Hearing Eye

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.

“There are many points at which one forgets one is reading a translation at all… This is great poetry of childhood – but simultaneously, and not coincidentally, it is among the finest poetry of old age... 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 the thought-provoking quality of much of what is translated.”