Paperback, published 2014. A modern translation into English of Victor Hugo’s l’Art d’être grand-père (1877), some of which is set in and describes Guernsey. This collection of poems, which celebrates his grandchildren, was very popular and helped to cement his modern reputation as a kindly and humane father figure. The poems are very accessible and many are charming, but beneath the fresh and unsentimental treatment of his beloved Georges and Jeanne lies a darker theme: that of the fate of the Paris Commune and of the Communards, which affected him deeply both practically and morally. Timoth Adès is a talented and highly experienced translator of poetry in languages other than English.

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.