Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, Translationally

Bug-Jargal (1826) was written by a young conservative-royalist French novelist who would later become one of the nineteenth century’s most global (and more ideologically liberal) figures. Translated into English and Spanish and reissued in French in multiple editions over a thirty year period, Bug-Jargal takes as its explicit subject the Haitian Revolution. Hugo calls it in his 1832 preface “an immense topic: the revolt of the Saint Domingue blacks in 1791, a struggle of giants, three worlds having a stake in the matter—Europe and Africa as the combatants, America as the field of battle.”¹ Despite the world-historical significance openly acknowledged here, and despite the fact that the first four English translations (1833–66) were in part motivated by the contribution they would make to the international abolitionist movement, the novel can’t make up its mind about the slave revolt it represents so self-consciously through multiple voices and languages, notably Spanish and Creole as well as French. In fact, Hugo didn’t even allow the revolt to come to an end in his novel as it did in history—with the creation of the independent Caribbean nation of Haiti in 1804. Enfolded within a brief frame narrative, the forward motion of Bug-Jargal begins at one of the traditional origin points of the revolution, on the eve of the Bois Caïman uprising in August 1791, and ends in December 1791, with the death of Bug-Jargal and the slaves in retreat—before the slave revolt had become the Haitian Revolution.

Hugo alludes to this historical disjunction in his 1826 preface, where he comments both cryptically and grandiosely, “Events have accommodated themselves to the book, not the book to events” (57). Referring explicitly to the 1825 Franco-Haitian ordinance (belatedly recognizing Haitian independence at the cost of imposing a crushing national debt owed to France), Hugo gestures here toward the kind of fractured timeline needed to bring a Francophone Haitian dimension to a trans-American literary itinerary periodized by established national-imperial histories. Linguistically as well, Hugo’s French Atlantic models a way of reading that extends the reach of Haiti, as the ongoing center of Euro-colonial failure, to a point of departure for a deeper and longer French-Creole-Spanish presence in trans-American literary culture. Just so, Hugo’s novel, a historical romance of black and white “brothers,” narrates the short-lived alliance between the enslaved African-born king of the title and the white nobleman Léopold D’Auverney, who, like the novel, both fails and memorializes his ally. The novel’s sociopolitical ambivalence about the Haitian Revolution is perfectly refracted in the “end” that is so markedly absent, leaving open whether the slave revolt is potentially reversible or simply unfinished. The novel thus registers the complex politics of transatlantic, interracial dialogue over this period and compresses France’s continuing engagement with the Haitian Revolution and Afro-Creole independence into the linguistic registers of the translational novel.

In this process of historical foreclosure and reverse adaptation, Hugo performs multiple acts of translation. Not only does he translate event into narrative and history into language, both inter- and intralingually, but also he underscores the problem of translatability itself, or what Chris Bongie, the translator of the newest English version, calls in his introduction the “inherent opacity” of language (10). A French novel filled with Spanish and Creole words and phrases, some footnoted and translated, others not, Bug-Jargal appears to be as intensely ambivalent about the possibilities of translation as it is about the Haitian Revolution. As Hugo translates purportedly nonfictional sources into a fictive narrative, buttressed by an elaborate apparatus of sixty-plus footnotes, the novel approximates the necessarily multilingual pathways that historical research would have to take by highlighting the many social scales of language use from which these sources might have emerged: metropolitan British and American English; proper and pidgin Spanish; the French of the capital and the colony; the patois of plotting slaves who had been exposed to all of these as well as to African tribal and trade languages...