HEARING EYE Publications

Acumen 44 January 2003

SYMPHONIC STRUCTURES

How to be a Grandfather by Victor Hugo, Translated by Timothy Adès.
Hearing Eye, 95pp.; £8.95.

In their very interesting anthology The London Book of English Verse (1949), Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée include examples of a 'genre' they describe as 'symphonic poems', poems of complex emotions and ideas in which the poet has responded to the need "of comprehending a diversity of emotional responses within a single artistic form". The same analogy with symphonic comes to mind when reading certain collections - and it certainly does in both these cases, for both are far more than mere assemblages of individual poems; each is a patterned exploration, in clear sections (one might call them 'movements') of recurrent themes and motifs, a structure of complex intellectual and emotional balances.

The poems in L'Art d'être grand-père were written between 1870 and 1877, in which later year Hugo's volume was published. It is made up of some sixty-eight poems, carefully ordered so as to intertwine observations on (and evocations of) childhood and old-age, death and birth, counterpointing a movement forwards from childhood towards a maturing experience with a backward movement into memory. Hugo's arrangement of his poems is complex and subtle (as discussed, for example, in J.C. Ireson's, Victor Hugo: A Companion to his Poetry, 1997).

Timothy Adè's translation is of 48 poems (a shame we couldn't have the whole) but preserves a clear sense of the large (and small) structures of Hugo's original volume. The best compliment one can pay Adès is perhaps to say that there are many points at which one forgets that one is readingtranslation at all (only to be reminded in a number of the poems in twelve syllable lines). This is great poetry of childhood — but simultaneously, and not coincidentally, it is amongst the finest poetry of old age. There are striking affirmations of the redemptive power of the innocent imagination, of the importance (and the vulnerability) of that power.

There are meditations on the public (as 'prophet' social reformer etc) and private (as indulgent grandfather) roles of the poet and there are fascinating discoveries that the 'big' issues of the public role are actually implicit in the 'little' matters of his private role. At times there is a visionary quality which reminds the English reader of Blake (of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, naturally, but also of the Prophetic Books). In one dimension of the poems, indeed, we might read the Hugo persona as 'God' to the 'Adam and Eve' of his grandchildren Georges and Jeanne (not least in the several poems set in the zoological gardens of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, with their vividly coloured animals, like creatures from Edward Hicks' wonderful painting The Peaceable Kingdom). The children are, without contradiction, also 'divine':

Summer. This park, like Eden's bowers,
Beams with hot June and gorgeous flowers;
I shall be there with Jean and George,
When Jean and George take me in charge.
We'll visit, with its growly bears,
This précis of the Universe.
I go because it's what Jean wants,
And against Jean I've no defence.

I have two depths in which to pry:
The child in trembling infancy,
And God, on fire to create:
The very sweet, the very great.
They blaze with but a single flame:
Vast star, small soul, one and the same.

Hugo's poetry seems to have been out of fashion for many years; in the publication of this volume by Adès (along with the bilingual edition Selected Poetry by Stephen Monte, published by Carcanet last year), there is perhaps evidence that poets (as well as academics) are beginning to reassess his work. Whether or not that is the case, Hearing Eye deserve our gratitude for their publication of How To Be A Grandfather, which I strongly recommend for the accomplishment of the translator and for the thought-provoking quality of much of what is translated. These late poems by Hugo have sometimes been dismissed as merely sentimental; they are far more than that, as Adès translations convincingly demonstrate.

Glyn Pursglove


The London Magazine, Spring 2003

Equally Libertarian

Mayakovsky: Russian Poet. A Memoir by Elsa Triolet
Susan de Muth
Hearing Eye, 104pp, £8.95

How to be a Grandfather
Victor Hugo
translated by Timothy Adès
Hearing Eye, 95pp, £8.95

These books are slivers cut from the careers of Vladimir Mayakovsky (died aged 36, in 1930) and Victor Hugo (died aged 80, in 1885). The first is a memoir of the Russian revolutionary Futurist by one of his earliest girl-friends. The second is a selection from Hugo's book of verse, L'Art d'Être Grand-père (1877), translated here as How to be a Grandfather. It is reasonable to cast it as a self-help book which will increase the self-esteem of novice grandfathers.

Mayakovsky: Russian Poet is a sparky paperback, its narrative in normal type interrupted by pages of bold face writings from Mayakovsky. It looks more 'Russian' than the 1939 French edition in yellow paper covers which Elsa Triolet published to honour Mayakovsky after his reputation had fallen foul of doctrinaire Soviet realists and to validate her own communist credentials as one who was in at beginnings of revolutionary socialism. She was living in France, married to Louis Aragon, the 'Elsa' of his poetry. When the young Mayakovsky erupted into the life of fifteen-year old Elsa, he had already served a year in jail for subversion. It was like loving a rock star.

Mayakovsky was a stand-up poet whom Elsa got by heart, as he wanted. 'The book will never be a substitute for recital... the radio, there's the way forward (one of them anyway) for the word.' Their romance was short, but contact survived partly because Mayakovsky fell in love with Elsa's sister, whom he shared for fifteen years with her husband. Elsa writes nothing of this transition either because she buried it or because of revolutionary comradeliness. But incompleteness suits this memoir of vignettes: of clothes, of jokes, of anti-bourgeois detail (like an upside-down tree for a Futurists' Christmas).

How to be a Grandfather is equally libertarian. Hugo wrote 68 poems for his grandchildren Georges and Jeanne of which nearly 50 are here, in chiming simplistic verse. He sounds like a nursery Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, let loose in his Guernsey gardens. Of Jeanne: 'She is heavenly by right, she is lovely by role, She has come to her throne and befuddled my soul.' Hugo is more sly than a soppy date: the children are clearly seen, their 'stammering' and 'riddling', their crazy greed which parents have to ban. 'You want the moon?' says grandfather: 'Oh, all right, have it then.' The poems are over the top, but what spills down their sides is neatly caught, as in the 'Epic Story of the Lion', rescued from sentimentality by Babar-like sharpness of outline.

These two books from Hearing Eye possess a lack of guile or smugness. Hugo's message for seniors is: What's wrong with second childhood? Triolet and Mayakovsky have a message for young authors: write, write and write — store your reserves. 'The pocket-book', says Mayakovsky, 'is a compulsory reserve.' Write aloud: 'I walk swinging my arms, muttering quietly. Little by little you start to extract words from this rumble.' Obvious, but this typical fragment of oral graffiti sounds as if it would work.

Ian MacKillop

 

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