Prophetic Chattiness

Patrick McGuinness

• The Distance, The Shadows: Selected Poems by Victor Hugo, translated by Harry Guest
  Anvil, 250 pp, £12.95, November 2002, ISBN 0 85646 345 0
• Selected Poetry by Victor Hugo, translated by Steven Monte
  Carcanet, 305 pp, £12.95, September 2001, ISBN 1 85754 539 7
• Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition edited by E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore
  Chicago, 631 pp, £24.50, April 2001, ISBN 0 226 35980 8

The size and variety of Victor Hugo’s oeuvre – around 200,000 lines of verse, plus dozens of novels, plays and critical works – makes it difficult to get an overview, let alone make a selection. In his Hugoliade, Ionesco suggested that Hugo’s best chance of survival lay in the impossibility of reading everything he’d written. But no other French poet has had such influence: unlike Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Hugo affected more or less every poet who came after him. He threw out so many novelties he could hardly keep up with himself. A reader of any of the new selections will not only discover a way into 19th-century poetry, but also into poetic Modernism. There is the Hugo of André Breton, a proto-Surrealist drawn to the irrational and dark; the politically engaged visionary revealed in Louis Aragon’s classic 1952 selection; the Hugo who ‘was poetry’, as Mallarmé claimed in Crise de vers; while Rimbaud’s version is a voyant, a ‘seer’, although one who didn’t see far enough, or not for long enough. Hugo saw everything he wrote as an experiment, and was, more than any other great poet of his century, aware of the provisionality of every position, every thought, every work of art. He was fond of saying that he corrected one work in the next one, that there were no contradictions, just stages of thought. No subject was too low or too high, too new or too old, too hackneyed or too erudite. Any selection of his poetry is not just a summation of the romantic mind at its most potent and protean, but a compendium of foretastes of the poetry that followed.