This poem by Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was inspired by witnessing the death of Mme Ginestat, a neighbour of Hugo’s on Jersey, who died of tuberculosis in 1855. In his collection ‘Les Contemplations’ Hugo antedated the composition of the poem to well before the event that had inspired it because he wanted it to seem as if it foreshadowed the death of his own child Léopoldine: I don’t really approve of such manipulation but I guess it’s a very small deceit on the scale of what some poets get up to!

The translation that follows is my own.

L’enfance

L’enfant chantait; la mère au lit, exténuée,
Agonisait, beau front dans l’ombre se penchant;
La mort au-dessus d’elle errait dans la nuée;
Et j’écoutais ce râle, et j’entendais ce chant.

L’enfant avait cinq ans, et près de la fenêtre
Ses rires et ses jeux faisaient un charmant bruit;
Et la mère, à côté de ce pauvre doux être
Qui chantait tout le jour, toussait toute la nuit.

La mère alla dormir sous les dalles du cloître;
Et le petit enfant se remit à chanter…
La douleur est un fruit; Dieu ne le fait pas croître
Sur la branche trop faible encor pour le porter.

Victor Hugo

Childhood

The child sang; and the mother on the bed,
Her fair face turned to shadow, suffered long.
Death hovered in the cloud above her head.
I heard her rattling breath, heard the child’s song.

The child was five years old; there by the window
Its play and laughter made a charming sight;
The mother, next to that poor gentle creature
Who sang all day, was coughing all the night.

In cloister laid, she slept at last below
Stone slabs; the singing did not long abate…
Grief is a fruit; God does not let it grow
Upon a branch too frail yet for such weight.

This week being the week of the summer solstice I thought this lyric by Victor Hugo would make an appropriate offering for today. It was Hugo who in a poem about the biblical Ruth, ‘Booz endormi’, gave us that most beautiful image of the summer sky at night, when at the end of the poem Ruth looks up and wonders

‘Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l’éternel été,
Avait, en s’en allant, négligemment jeté
Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des étoiles’.

(‘What god, what harvester of the eternal summer,
Had, as he went, so carelessly thrown down
That golden sickle in the field of stars’).

But this lyric too seems to me to capture beautifully the airy, dreamlike quality of these short June nights.

The freeish translation that follows is my own.

Nuits de juin

L’été, lorsque le jour a fui, de fleurs couverte
La plaine verse au loin un parfum enivrant;
Les yeux fermés, l’oreille aux rumeurs entrouverte,
On ne dort qu’à demi d’un sommeil transparent.

Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure;
Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel;
Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure,
Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

Victor Hugo

June Nights

In summer, when day’s fled, and on the plain
Flowers pour their heady scents out far around,
Our eyes shut, ears half-open still for sound,
We lie in lucid sleep, or wake again.

Purer the stars now, sweet the shaded bower,
The heaven’s dome still flushed with day’s last light,
While, at the bottom of the sky, all night
The white dawn wanders, waiting for its hour.

The French poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885) lost his beloved elder daughter Lėopoldine when she was only nineteen: she drowned along with her husband in a boating accident on the Seine. Hugo wrote many moving poems in her memory; this is one of them. The translation that follows is my own.

‘Elle avait pris ce pli…’

Elle avait pris ce pli dans son âge enfantin
De venir dans ma chambre un peu chaque matin;
Je l’attendais ainsi qu’un rayon qu’on espère;
Elle entrait, et disait: Bonjour, mon petit père;
Prenait ma plume, ouvrait mes livres, s’asseyait
Sur mon lit, dérangeait mes papiers, et riait,
Puis soudain s’en allait comme un oiseau qui passe.
Alors, je reprenais, la tête un peu moins lasse,
Mon oeuvre interrompue, et, tout en écrivant,
Parmi mes manuscrits je rencontrais souvent
Quelque arabesque folle et qu’elle avait tracée,
Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froissée
Où, je ne sais comment, venaient mes plus doux vers.
Elle aimait Dieu, les fleurs, les astres, les prés verts,
Et c’était un esprit avant d’être une femme.
Son regard reflétait la clarté de son âme.
Elle me consultait sur tout à tous moments.
Oh! que de soirs d’hiver radieux et charmants
Passés à raisonner langue, histoire et grammaire,
Mes quatre enfants groupés sur mes genoux, leur mère
Tout près, quelques amis causant au coin du feu!
J’appelais cette vie être content de peu!
Et dire qu’elle est morte! Hélas! que Dieu m’assiste!
Je n’étais jamais gai quand je la sentais triste;
J’étais morne au milieu du bal le plus joyeux
Si j’avais, en partant, vu quelque ombre en ses yeux.

Victor Hugo

From her earliest years, this was her thing
To come into my room a while each morning.
I’d wait, as for a sunbeam to appear.
She’d march in, say ‘Good morning, little father’,
Sit down on my bed, take up my pen,
Open my books, muddle my papers, laughing,
Then like a bird of passage she’d be gone
And I, with clearer head, begin again
My interrupted work, often to find
Some zany arabesque she’d left behind
Among my manuscripts, a sketch she’d traced,
And then, blank pages that her hands had creased.
Somehow, my best lines fell between those folds.
She loved God, flowers, starry skies, green fields.
Before she was a woman, she was spirit
And from her clear eyes her bright soul shone out.
She quizzed me constantly, upon all things.
Ah, but the warm glow of those winter evenings
When we’d talk language, grammar, history,
Their mother near, four children at my knee,
A few friends by the hearth and much to say –
That was a life to which content came easy.
And now to think that she is dead! God help me,
For I, when she was sad, was never happy.
I took no joy in joyous balls and parties
If parting I’d seen shadow in her eyes.