserpine’s rape.

  ‘One day the solemn spirit …’

  The ‘prophet who is dreaming in Patmos’ is John of the Book of Revelations. Patmos is a Greek island off the coast of Turkey where, according to one legend, John is dreaming and will continue to dream until Judgement Day. John is often portrayed in paintings with an eagle.

  ‘Nomen, Numen, Lumen’

  The Latin title means ‘Name, Divinity, Light’. The lion of Androcles, whom Hugo contacted during a seance, declared: ‘Omen, lumen, numen, nomen meum’ (‘Omen, light, divinity is my name’). The title illustrates Hugo’s belief in the creative power of the language in that each word changes by one letter from the previous word. This poem bears some resemblance to ‘Et Nox Facta Est’ and other poems in The End of Satan.

  ‘To the One Who Stayed Behind in France’

  This long elegy both builds on the image of ‘the shore of infinity’ from Book VI of Contemplations and functions as a separate epilogue or dedication. The one who stayed behind in France is Léopoldine, whose grave at Villequier Hugo could no longer visit because of his exile.

  ‘Before, when September would return with its tears’ refers to the date of Léopoldine’s drowning on 4 September. ‘Clematis’ (pronounced ‘Klem-uh-tis’) is a creeping plant with flowers that have plume-like seeds. For ‘Harfleur’, see the notes to ‘Tomorrow, at dawn …’

  The lines about ‘the Gaze’ (end of part 4) are mysterious. The gaze appears not to be Death’s but some sort of indefinite, impersonal, anonymous look.

  In the line ‘Jerusalem has put my Paris in eclipse’, Hugo uses the word ‘Solime’ (‘Salem’) for Jerusalem. This choice seems to indicate not the literal city of Jerusalem but something like the world of spirits. Genesis 14:18 refers to Melchizedek as the king of Salem.

  Hugo pairs three geographically close cities, Rouen, Villequier, and Caudebec, with the biblical place names Horeb, Cedron, and Balbeck, though he does not appear to intend a precise analogy. The French cities relate to his daughter’s drowning. Horeb is a mountain in Arabia where God appeared to Moses. Cedron is the river that separates Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Balbeck, or Heliopolis, was the city where the false god Baal was worshipped.

  Gethsemani (or Gethsemane) refers to the place where Christ experienced his ‘agony in the garden’. The subject of Christ’s anguish over the death he foresaw for himself was popular among French romantics. Lamartine and Nerval wrote poems about it.

  The final image of the poem portrays the contemplator on the shore of infinity.

  Songs of the Streets and the Woods

  For the most part, this collection is deliberately light. Hugo may have been trying to emulate his friend Théophile Gautier, who had gained some fame for his book of poems composed in short quatrains, Emaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos). Hugo divides this collection into two parts, ‘Youth’ (‘Jeunesse’) and ‘Wisdom’ (‘Sagesse’), a typically romantic pairing.

  The Horrific Year

  This collection traces Hugo’s experiences before, during, and after the siege of Paris in 1870–1. Hugo encouraged his fellow Parisians to withstand the Prussians’ siege and did not want France to cede any territory. He did not support the Paris Commune but afterwards pleaded on behalf of the Communards for clemency. See introduction for more details.

  ‘1 January’

  Hugo is addressing his two grandchildren in this poem.

  ‘Letter to a Woman’

  The woman of the title may be Hugo’s sister-in-law, Julie Chenay. Balloons filled with letters were sent out of Paris during the siege. The first such mail balloon was given the name ‘Victor Hugo’.

  General Isidore-Pierre Schmitz was one of the generals in charge of the army of Paris.

  ‘It’s Aesychlus translated by the eighteenth century’ is more literally ‘It’s Aeschylus translated by Father Brumoy’. Brumoy was an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest who translated and summarized Greek tragedies. Brumoy felt that Aeschylus was too monstrous for modern taste.

  George and Jeannine are Hugo’s grandchildren. During the siege, zoo animals from the Jardin des Plantes were in fact eaten by the Parisians.

  Hugo places an asterisk after the phrase ‘Ce qui fit la beauté des Romaines antiques’ (‘What made all of the women of Rome especially beautiful’) and cites four lines from the Latin poet Juvenal, more or less translated by Hugo in the five alexandrines starting with the asterisked verse:

  Praestabat castas humilis fortunas Latinas,

  Casulae, somnique breves, et vellere tusco

  Vexatae duraeque manus, et proximus urbis

  Annibal, et stantes Collina in turre marite.

  Hugo cites line 287 and lines 289–291 from Juvenal’s sixth satire In leaving out line 288 (‘quondam, nec vitiis contingi parva sinebant’), Hugo had to modify some of the verse surrounding it. The original passage in Juvenal might be translated: ‘In days of old, humble fortunes kept the women of Latium chaste. What kept vice from polluting their modest homes was work and short sleep, hands chafed and hardened by Tuscan fleece, Hannibal nearing the city, and their husbands standing guard at the Colline gate.’ In 213 BC, Hannibal neared Rome’s Colline gate.

  The phrase ‘Paris, the escapee’ is more literally ‘Paris is Latude’. Latude was a famous eighteenth-century prisoner in the Bastille who made several daring escapes.

  The Art of Being a Grandfather

  This deliberately light collection made Hugo’s grandchildren, Jeanne and Georges (Jeannine and George in my translations), the most famous children in France.

  ‘Open Windows’

  The manuscript indicates that the poem’s setting is the island of Guernsey.

  ‘Jeannine Asleep (‘She’s asleep …’)’

  This poem is one of several with the same title. Charenton was an asylum for the insane. Some of the threats cited in the poem resemble those made against Hugo.

  The Legend of the Centuries

  This collection was published in three separate series during Hugo’s lifetime (1859, 1877, 1883) before being joined into one large volume in 1883. Hugo called the poems in The Legend of the Centuries ‘little epics’; taken as a whole, the collection forms one massive epic that traces the history of humankind from creation to the present and beyond. The Legend of the Centuries is divided into sections with titles like ‘Between Giants and Gods’, ‘After the Gods, the Kings’, and ‘Between Lions and Kings’. (From this perspective, the collection’s title might be translated ‘The Legend of the Ages’.) The individual poems are often long narratives on mythical and historical subjects. For many readers, The Legend of the Centuries rivals Contemplations as Hugo’s finest volume.

  ‘Conscience’

  This poem is from the first series of The Legend of the Centuries, though Hugo first considered including it in Punishments. (In that context, Cain would have been a figure for Louis Napoleon.) The names of the members of Cain’s family and other proper names can be found in Genesis, with variant spellings. Hugo changes some details of the biblical account, such as the relative ages of the family members. I have shortened the name ‘Jabel’ to ‘Jab’.

  ‘Boaz Asleep’

  This poem, from the first series of The Legend of the Centuries, is one of Hugo’s most famous. The story of Ruth and Boaz is in the fourth chapter of Ruth, from which most of the details of this poem derive. The town Jerimadeth seems to be Hugo’s invention. It has been suggested that Hugo may be punning on the phrase ‘J’ai rime a dait’ (‘I made a rhyme with “dait”‘). Including a hidden joke in a serious poem is not out of character for Hugo. The phrase ‘reaper of eternity’ is more literally ‘reaper of eternal summer’.

  ‘Christ’s First Encounter with the Tomb’

  This poem is from the first series of The Legend of the Centuries. Hugo draws on all four gospels for details, but concentrates on John 11. Sometimes Hugo takes some liberties with his source or embellishes the facts: Bethany is relatively close to Jerusalem, for example, not a three days’ march. (Perhaps Hugo wanted to call to mind the three days Christ would be in the tomb.) The ‘praetor’s home’ at the end of the poem presumably refers to the house of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, but Hugo has invented the scene of priests assembling there. As with the ‘three days’, Hugo may have in mind a later scene associated with Christ’s passion and death.

  ‘The Hydra’

  This poem is from the second series of The Legend of the Centuries.

  ‘Mohammed’

  This poem is from the first series of The Legend of the Centuries.

  ‘The Parricide’

  This poem is from the first series of The Legend of the Centuries, though Hugo for a time considered using it in Punishments (see notes to ‘Cain’). Kanut the Great (also spelled ‘Canut’ and ‘Canute’) became king of Denmark in 1014 and king of England in 1015. Hugo seems to have drawn his facts about Kanut from various histories, dictionaries, and literature on Nordic myth. According to tradition, Mount Savo marks the utmost boundary of Norway.

  ‘The Work of the Prisoners’

  This poem is from the second series of The Legend of the Centuries. The mountain ‘Galgal’ (‘Gesequel’ in my translation) seems chosen in part because its Hebrew root means ‘cavern’. The Sporades (pronounced ‘Spore-uh-deez’) are all of the Greek islands in the Aegean except the Cyclades. The island Patmos is famous (‘shines among the Sporades’) because John is supposed to have written the Book of Revelations there.

  ‘The Infanta’s Rose’

  This poem is from the first series of The Legend of the Centuries. An infanta is the daughter of a Portuguese or Spanish king. Hugo seems to have been inspired by a Velasquez portrait of ‘Marie’ Marguerite Theresa, daughter of Philip II of Spain (see introduction). Philip II was the king who sent the ‘Invincible Armada’ to conquer England in 1588 ships famously wrecked by a storm before they reached their intended destination. Had she lived, Marie (1880–83) would have been eight years old at the time of the Armada. The setting of the poem seems to be the gardens at Aranjuez, the royal residence southeast of Madrid.

  Spain possessed Brabant, Flanders, and Sardinia in the sixteenth century.

  For ‘the Bible’s Cain’, see the notes to ‘Conscience’. Iblis is the ruler of the demons according to the Koran.