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Pathological as it seems, we tend to express reverence for our favorite writers by reshaping their work into something more like what they should have done. Most of us manage this simply by reading selectively. We skip uncongenial or tiresome sections of long novels--the moralizing rants in Dickens, say, or the poetry in "The Lord of the Rings." We avert our eyes from aspects of familiar work we don't want to see--Eliot's anti-Semitism, Flannery O'Connor's cranky religiosity. And we ignore major works the author cared about but we don't--Fielding's "Amelia," Poe's "Eureka," the fiction of William Carlos Williams, the poems of Raymond Carver. And perhaps more benignly (or perhaps not), we regard certain writers--Blake, Dickinson--as our contemporaries in period costume, mentally correcting the occasional "thee," "thou" and "twas." In effect, we're editors as much as we are readers; we never take writers quite as they are.
Real editors (that is, readers who get paid to put their tastes and judgments into practice) and translators (gatekeepers whose control is even more absolute) range from hands-off compilers and intermediaries to gloves-off co-creators. The playwright and poet laureate Nahum Tate gave his 1681 adaptation of "King Lear" a happy ending. (Almost a century later, a no less rigorous critic than Samuel Johnson still thought this was a good fix.) In our own time, editors have quarried out and patched together three posthumous "Hemingway" novels ("Islands in the Stream," "The Garden of Eden" and "True at First Light") from his sprawling and chaotic unfinished manuscripts. (One of those editors was his son Patrick.) Translators, meanwhile, have recreated Catullus as a Beat poet, Zola's lowlife Parisians as London Cockneys, Asian poets who lived during the West's Dark Ages as fin de siecle Imagists, and ancient Greek bards as 18th-century neoclassicists. ("It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope," the scholar Richard Bentley said, "but you must not call it Homer.") And C.K. Scott-Moncrieff did Proust the ambiguous favor of Englishing his masterpiece under a more resonant, less relevant title copped from Shakespeare. OK, show of hands: how many think "In Search of Lost Time" sounds better than "Remembrance of Things Past"? Yep, about what I expected.
What I'm slowly working up to is an attempt to figure out what to make of the poet Brooks Haxton's new selection and translation of poems by Victor Hugo, published as a Penguin Classics paperback. My first response to "Victor Hugo: Selected Poems" was the one Haxton must have wanted: where has this guy been all my life? Like a lot of people, maybe you too, I'd thought of Hugo (whom I've never read) mainly as a novelist: an overbearing, more-than-Tolstoyan presence bestriding 19th-century France, a Napoleon of moral earnestness and a Ray Kroc of productivity, who (now this is mean) somehow deserves to be known today mostly as the distant progenitor of "Les Miz." But here was an entirely different figure: a lyric poet setting up for business on a modest scale. Hugo writes about nature and children, love and war, the mystical and (like most poets) the literary. He's plainspoken, economical, surprisingly modern for his day (more like Frost and Hardy than Keats and Wordsworth), with unruly passions, a precisionist's eye and a wonderful ear for cadence. Here's the end of an untitled poem Haxton calls "Barefoot":
Hugo, that is, seems to be a poet who writes a bit like Brooks Haxton. (You owe it to yourself to check out Haxton's 2001 collection "Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero," or "The Sun at Night," from 1995.) And as a matter of fact, it's Haxton himself who put in those cracked lips. (He might have been remembering Bob Dylan's "To Ramona": "Your cracked country lips I still wish to kiss.") In the original French ("Ses cheveux dans ses yeux, et riant au travers") Hugo doesn't say a word about them; as nearly as I can tell, she's just laughing through her unkempt hair.
I think we've got a problem here. Haxton is perfectly aboveboard about what he's up to: he prints Hugo's French on facing pages so you can check him out--you didn't think I looked this up myself, right?--and he provides notes explaining his cuts and additions. But is it kosher when, in a poem about Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, he cuts off the last 14 lines (of what seems to be only the first section of a longer piece) in order to create a snappier ending?
The French, moreover, says nothing like this. ("Et lui, chene vivant, par la hache insulte,/Tressaillant sous le spectre aux lugubres revanches,/Il regardait tomber autour de lui ses branches.") Hugo's ax isn't inevitable, and his Napoleon is the metaphorical oak tree--not some consciousness inside it--watching his own branches fall around him. There's no question in my mind that Haxton's version is far better than this lame trope of Hugo's. It's just not Hugo.
And what about those 14 final lines that didn't make the cut? In his note on the translation, Haxton says that he's "pared down especially where the effectiveness of a lofty tone depends on Hugo's genius for French verse. Often my omissions involve rhetorical figures that feel strained in literal English ... Where liberties serve my version of the poem, I have altered and substituted freely. I have also omitted words and phrases, in some cases, sentences at a stretch, that in English fail to suggest the intensity of the original poem." This sounds reasonable as all hell, but in fact he's asking us to take his word that a rhetorical figure which is "strained" in English is just fine in French, and to trust his intuition that the "intensity" of a French poem can survive a bunch of superfluous words while the same poem in English cannot.
Since my own French is barely fit to order dinner with, and my immersion in the conventions of French poetry isn't deep enough to wet my insteps, I can't credibly dispute these assumptions. But I'm still scratching my head. It seems an awful lot like Haxton is editing and rewriting Hugo into a smarter, more skillful and more modern poet than he really was. And now that I think about it, even the modest size of this book makes me suspicious. According to Haxton's introduction, the standard edition of Hugo's complete poems is ten times the size of the complete Emily Dickinson. The "Selected Poems" runs about 120 pages, and half of those pages are the French text. Granted, poets (like the rest of us) should be judged by their best work, but Hugo seems not to have known what his best work was. He just put it out there. And if what Haxton has culled is the best of the best of the best, and if even that best has been tinkered with and gussied up more than a hundred years after it was written, does it really give us a trustworthy sense, for better or worse, of what sort of poet Victor Hugo was? If it doesn't, then what have we actually got here? Most of this book is great fun to read, in English at least, but I don't quite understand its--how do you say?--raison d'etre.