Hugo, as he tells us, had tramped over the battlefield, presumably when he was living in Brussels in 1853; he had studied maps and army-lists and such professional records as were available to him, and out of this he concocted his own elaborate and poeticized layman’s version of an event which, tremendous though it was, had no more to do with the story of Les Misérables than any other major historical event that had occurred during the century.

This is the largest of the digressions, and it is reasonable to assume that the bulk of it was written long before Hugo returned to his novel. The present English version has retained it, very slightly abridged, in the place it occupies in the novel, partly because it is a magnificent piece of writing and also because the episode described in that final chapter is crucial to the story.

Two other long digressions, however, have been treated with less respect. The first is in the seventh book of Part Two, entitled Parenthèse, in which Hugo discourses upon the subject of strictly enclosed religious orders, of which he disapproved (he himself, although he was broadly and sincerely religious, subscribed to no particular orthodoxy). This parenthesis follows immediately upon another, the meticulous (and fascinating) account of life in the Petit-Picpus convent, so that the story, at a highly dramatic point, is left in mid-air for some fifty pages. Hugo’s publisher, Lacroix, feeling that this would be trying the reader’s patience altogether too high, urged him to take it out; but Hugo refused, as it seems for purely personal reasons: his cousin Marie, to whom he was attached, had taken the veil in 1848. This section has accordingly been removed from the body of the book and transferred to the end as Appendix A.

The discourse on argot (Book Seven, Part Four) has been similarly treated and is relegated to Appendix B in Volume II. Here little explanation is needed. In so far as it related directly to the argot (Paris underworld slang) of Hugo’s day, his discourse, with its numerous examples, can be of interest only to specialists; where it spreads into the wider field of the general significance of thieves’ cant (a digression within a digression!) it is more interesting; but in any event it does nothing to advance the story.

The other digressions, homilies and disquisitions, or simply over-large elaborations, have been left where they were, but in some cases, particularly those of over-elaboration, they have been somewhat abridged. And here I must abandon any suggestion of the editorial ‘we’ and state as plainly as I can my personal approach to the translation of Les Misérables and the liberties I have felt justified in taking with Hugo’s text.

III

There are three earlier English renderings of Hugo’s novel, of which I have seen only one. I shall not disclose which one, or make any comment except to say that I found it very heavy going. It was made at the turn of the century and the translator, conscientiously observing the principles of translation at that time, has made a brave attempt to follow Hugo in the smallest detail, almost literally word for word. The result is something that is not English, not Hugo and, it seems to me, scarcely readable. It reads, in short, like a translation and it does no service to Hugo. I am told that the other English versions, which I have not seen, are not very different.

The principles of translation have greatly changed in the past twenty or thirty years. It is now generally recognized that the translator’s first concern must be with his author’s intention; not with the words he uses or with the way he uses them, if they have a different impact when they are rendered too faithfully into English, but with what he is seeking to convey to the reader. This, of course, embraces a great deal more than literal meaning or the plain statement of fact: feeling, colour, poetry, humour, irony, all these are elements which the translator may on no account ignore; he must catch them as best he can. But there is an overriding intention, larger than all others. The author – each and every author – writes because he wants to be read. Readability must be the translator’s first concern. Sometimes he is set an impossible task. There are writers who may fairly be termed unreadable. But Victor Hugo is not one of them. He is in many ways the most exasperating of writers – long-winded, extravagant in his use of words (it is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun), sprawling and self-indulgent. At times (the vanity for which he was famous may account for it) he was, with all his high-minded earnestness, extraordinarily lacking in self-criticism. There are passages of mediocrity and banality in Les Misérables, as in all his work, which may cause the reader to lose all patience with him and put the book aside, without having ever reached the nobility of spirit that inspired it.

The translator (and here I am referring specifically to myself and Les Misérables) can, I maintain, do something to remedy these defects without falsifying the book, if he will nerve himself to treat Hugo not as a museum piece or a sacred cow but as the author of a very great novel which is still living, still relevant to life, and which deserves to be read. He can ‘edit’ – that is to say abridge, tone down the rhetoric, even delete where the passage in question is merely an elaboration of what has already been said.

I have edited in this sense throughout the book, as a rule only to a minor degree, and never, I hope, so drastically as to be unfaithful to Hugo’s intention. I must cite the most extreme case in illustration of what I mean. This is the third book of Part One entitled ‘In the year 1817’. Hugo has sought to convey the social climate of that particular year by compiling a lengthy catalogue of personalities and events, most of them of no great importance – people and happenings, in short, that got into the news at the time. One has the impression that he did it by skimming through the newspaper headlines.