Selected Poems: Dual-Language Edition

Although Victor Hugo is better-known as a novelist, he was actually among the greatest of the French poets in the pre-Baudelaire era.

This was a gift for a my little brother who is taking French Literature this year in college. He is happy with this book! That's all I really know.

A magnificent translation, worthy of the highest praise, which, unfortunately, the Blackmores will not receive because of the animus everywhere prevailing against the translation of rhymed poetry in rhyme. Yet it would make as such sense to deprive Hugo of rhyme as it would to inflict it on Whitman. Rhyme is not a frivolous adornment or a self-inflicted stricture in Hugo's poetry of which the helpful translator should make haste to free him. Rhyme is an integral part of Hugo's poetry: it enhances the sense rather than diminish it. The Blackmores, contrary to the opinion of Publisher's Weekly, are faithful translators. No two languages are exactly compatible; hence the need for translation. To expect a word for word correlation in a formal (or even a free translation ) is to elevate computer-translation to pre-eminence in the field. This translation does Hugo a greater service than that. It is clearly a work of love and reverence and almost of resurrection, since Hugo the novelist so completely overshadows Hugo the poet in The English-speaking world. It is also a most timely translation, for, inevitably and probably soon, the bile of modernism will finally dissuade anyone from undertaking the monumental task that the Blackmores have so admirably performed.