Publications

How to be a Grandfather

writerVictor Hugo

translatorTimothy Adès

How to be a Grandfather The Complete Edition - and other poems is translated from Victor Hugo’s L’Art d’être Grand-Père and introduced by Timothy Adès.

Victor Hugo remains France’s greatest poet, perhaps greatest writer. He is known in the UK for his two famous novels in cinematic or musical versions: all the rest, including his vast output of wonderful poetry, is largely neglected. This was his last book of poetry. He had lost almost all his family except two little grandchildren. His musings on childhood, old age, politics, history, the natural and animal kingdoms, are poured into these rhymed verses with a torrential energy. Timothy Adès translates with rhyme and metre.

Appended are Hugo’s epic accounts of the great Napoleonic disasters: Moscow, Waterloo and St Helena.