Pitt Press
2 total works
This generous, varied selection of poems by one of France's best-loved and most reviled poets is presented with facing originals, detailed notes, and a lively introduction to the author's life and work. Victor Hugo's novels "Les Miserables" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (thanks to musicals and films they have inspired) are his most familiar works, but he invested his most sustained creative energy in his poems. From the beginning they commanded a wide popular and critical audience in France. Steven Monte presents more than 80 poems, taken from the earliest poetic publications of the 1820s, through collections published during exile, to works published in the years following Hugo's death in 1883. Here are all the wonderful, inevitable anthology pieces such as "Tomorrow, at dawn..." and "Boaz Asleep", as well as less-known work like "Letter" and "Open Windows". The introduction provides helpful background information about Hugo's life and work, the selection, and what is involved in translating a poet whose effortless rhymes are central to the poetry's power. Detailed notes at the back of the volume offer information about the poems and their publishing and historical contexts.
This is an ideal introduction to a poet whose work, for all its renown, remains for Anglophone readers an undiscovered country.
This is an ideal introduction to a poet whose work, for all its renown, remains for Anglophone readers an undiscovered country.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is best known as the author of the novel Les Miserables, but he also wrote several plays, of which Les Burgraves (1843) was the last; it was in fact the failure of this play at the box office that caused Hugo to abandon drama in favour of fiction. The play, a melodrama set in medieval Germany, is now widely regarded as marking the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre on mainland Europe. This edition, which reproduces the French text along with an introduction and notes in English, was first published in 1904. Cambridge University Press is delighted to bring this classic edition back into print.