Around the Orientales: Victor Hugo, Ernest Fouinet and archaic Arabic poetry

What is it about?

Ernest Fouinet (1799-1845) is known today only for having provided Victor Hugo (1802-1885) with the fragments of oriental poems mentioned in one of the notes of Orientales (1829). Arabic fragments are the most numerous. they are a veritable anthology of archaic Arabic poetry. Only two of Fouinet’s sources can be identified and one cannot exclude recourse to manuscripts. His comments, many of which are taken up by Hugo, show a poet’s sympathy for other poets. His translation, without being as literal as Hugo claims, is not less striking in terms of its concision and precision. Although, in some cases, he keeps an eye on earlier Latin translations, he nevertheless keeps the other on the Arabic original. Despite Hugo’s replacing Fouinet, the Arabic “cassideh” seems to have missed its arrival on the French literary scene. Yet, Fouinet tried to “naturalize” it: the following year, he would provide three major pieces of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and this time rendered in French verses. Although this was not a practice he persevered in nor set up a school of thought in, Fouinet nevertheless appears as a true pioneer of the translation, especially poetic, of archaic Arabic poetry.

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