Fragments

This book features Victor Hugo’s poetic writings that ultimately remained unpublished except for their inclusion in appendices and notes. He had intended these verses for future use, sometimes with a particular work in mind, whose title he would sometimes inscribe above the verses. Early editors called them “remnants”; later editors and scholars called them “fragments.” In the introduction, the editor and translator of this book, R.G. Skinner, focuses on verses written during Hugo’s political exile, and on the works for which they were meant. He begins with an exposition of those works and the circumstances of their origins, and ends with a discussion of the nature of the fragments, themselves, their genesis, their emergence, the conditions under which they were created. Highly motivated and obsessive, Hugo wrote throughout the day and night. Whenever verses came to mind, no matter the circumstances, he would write them down on any handy scrap of paper. An editor of his work, Gustave Simon, described these writings when they were discovered: "…nearly a thousand fragments of all sizes, some rare full pages, others on the back of an envelope, a newspaper wrapper, a summons, a circular, or a handbill; when letters addressed to his wife or children came into his hands, he used the blank spaces; some verses are placed in an area a mere centimeter high." R.G. Skinner has chosen fragments from the early years of Hugo’s political exile, 1853-1861. This was the voice of the Hugo who contemplated the deeper experiences of life, death, and God, brought on by the isolating, sometimes sorrowful experiences of exile, especially during the brooding, dark, stormy months. A future editor of Hugo’s complete works, Jean Massin, would say of these verses: ". . . the Fragments will undoubtedly destine more than one reader to the discovery of some of the most beautiful verses of all hugolian poetry." Artwork by René de Saint-Denis attempts to capture the other-worldly, cosmic essence of Hugo’s work represented here, captured by Hugo’s own words: “on the brink of the Infinite,” “beyond the things of this world.”