Two Poems Translated by A.Z. Foreman

TRANSLATOR STATEMENT

Night of the Fourth: A Remembrance by Victor Hugo

After Napoleon III’s coup in 1851, Victor Hugo was one of a number of intellectuals who attempted to organize a popular resistance to the new regime. That resistance was violently put down and Hugo went into exile on Jersey under the English crown where he wrote Les Châtiments, a volume dedicated to excoriating Bonaparte and his regime, which included this poem. It recalls the death of a child on the streets of Paris on December 4th, two days after the coup d’état. I see no reason to doubt that the basic facts of the story Hugo tells here actually happened. He certainly was in a position to have experienced it that night. Some details must have been adjusted one way or another. There are differences—some of them mutually exclusive—between Hugo’s verse account here and the version of the episode that he would later tell in prose in his Histoire d’un Crime. For example, the woman’s complaint is here more straightforward and less confused, and her mention of religion and God here amounts to no more than stock interjections. Aragon’s comparison of the two in Hugo, Poète Réaliste is worth reading.

This poem is quite famous in France and a mainstay of anthologies and school assignments, which has had a perverse but common effect. Like Hamlet’s soliloquy in English, it has become a tissue of quotations in French, hard to hear with its original immediacy, much as it is now hard for film-buffs to feel any of the original suspense watching Casablanca when we all know whom Ilsa will choose to be with in the end. One of the warrants of translation, to my mind, is allowing works sanctified into cliché to become fresh in a fresh language. I’m reminded of how the most fun I ever had at a production of Hamlet was seeing it performed in Russian while living in Armenia.

It has not seen much action among English-speakers who don’t know French. Some of Hugo’s translators have just omitted it altogether from their selections. Its qualities of rhythm, tone and form are not those which handle translation very easily. At least when rendering between different Western European languages, striking images and similes tend to be relatively “translator-proof” (inasmuch as anything is). In this poem, Hugo does not offer a steady supply of such material to work with, though there is some. Much of the episode—apart from the final caustic satirical section—is conveyed in an extremely documentary way. For all that Alexandrine couplets were standard fare in this period, the form is essential to how this poem functions.

Pentameter couplets have a bad reputation in modern English which, however undeserved, can make a translator hesitant about deploying them. But they really are called for here, not as a mechanical formal answer to the French Alexandrine but because the regular versification and rhyme together are part of what makes the documentary style of the first section stand out. They are the megaphone through which the bare facts of horror and tragedy are announced. I tried versions in free verse, in blank verse, in pentameter couplets with assonance etc. Finally I had to accept that, as with certain other poems of Hugo’s, the matter really did demand the manner.
The old woman’s words use a fair amount of language that, while not “low” in the stereotypical sense, did not often find its way into French poetry at this time. She does use phrases that, though not part of normal unaffected speech today, had more currency in people’s mouths in the mid-19th century. But that is a fact probably of much greater interest to me than to this translation’s intended audience.