Bug-Jargal

Bug-Jargal
Author(s)	Victor Hugo
Country	France
Language	French
Publisher	J. Hetzel
Publication date	1826
Published in English	1833
Media type	Print
Pages	211

Bug-Jargal is a novel by the French writer Victor Hugo. First published in 1826, it is a reworked version of an earlier short story of the same name published in the Hugo brothers' magazine Le Conservateur littéraire in 1820. The novel follows a friendship between the enslaved African prince of the title and a French military officer named Leopold D'Auverney during the tumultuous early years of the Haitian Revolution.

Hugo later claimed that the story was to have been part of a collaborative work called Contes sous la Tente (Tales under a Tent), and that he had written it in 1818 (at the age of sixteen) in two weeks; the manuscript is however dated April 1819.

Several translations into English exist. The first, a modified version with the title The Slave-King, was published in 1833. The only modern translation is by Chris Bongie and was published in 2004.

References

• Max Bach, Hugo’s Interest in Social Problems, Modern Language Notes, January 1957, No 72 (1), pp. 47-48.
• Pascale Gaitet, Hybrid Creatures, Hybrid Politics, in Hugo’s "Bug-Jargal" and "Le Dernier jour d'un condamné", Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Spring-Summer 1997, No 25 (3-4), pp. 251-65.