GLEANINGS IN FRENCH FIELDS: A FORMAL APPROACH TO THE TRANSLATION OF

FRENCH POETRY, WITH A REPRESENTATIVE SELECTION OF TRANSLATED POEMS

FROM THE SIXTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURIES

______

A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

______

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of

Bachelor of Arts in French

______by

Robert A. Armstrong

April, 2020

Invocation: From “Words” by Edward Thomas

Out of us all That make rhymes, Will you choose Sometimes— As the winds use A crack in a wall Or a drain, Their joy or their pain To whistle through— Choose me, You English words?

I know you: You are light as dreams, Tough as oak, Precious as gold, As poppies and corn, Or an old cloak: . . . Worn new Again and again: Young as our streams After rain: And as dear As the earth which you prove That we love. . . .

Let me sometimes dance With you, Or climb Or stand, perchance In ecstasy, Fixed and free In a rhyme, As poets do.

Table of Contents

Part I: On Translation Introduction: New Worlds ...... 1 Versification in French and English: Conventions and Comparison ...... 4 Historical Perspectives on Translation ...... 19 A Personal Approach to Translation ...... 30 Borrowers and Borrowings in Poetry...... 40

Part II: Poets and Poems Note on the Texts ...... 73 Louise Labé ...... 74 Joachim Du Bellay ...... 82 Pierre de Ronsard ...... 91 Jean de La Fontaine ...... 97 L’Abbé de Lattaignant ...... 103 André Chénier ...... 109 Victor Hugo ...... 118 Gérard de Nerval ...... 150 Théophile Gautier ...... 157 Leconte de Lisle ...... 166 Charles Baudelaire ...... 179 Stéphane Mallarmé ...... 190 Paul Verlaine ...... 195 Arthur Rimbaud ...... 200

Appendices Timeline of French History, 1500-1900 ...... 217 Acknowledgements ...... 225 Works Cited ...... 228

Armstrong 1

Part I: On Translation

Introduction: New Worlds

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken . . .

—John Keats1

In the summer of 2015, I made my entry into the world of French literature as many

Americans have done for the past 70-plus years: with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit

Prince. The copy was old—a Houghton Mifflin educational edition from my grandmother’s school days, published only three years after the book’s first American appearance, and the very same year it made its debut in liberated France (Cerisier n. pag.). That this now-venerable text was being used to introduce schoolchildren to French literature even in the 1940’s struck me; it bespeaks an instant canonicity for the book.

Le Petit Prince certainly has a seminal place in the French canon today—for myself, for all the French students in my high school, and for countless thousands of other Anglophones, it is a rite of passage. It is a portal from the world of verb-charts to the world of literature—that is to say, from the world of artificial classroom language to the world of living real-world language: le monde francophone. It is, veritably, a world unto itself; any speaker of a second language can attest to this fact. There is the world of one’s native language, and there is the

1 Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry 189.

Armstrong 2 world of each foreign language one encounters. Every such world comes with its own population, its own uses and wonts, its own rules—and its own literary canon.

As much as it is revelatory, thrilling, seductive—and fun—to enter this new world, the initiation immediately poses a problem. For the student of literature, the canon is the cultural basis of the world. To be worldly, to even begin to know this world, one must know the canon.

Even if the student of English has not read the complete works of Shakespeare, Austen, and

Steinbeck, there is much to be said for knowing of these authors: when they wrote, what they wrote, what they represented. Within this schema, within this structure, the student fills the canon in with deeper knowledge of those authors and works that particularly interest him or her.

And then the student learns a new language, enters a new world, and confronts a new literature in its shining, daunting totality. Daunting is what it is to explore the English canon, the endeavor of a life for those who love the exploration; now the world is doubled overnight.

Thus, with that first sentence—Lorsque j’avais six ans . . . (Saint-Exupéry 1)—I made, as

I have said, my entry into the new world of a second literary canon. I liked what I found, and set about exploring.

The last assignment in my last year of high school French class was meant to offer us, the graduating students of French 5, some guidance in our incipient explorations. We were to peruse a selection of some of the best-known poems in the language (the likes of “Demain, dès l’aube . . .”), pick one we liked, and, reading it carefully and closely, produce a translation. I selected a poem called “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse . . .” by a fellow called Joachim Du Bellay.

It was Keats finding Chapman’s Homer. I felt the poem; I loved the poem; I wanted my translation to feel the same, and so I set myself the challenge of reproducing the poem’s form: rhymed alexandrine verse. The translation was loose, and marked by a beginner’s clumsiness,

Armstrong 3 but the process exhilarated me, and so it is in that spring of 2016 that this project can be said to have its deepest roots.

I got to college, and translation stayed in the back of my mind. My first semester at Ohio

University I was an engineering major; it was by a fortunate series of events and with the help of some wonderful people that by my sophomore year I was studying French in the Honors Tutorial

College. From nearly the start I had a project of poetry translation in mind for my eventual senior thesis. I took a series of classes and tutorials in poetry, translation, and related areas, and gradually built both a body of works and my own focused approach to translation. I will explain these both in detail, but before I do, some preliminary explanations are in order.

Armstrong 4

Versification in French and English: Conventions and Comparison

“Il fallait . . . ne pas se croire autorisé à violenter la langue par l’exemple d’un usage ancien dont on n’avait pas pénétré les raisons.”

—Maurice Grammont2

As the matter at hand is translation of French verse into English, let us begin by examining the conventions of French poetry, and then pass on to those of English, before we finally arrive at the synthesis of the two that must be reached when translating the one into the other. The main resources I shall draw on in this section are Maurice Grammont’s Petit traité de versification française and Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An

Explanation of Meter and Versification. Grammont’s treatise was published in 1908 when the traditional rules of French verse were just beginning to be challenged by experimentative

Modernist poets; as I have included no translations of poems composed after the 1870’s, it is a perfectly suitable resource. Steele is still alive and writing poetry, but is something of an apologist for old-fashioned formalism—his work is marked by “its allegiance to traditional forms, meters, and rhyme schemes,” and is thus a similarly appropriate resource (“Timothy

Steele”).

English verse for the past several centuries has been primarily accentual-syllabic (more on this later, but think of the iambic pentameter “heartbeat” rhythm typical of lines like

Shakespeare’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”). The defining feature of French poetry during the same time period, however, has been syllables more so than accents. While the

2 Petit traité de versification française 25.

Armstrong 5 line above from Shakespeare is considered regular because it has ten syllables, of which five are stressed or accented (hence accentual-syllabic), a ten-syllable line in French like Du Bellay’s

“Sacrez costaux, et vous sainctes ruines” (Antiquitez de Rome VII) is regular only for its ten syllables, regardless of where stress falls. French verse shares this syllabic nature with other

Romance languages like Italian and Spanish (Steele 137). It is noteworthy that stress is generally much less prominent in these languages than in English.

For anybody acquainted with French, but not French verse, this notion of syllables can get confusing. Take the second quatrain from Victor Hugo’s “Nuits de juin”:

Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure ;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ;

Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

To the uninitiated, counting syllables here, it might seem like the quatrain is composed of lines of ten, eleven, eleven, and ten syllables. A strange pattern, but perhaps some conventional form?

Not so. While in modern conversational French these lines would likely have those syllable counts as prose, by standard conventions of verse pronunciation they are in fact all regular twelve-syllable lines, called alexandrines.

In Old French (the language of the 11th to the 13th centuries, according Chauveau et al.

[xii]), Grammont explains that the count of syllables in poetry conformed rigorously to everyday pronunciation. As pronunciation changed moving into Middle and Modern French, however, the rules for pronunciation of poetry remained largely static, resulting in the discrepancy highlighted

Armstrong 6 above (7). First and foremost is the problem of the letter “e.” The rules for when and how to pronounce the French “e” are byzantine, but the matter is actually simpler in poetry than in prose. The rule of thumb for poetry is that an “e” not part of a diphthong should be pronounced, even at the end of a word like “aube” above where the terminal “e” would not likely be heard in conversational French. Grammont claims that in verse every “e” should be pronounced (8); I was taught, and usage seems to suggest, that an “e” at the end of a line is not to be sounded. The first line of the Hugo extract above bears this out—pronouncing every “e” except the one at the end of “meilleure” gives a twelve-syllable line, a regular alexandrine.

The exception to this rule is in the case of elision. In regular prose French, this term refers usually to contractions between, for example, the definite article (le or la) and a noun beginning with a vowel: instead of saying “le aube” we say “l’aube.” This elision and similarly common ones (such as “si” and “il” becoming “s’il”) are marked by an apostrophe and the deletion of a vowel; other incidental elisions are not orthographically marked but are to be understood by the reader. Examples of such incidental elisions—where an “e” at the end of one word runs into a vowel at the beginning of another—can be found in the second and third lines of the Hugo extract above: “dôme éternelle” has four syllables (since the line-final “e” is not pronounced); “douce et pale, en” has two instances of elision and consequently also has four syllables (23-25).

A special case is the letter “h.” Though never pronounced, this letter at the beginning of a word is considered, depending on etymology, either “mute” or “aspirated.” The mute “h” requires elision in the same cases that vowels do; the aspirated “h” is never to be elided (Booth

49). As an illustration we can look to the first and last lines of another Hugo poem, “Demain, dès l’aube . . .”

Armstrong 7

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,

Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

Here the “h” in “heure” is mute and elided with the definite article, as indicated by the apostrophe. The “h” in “houx” is aspirated, and so not elided with “de,” as “heure” would be

(“d’heure”). Where the elision or lack thereof is indicated by the presence or absence of an apostrophe, as here with “le” and “de,” it poses no problem for counting syllables in lines of verse. Where the elision is not thus indicated, it is up to the reader to know which words begin with which sort of “h.” Even if one has not memorized this fact for every h-word, though, a suspect syllable count in a line can often be resolved by considering that an unknown “h” could go either way.

There are plenty of other rules for determining precisely the count of syllables in a line of

French verse; many respected poets do not follow them with perfect consistency, and for the amateur, it is enough to know the guidelines given above to appreciate the form of a French poem. Combinations of vowels within words are particularly slippery and variable, and many words can be considered to have one syllable greater or fewer according to need. Grammont gives us examples of the same poet using the same word as either a mono- or a disyllable according to need, as in these two lines from Hugo:

Sur la terre où tout jette un miasme empoisonneur.

Armstrong 8

Mêlé dans leur sépulcre au miasme insalubre.

In order to make the correct twelve syllables in each, the first line uses “miasme” as a monosyllable, the second as a disyllable (14). Essentially, Grammont identifies this flexibility as a compromise between the school of respecting the classical rules of pronunciation, and that of conforming poetry to the usage of contemporary language. This compromise might be thought perfectly respectable, but Grammont, a comically irascible purist, thought not—deeming it

“unjustifiable except by error and false analogy” (7). Let us reserve judgement on Monsieur

Grammont, but accept the compromise he could not.

Most traditional French verse has been written in lines of eight, ten, or twelve syllables.

The eight-syllable verse, according to Grammont, served in the Middle Ages for dramatic, didactic, and narrative poetry, becoming a mainly lyric verse in the sixteenth (40). In my translations there are no examples from this era, but a later one comes from Lattaignant’s “Le

Cabinet du philosophe”:

J’aime beaucoup mon cabinet ;

Je passe en ce réduit secret

Plus de la moitié de ma vie ;

Recall that “J’aime” here will have two syllables, and so will “passe en.” Grammont qualifies ten-syllable verse as that of the epic in Old French, and later as a common verse broadly used in all genres. It lost most of its popularity in the seventeenth century, but was still much-

Armstrong 9 employed in the sixteenth, where my survey of French poetry begins (40)—take this example from Louise Labé’s eighth sonnet:

Je vis, je meurs : je me brule et me noye.

J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure :

La vie m’est et trop molle et trop dure.

J’ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye.

This brings us to twelve-syllable verse, better known as the alexandrine, which warrants a closer look than the eight- and ten-syllable forms.

The alexandrine is the standard line of verse in French for most of its history, analogous to the iambic pentameter in English. The line gains its name from a 12th-century epic poem about

Alexander the Great; its form is thought to be an extension of the ten-syllable line, meant to equalize the six- and four-syllable hemistiches of that line into a more balanced six and six. In the sixteenth century, Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay led a group of young poets called the Pléiade in re-inventing and re-invigorating French poetry; it was the Pléiade who elevated the alexandrine to the status it would hold in the centuries that followed (Grammont 41-

42). An excellent specimen of the Pléiade alexandrine, showing the division by a caesura or pause into two groups (hemistiches) of six syllables, is the first line of Du Bellay’s Regrets

XXXI:

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, ║ a fait un beau voyage,

Armstrong 10

The rule of placement of this well-defined pause between the two halves of the line was an ideal, but not always perfectly followed, especially by poets of later centuries.

Eventually, the syllabic alexandrine came to be considered also as “rhythmic”—

Grammont’s term—or what we might call accentual. The classical alexandrine had four light stresses, and was thus considered a tetrameter (47-50),

/ / / / Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,

whereas the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century often employed a line of three stresses, called a trimeter. Often trimeters were mixed into a piece composed mainly of tetrameters, in order to highlight the subject of the three-stressed line (53-58). Returning to one of Hugo’s lines above, we see:

/ / / Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ;

These stresses, however, are indeed relatively light compared to word-stresses in English, and the alexandrine remains primarily a syllabic verse form.

Beyond discussion of the eight-, ten-, and twelve-syllable lines, there is relatively little to say about this aspect of form in the poetry that I have translated. “Free verse” (vers libre) originally referred even to alexandrines of other than three or four stresses; the very free verse as we understand the term today, with lines of varying numbers of syllables, was not much used before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its most important practitioner before this is

Armstrong 11 probably Jean de La Fontaine, who used it in his Fables (Grammont 68-70). Here is an example from his “Le Corbeau et le Renard”:

Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché,

Tenoit en son bec un fromage.

Maître Renard, par l’odeur alléché,

Lui tint à peu-près ce langage :

Hé ! bon jour, Monsieur du Corbeau.

Que vous êtes joli ! que vous me semblez beau !

The first line is of ten syllables, then eight, ten, eight, eight, and twelve. Lafontaine may have considered the comic/didactic subjects of his fables appropriate for free verse rather than something stricter, and he uses it to good effect. The only other poem in free verse I have translated is Rimbaud’s “Bonne pensée du matin,” whose lines of anywhere from four to ten syllables manifest the breaking-apart of nineteenth-century convention that Rimbaud’s poetry in many ways represented.

Finally, there is imparisyllabic verse—that is, of lines having an odd number of syllables.

Grammont writes that nine-syllable verse was used from time to time in the Middle Ages, and that seven-syllable verse was used for light, playful, or ironic poetry (42-43). Of the poets represented in my translations, the only one notable for using imparisyllabic verse is Paul

Verlaine. In his “Art poétique,” he urges “De la musique avant toute chose, / Et pour cela préfère l’Impair” (“Before all else, music, / And for this, prefer the Impair”) as part of a poetry of ephemeral nuance and restraint from traditional eloquence (Bercot et al. 743-744). “Art

Armstrong 12 poétique” is in nine-syllable lines, but the only example from Verlaine that I have translated,

“Nevermore,” actually uses conventional alexandrines. I have translated one poem in imparisyllabic verse, Hugo’s “Viens !—une flute invisible,” which uses a seven-syllable line.

Once one begins to get a grasp on syllables, French verse reveals another complication that goes beyond the exigencies of English poetics. Rhyme is an important feature of verse in both languages, helping to differentiate verse from prose. However, Grammont identifies in early

French poetry a tendency to use and re-use too often the same rhymes, leading to monotony of sounds and words. To address this problem, the poets of the Pléiade and later classicists developed the custom of alternating “masculine” and “feminine” rhymes—so called because the masculine rhymes finish in a stressed vowel and often a consonant, along the pattern of masculine adjectives like grand, while feminine rhymes finish with a mute “e” after the stressed vowel and possible consonant, along the pattern of feminine adjectives like grande (30-32). In our passage from “Nuits de juin”:

Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure ;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ;

Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

The first and third lines form a feminine rhyme (note the mute “e” on “meilleure” and “heure”), while the second and fourth form a masculine rhyme. This custom may seem curious and pedantic to an English speaker, but Grammont assures us that it is “the most important of the classical rules concerning rhyme” (33). In terms of quality of rhyme, French distinguishes

Armstrong 13 between “rich” and “poor” rhymes; the more phonemes that two words have in common, the better. Perfect homophones are considered excellent rhymes. Grammont gives the example of

“pas” as a negation rhyming with “pas” as a noun, and Hugo frequently employs “tombe” as a verb with “tombe” as a noun, as in “Demain, dès l’aube . . .” (33):

Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,

Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe

Such rhyming pairs of homophones, especially the one above, are so common in French poetry that the Anglophone reader might find them banal, or at least curious.

Let us turn now to a comparative overview of English verse. As has already been remarked, the classic standard of English poetry is iambic pentameter—ten syllables, five stresses, organized into units called “feet.” An iamb is a foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and “iambic pentameter” means a meter of five iambs (Steele 5). The practice of analyzing stress patterns in poetry is called scansion, and in its simplest form involves putting a slash over accented syllables, and an “x” over unaccented ones. Here is an example from John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow” (8):

x / x / x / x / x / I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

x / x / x / x / x / Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?

Armstrong 14

Iambic pentameter has been used by nearly every well-known English poet, especially before the twentieth century, and beyond the realm of poetry is found in some of the plays of

Shakespeare and others. The principles of scansion, though, can be used for meters other than the ubiquitous iambic pentameter. If the iamb is represented as (x /), then other metrical feet found in

English poetry include the trochee (/ x), the anapest (x x /), the dactyl (/ x x), and the amphibrach

(x / x) (Steele 55).

The most common line in English, then, is of ten syllables, but is not syllabic in the same way that French lines are. What matters in iambic pentameter is five iambs; it is of secondary importance that this happens to give us ten syllables. As we have seen, the classical French alexandrine had certain conventions regarding stress, but these were secondary; what matters most in an alexandrine is the syllable count. Steele explains, though, that the term “alexandrine” was sometimes imported into English to describe a line of iambic hexameter, a usage he calls

“misleading, since the French alexandrines neither are iambic nor have six beats” (57). The

English alexandrine has not been much used for whole poems, but in the eighteenth century and before was often found as a variant in works mainly composed in iambic pentameter. Steele cites

Alexander Pope’s famous criticism of this practice:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

The alexandrine, as Pope implies, was seen as cumbersome and ill-paced to the reader accustomed to lines no longer than iambic pentameter (59). The only poem I know of in English

Armstrong 15 that approximates the French use of the alexandrine is W. H. Davies’ “The Coming of Peace”

(Davies 278):

It was the night when we expected news from France,

To say the war was over, and the fighting done;

The tidings that would make my heart rejoice at last,

For foe as well as friend, and make the peoples one.

And as I moved amidst that silent multitude,

Feeling the presence of a wild excitement there,

The world appeared to me so strange and wonderful—

I almost heard a cuckoo in Trafalgar Square!

While this can be scanned as iambic, a case could be made that some of the iambic stresses are weak enough that we can discount them. Furthermore, the strong caesuras that most of the lines show after the first six syllables are highly evocative of the classical French alexandrine— perhaps the “news from France” is paralleled here in a verse form from France.

Mandatory elision as it exists in French (“l’aube”) does not feature in English. In conversation we say “it’s” and “I’m” and call it contraction; it is in fact a form of elision. In

English poetry elision does feature, though. Like in French, this can either be indicated by orthography—omitted letters and/or an apostrophe—or left to the reader to understand. An example of the former frequently seen in older poetry is supplied by the Donne excerpt above:

Armstrong 16

Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?

In Donne’s time, the past tense verb-ending in “-ed” could be sounded as its own syllable. To show when it was not, poets sometimes replaced the “e” with an apostrophe. Of the latter variety of elision, not indicated by orthography, Steele gives us several common forms.

There are y-glides and w-glides in vowel combinations making for variable syllable counts, as in the words “hideous” and “shadowy” both being able to count for three syllables when carefully enunciated or two syllables when said with the vowel sounds “glided” together. Often a word with an internal unstressed “-er-” syllable will be variable: “dexterous” and “interest” can both be tri- or disyllabic. Finally, there are certain words that can be pronounced with fewer syllables by poetic convention but not in regular conversation, like “ne’er” for “never” and “o’er” for

“over.” These uses tend to reflect historically possible pronunciations that have simply been retained for convenience in the context of poetry (119-130).

Lastly, we come to rhyme. Rhyme is not “native” to English verse; the oldest English poetry that we have relies not on rhyme but stress and alliteration as its defining qualities. It is in fact from French that rhyme entered English poetics, following the Norman conquest of 1066. It became firmly established by the Middle Ages (Steele 180). Like French, English has masculine and feminine rhyme—in this case, masculine rhyme is a rhyme of one stressed syllable, and feminine rhyme is of two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed (Steele 186). It has never been the convention in English to alternate the two as in French, but on occasion this has been tried. One such experiment that illustrates well the two types of rhyme is Robert

Browning’s 1842 “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” which opens (Andrews and Percival 159):

Armstrong 17

Gr-r-r—there you go, my heart’s abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

God’s blood, would not mine kill you!

What, your myrtle-bush wants trimming?

Oh, that rose has prior claims—

Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?

Hell dry you up with its flames!

The first and third lines are feminine rhymes, the second and fourth masculine, and so on.

Just as there are some elisions that are customarily used in English poetry but not in conversation (ne’er, o’er), usually based on historical pronunciation, so there are some such rhymes. Two of the most familiar ones are in fact based on regional rather than historical pronunciation: in conversation, many Americans say “been” as a homophone of “bin,” and

“again” to rhyme with “pen” (for some in my own part of the country, in fact, these four words all rhyme with one another); in poetic convention, most Americans understand “been” to be an acceptable rhyme for “seen” and “again” for “rain.” As far as historically-influenced rhymes that no longer ring true, Steele makes examples of “prove/love” and “free/liberty.” Sometimes these are still used, but are to be understood as near or “slant” rhymes. In this category could also fall such almost-pairs as “run/young” and “mist/kiss,” but Steele dismisses these as “facile assonantal rhymes endemic in pop-song lyrics” (192-194). If these rhymes are too poor, we must also take caution in English against rhymes that are too rich. Steele does not say much on the subject, but in their manual The Art of Versification, Esenwein and Roberts caution us especially

Armstrong 18 against the use of homophones as rhyming pairs—words like “sight” and “site” which “are not considered perfect rhymes in English poetry, although they are allowed and even much used in

French verse” (70).

Armstrong 19

Historical Perspectives on Translation

What is translation? On a platter

A poet’s pale and glaring head,

A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,

And profanation of the dead.

—Vladimir Nabokov3

In her Translation, Susan Bassnett opens an overview of the discipline by highlighting the contrast at its heart: “The layman’s view of translation,” she says, “is that it involves a simple process of linguistic transfer, whereby whatever is written in one language . . . can be transferred4 unproblematically into another language”—although in fact, “no two languages share the same structures, syntax, and vocabulary, so adjustments always have to be made” to bring ideas from the one into the other (2-3). Translation is likely as old as language itself, and the implications of interlingual communication have been the subject of thought from the ancient origins of the biblical Babel story up through the modern day and Derrida’s Des Tours de Babel.

In studying French texts and their English translations (as well, as we shall see, as the sources of those texts in English, Italian, Latin, etc.), we may pick ancient Rome as the starting point for our examination of translation. In the literary culture of Western Europe, canon and translation are inseparably entwined, and in the mind of the early modern francophone or anglophone scholar,

3 Bassnett 11. 4 It is worth noting that etymologically, transfer and translate derive from different parts of the same Latin verb (transfero, transfere, transtuli, translatum).

Armstrong 20 both are firmly rooted—to quote one such poet—in “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (Poe 66).

In Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800, Julie C.

Hayes identifies three references common to the translators she studies: Cicero, Horace, and St.

Jerome, who were all occupied in translating Greek texts (as well as Hebrew in Jerome’s case) into Latin, and who each built upon a theory of “sense for sense, not word for word” translation that is ultimately summed up in Jerome’s formula “non verbum verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu.” Interestingly, Hayes points out that it is in poetry that Horace tells translators to take the greatest liberties in translating not mere words, but thoughts and ideas (4).

In the introduction to Translation, Bassnett explains that Roman orators were trained to imitate “superior” Greek models, and that imitation and translation were closely associated in the literary culture of the time. Eventually, however, “translation played a significant role in asserting Roman cultural independence from the Greek models.” She says that in a parallel way,

Renaissance translators would employ their craft to demonstrate the equal expressive qualities of vernacular French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages to classical Latin and Greek (4-5).

Hayes echoes this thought, and again emphasizes that translation and imitation were closely associated in the Renaissance mind. Joachim Du Bellay, for example, believed that translation alone (whatever that term meant for him) was not enough to enrich the French language, but that other forms of imitation were required as well to do so (5).

John Dryden is identified by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet as something of a forerunner of modern translation studies. In their Theories of Translation anthology, Dryden is the only pre-nineteenth-century writer included, since “already in his time, he mapped the diverse streams of translational thinking, streams that forged the guidelines for the discussion of

Armstrong 21 more recent times” (1). Indeed, in his Lives of the Poets, Dr. Johnson seems to give Dryden partial credit for raising translation to the level of a respectable form of expression (Lives 147).

In the preface to his 1680 translation of Ovid’s Epistles, Dryden identified three species of translation: metaphrase, or word-for-word translation; paraphrase, or “translation with latitude” where accuracy of sense is more important than accuracy of word or phrase; and imitation,

“where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion” (Schulte and Biguenet

17). Dryden views the first of these forms of translation, metaphrase, as particularly unsuited to the reproduction of poetry. Imitation can produce excellent poetic work, but as he says above, it is questionable if this can in fact be called translation, so much does it disregard the source text.

Thus the middle ground, paraphrase, is proposed as the ideal for the translator of poetry (17).

Plenty of other authors and theorists have said it plenty of other places and times, but the above remarks from Dryden are enough to demonstrate the idea that Bassnett opened with: translation is a slippery business. The ways of producing a translation are many, and none can be called correct or incorrect except according to a set of criteria which are not inherent to the source text. Dante Gabriel Rossetti called translation “the most direct form of commentary” upon a poem, since the choices of the translator involve “the necessity of settling many points without discussion” (Schulte and Biguenet 65). In his essay “Forms of Verse Translation and the

Translation of Verse Forms,” James Holmes expands upon the ideas of translation as commentary, and of metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation. To show how a poem may be treated in translation, he proposes a diagram consisting of two overlapping continua: one of interpretation and one of poetry, linked by the verse translation (analogous to Dryden’s paraphrase) or “metapoem.” The diagram appears thus (Holmes 195):

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Of the several ways I have encountered of conceptualizing the relationship between source text and translation, as it applies to poetry, I think this model best illustrates the difficulty in articulating limits to the definition of translation. Dryden accepts that a prose translation and a verse translation of a poem both retain a claim to the identity of the source-language original; he is unsure if an imitation does, but does not exclude it outright. Most writers of a “critical essay in another language” or of a “poem about a poem” would not say that they are producing a translation of a poem, but the question Holmes’ model raises is of where the frontier is, say, between imitation and poem-about-poem. The lines are blurred further when we consider Roman

Jakobson’s expansion of the definition of translation to include intralingual, as opposed to interlingual, translation—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language” (Schulte and Biguenet 145). Think of a text based on a story from Shakespeare or

Dickens, but presented in updated “contemporary” English. If this is a translation, and if a translation of a poem is necessarily a critical interpretation, then the “critical essay in language of

Armstrong 23 poem” and “verse translation” of Holmes’ chart might not seem so far apart in nature as originally they did.

On the other side of the diagram from “critical essay in the same language as poem,” we have “poem inspired by a poem.” A fine example of a poem that exists somewhere between translation and poem-inspired-by-poem is W. B. Yeats’ “When You are Old,” which borrows major elements from Ronsard’s “Quand vous serez bien vieille . . .” (Hélène de Surgères V). The twentieth-century French poet Yves Bonnefoy suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that “you can translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of another” (Schulte and Biguenet 186); in this case, Yeats’ rendering of Ronsard is more than validated. The point that Bonnefoy is trying to make, though, is not of the ease of translation, but of its difficulty—impossibility, in fact, is his claim. “The answer to the question ‘Can one translate a poem?’ is,” says Bonnefoy, “of course no. The translator meets too many contradictions that he cannot eliminate; he must make too many sacrifices” (186).

This is not an uncommon sentiment. Schopenhauer says that poetry cannot be translated but at best “transposed” as a piece of music5 (Schulte and Biguenet 33), while Derrida goes a crucial step further, calling translation both “necessary and impossible” (223). Impossible, translation is necessary. Of course it is—Bassnett’s sublunary explanation is typical: “Millions more people are moving around the planet than at any time in history . . . and as those millions move around, taking their own languages with them, they encounter other languages, other cultural frameworks and other belief systems, hence are compelled . . . to engage in some form of translation” (1). Paul Valéry gives a more personal and poetic explanation for the necessity of grappling with the supposedly impossible: “When a poem compels one to read it with passion,

5 It strikes me that the arrangement for brass band of a piece originally composed for strings might be a better analogy than a transposition of key, for an interlingual translation.

Armstrong 24 the reader feels he is momentarily its author, and that is how he knows the poem is beautiful”

(Schulte and Biguenot 122); Bonnefoy gives us the inverse, asserting (curiously, since he previously asserted that no true translation is possible) that “if a work does not compel us, it is untranslatable” (192).

Aside from asserting the possibility of translation, Valéry’s quote above brings us to the question of authority (in its elemental sense—quality of authorship—as well as its more usual sense) in the practice of translation. Who owns a translation? We speak of the Fables of La

Fontaine when in fact they are largely adapted from other sources; at least one of the selections I have translated comes from the Roman fabulist Phaedrus, who in turn adapted it from Æsop. We speak sometimes of Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám as though the author’s name were merely a part of the title, though this could reflect a colonialist attitude of the West taking possession of something of value from the East. In any case, another question at the heart of translation is posed and must be discussed, if not answered.

For much of European history, the distinction between translation and original work was not straightforward. Authorship was not the clear-cut thing we understand it to be today. The ideal literary person in early modern Europe was proficient in Latin, Greek, and at least a few modern languages, was well-versed in the classics, and was familiar with verse forms from the ancient to the innovative. Louise Labé opens one of the most famous sequences of sonnets in the

French language with a poem in Italian; Du Bellay includes translations from Italian and Latin in his Antiquitez de Rome; Hayes tells how a seventeenth-century preface-writer gives equal authorial status to the translator of an especially well-known and admired account of the life of

Alexander the Great (38). Although authorship as we know it began to develop in this time, translation continued to muddy the waters. Hayes remarks that “even as the modern notion of

Armstrong 25 individual, autonomous authorship comes to the fore, the translator both puts that autonomy into question and asks us to consider a form of disenchanted agency, a ‘middle voice’” (18).

The idea of translation as something in the middle thus comes up again. Hayes characterizes Dryden’s approach as a “middle way” between two extreme methods of translation

(101). However one translates, though, the nature of the translated text is uncertain, existing somewhere between two languages and two authors. Out of this tension we frequently find translation to also be caught between opposing poles of principle. We saw it in Holmes’ diagram: if a translation of a poem is both a poem and a commentary, how are the two reconciled? How can any of the paradoxes of translation be resolved? I have in my hands an interesting seventeenth-century anonymous translation into French of the Soliloquies of St. Augustine; in the translator’s avertissment there is a singular attempt at such a resolution by suggesting that common to God and all men is a “language of the heart” that allows ideas from one tongue to be transferred intact into another—in essence, it seeks divine sanction for the “sense for sense” approach (Anonymous, Les Soliloques n. pag.). The contemporary translator will likely have a harder time accepting a divine basis for a particular translational approach, especially for secular texts. We shall leave it to theological specialists to ponder if and how God might want to see

Baudelaire translated. Yet the point is a sound one; Hayes considers that “every translation is at some level an act of faith, a hermeneutic leap, a gesture of reconciliation” (24), and in the midst of uncertainty and paradox, a firm basis—a set of rules—may prove useful.

Where do we find our rules? Hayes writes that a major current in French “neoclassical” translation of the seventeenth century was of “updating” works, translating even ancient works so that they seemed contemporary (56); she points out that major recent figures in translation studies like Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti have called such an approach “‘ethnocentric’

Armstrong 26 and ‘hegemonizing’” (6). Nor is this concern confined to French translations of several centuries ago—Venuti is cited in Bassnett as bemoaning the current “Anglo-American preference for fluent translation that can be read as though the works had been written in English in the first instance” and the accompanying re-enforcement of Anglophone hegemony in world literature and politics (14). Hayes sees Venuti as rejecting the possibility of a middle ground between translations that retain the foreign element of the source text and those that domesticize the material; she herself suggests that Venuti is projecting too many generalities onto the neoclassical translations in question, and that some very much do find their middle ground (244-

245).

Word-for-word or sense-for-sense; primacy of author or of translator; duty to author or audience; preservation of the foreign or adaptation to the domestic in time or place: these are some of the most-discussed questions in translation studies over the past few hundred years.

Beyond theory though, what have translators of poetry done in practice over the past several decades? Eliot Weinberger commends Ezra Pound’s 1915 Cathay, a collection of translations of

Chinese poems, for its use of free verse rather than any traditional Western verse form which would have been alien to the originals (Bassnett 98). This seems entirely right to me. It is ridiculous to force foreign poetry into a verse form that has nothing to do with it, unless it is something closer to an imitation (or poem-inspired-by-poem) that the author hopes to create.

Take the following rendering of Psalm 23 from Sternhold and Hopkins’ metrical psalter (n. pag.):

The Lord is only my support, and he that doth me feed;

How can I then lack any thing, whereof I stand in need?

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In pastures green he feedeth me where I do safely lie;

And after leads me to the streams, which run most pleasantly.

And when I find myself near lost then doth he me home take;

Conducting me in his right paths, ev’n for his own Name’s sake.

And tho’ I were ev’n at death’s door, yet would I fear no ill;6

For both thy rod and shepherd’s crook afford me comfort still.

Thou hast my table richly spread in presence of my foe;

Thou hast my head with balm refresh’d, my cup doth overflow.

And finally, while breath doth last, thy grace shall me defend;

And in the house of God will I my life for ever spend.

Ancient Hebrew poetry does not rhyme.7 It is not free verse, but its structure is derived from other techniques. The Psalms are well-known of course, and Bassnett proposes that translators may be justified in taking greater liberties with oft-translated works (102), but the metrical psalter epitomizes what Venuti decries as domesticizing translation.

To return to Pound, Jean Garrigue considers him to have been instrumental in the development of a twentieth-century idiom of translation. “Name Pound,” she says in the introduction to the anthology Translations by American Poets, “and you name the begetter of what amounts to by now an age of translation, brilliant and inventive in its zest for bringing poets over into the English tongue” (xxv). Garrigue goes on to hail a new era of English-language

6 This, of course, is perhaps the best-known line from the psalms, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” To be fair, I do not know the Hebrew, but the butchering of this line alone renders the translation inexcusable in my eyes. No doubt the translator was proud of his “foe/overflow” couplet; it is the high point of the unfortunate whole. 7 We have already mentioned the metaphysical side of translation theory; C. S. Lewis speculated it was by divine planning that Hebrew poetry was not structured in rhyme, which cannot be translated well into all languages, but in parallelisms, which can.

Armstrong 28 translation in the middle of the twentieth century—in part spurred by the project that bore the above-mentioned anthology as its fruit, and in part lead by the poets Stanley Kunitz, Robert

Lowell, and Richard Wilbur. Remember that last name; we shall return to it soon. Garrigue hails the renaissance of “this neglected art of translation in our country” (xxv), happily noting the growing number of working poets who saw fit to include translation in their practice (xxix).

If we examine the poems in this anthology, we find some stirring and excellent translations, but we note one thing that detracts from at least my enjoyment of them: the majority of poems which follow fixed forms of meter and rhyme in their original languages are not reproduced with meter and rhyme in English. More on this later—but in my view, form and sound are an indispensable part of the whole of a poem, contributing to the experience of the poem that both bolsters and transcends its meaning. Of the forty-eight translating poets in the anthology, only six employ rhyme, which is admittedly harder to reproduce than meter. Barbara

Howes uses only loose partial rhyme and a close reproduction of meter in her translations of two sonnets from Nerval (174-177). Edwin Honig gives closer rhyme but no reproduced meter in his translation of Miguel Hernández’s “El Rayo que no cesa” (170-173). Babette Deutsch rhymes, though a bit freely, in her translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Der Schauende” but not of Jules

Supervielle’s “Lourde” (74-79). She does not reproduce the French meter and I cannot comment on the German. Stanley Kunitz seems to reproduce partially-rhymed poetry from Russian (192-

195) and Philip Booth from Finnish (52-53), but I again can make no informed comment here.

Dudley Fitts uses a variety of meters, and he rhymes some but not all of his translations of

Martial’s Epigrams, an interesting choice (Venuti might say “domesticizing”) given that the originals were not rhymed.

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The translator who in this volume stands out for attention to form is Richard Wilbur.

Wilbur, the second Poet Laureate of the United States (“Richard Wilbur”), represented the same movement as Timothy Steele in a return to the appreciation and use of formalism in verse; and in the case of translation his approach was no different. Wilbur’s translations can defy belief—he is particularly famous for his rhymed translations into English of Molière’s verse plays. In the introduction to his translation of Molière’s “The Misanthrope,” he remarks that for authenticity and effect, “rhymed verse seemed to me obligatory” (10). In Translations by American Poets,

Wilbur uses rhyme in his translations form Russian and French. His delightful translation of

François Villon’s “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” maintains the eight-syllable meter of the original; his version of Du Bellay’s “Heureux, qui, comme Ulysse . . .” opts for a ten-syllable line rather than an alexandrine, but does not quite succumb to the domestic iambic pentameter. His translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s free-verse “Senza più peso” is likewise respectful of the original, being itself in free verse (352-363). In the 1963 collection The Poems of Richard

Wilbur, which predates Translations by American Poets, Wilbur includes many translations from the French of Baudelaire, Valéry, Nerval, and others. These show less consistency in reproduction of meter, but maintain the aural quality of rhyme.

Other poet-translators of note working in French and English in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries are Anthony Hecht, E. H. and A. M. Blackmore, and William H. Crosby. We will look more closely at some of their works in a later chapter. Given the heritage of translation discussed above—from the Romans to the New Formalists—I would like to at last say a word about my own thoughts on poetic translation, and why I have seen fit in this thesis to present my approach and its results.

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A Personal Approach to Translation

“L’auteur du présent livre . . . fait des vers pour avoir un prétexte de ne rien faire, et ne fait rien sous prétexte qu’il fait des vers.”

—Gautier8

What is the function of a poem, or of a poet? Matthew Arnold writes that “two desires toss about / The poet’s feverish blood; / One drives him to the world without, / And one to solitude” (309). Hugo sets at the head of his Les Rayons et les Ombres a discourse in verse that examines both of these desires tossing the poet about—“Fonction du poète” (241-250). Here he first makes the case for the poet’s withdrawal from the world, from the unappreciative and stifling world, into a beautiful bountiful Nature that at once offers endless inspiration and the appearance of a divine approval of the poet’s work, such as could not be found among humanity.

Appealing though this idea be to the poet in despair of human affairs, Hugo quickly refutes it. In this century of challenges, he tells the poet—really, he tells himself—each has a duty to all, and so God wills that the poet do his utmost to serve his fellow man. Woe to the one who puts on sandals and retreats to the desert; it is not the ascetic that we need, but the prophet! In language that seems to evoke the sufferings and perseverance of St. Paul, Hugo urges the poet to travel through a darkened world spreading light, and bearing all the injury that is sure to reward his efforts. Sometimes the poet is Jeremiah, crying out “Malheur ! malheur !,” while sometimes he is Amos prophesying justice and righteousness that roll down like waters; never is he Habakkuk

8 Poésies complètes 3.

Armstrong 31 despairing nor Jonah assuming the crowd will not heed him and spitefully waiting to watch their destruction.

For Hugo, it is truth on a metaphysical level that is the essence of poetry (La Légende des siècles xxix). Hugo would doubtless agree with Keats’ dictum that truth is beauty, but perhaps not that beauty is truth, and certainly not that “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry 219). Counter to Hugo’s theory of poetry is

Théophile Gautier’s pointed statement that “in general, as soon as something becomes useful, it ceases to be beautiful” (4). It might be argued that Hugo’s attitude of the concrete utility of art to society is a relic of the eighteenth century, and that the school of art for art’s sake represented by

Gautier is much more in keeping with the zeitgeist of the nineteenthespoused a philosophy of art- for-art; in one of his projected prefaces to the Fleurs du Mal he states his intent not to “confound good actions with beautiful language.” Baudelaire is surprised but unconcerned that some have told him his poems will do good or ill in the world; he calls his book “essentially useless and entirely innocent . . . made to no other end than my own diversion” (233). Clearly somebody thought that the Fleurs du Mal would do ill in the world, since much of the book was censored and its author legally prosecuted for its scandalizing contents.

Victor Hugo lived a long life, and had a long and productive career. He lived to see the

Romantic ideal of art that bettered society give way to that of art for art’s sake, and even admired and corresponded with poets like Gautier and Baudelaire. How, then, to reconcile these two theories of poetry? Hugo provides an answer in his essay “Utilité du beau,” where he demonstrates the effect of art on the human mind and spirit: uplifting, consoling, stirring to action, and ultimately ameliorating. The crucial thing is that this applies even to the most corrupt of art. “All that is beautiful manifests the truth,” he writes (18)—this is not to say that the wicked

Armstrong 32 is true so long as it is beautiful, but that, by “the involuntary holiness of art” (25), the true shines through in beauty in spite of the false. “Utilité du beau” does not revoke the exhortation that poets serve humanity—that is still the ideal—but affirms that even when a poet seeks exile, a beautiful poem will always work good upon its reader.

Where do I stand against this background? With Hugo. I believe in the utility of art as a goal and as an inevitability. I believe that the substance of a poem is much more than its content of words and images and sounds; it is also the effect on the reader of its words and images and sounds, and thus the poem becomes something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Now, I grant that the effect of a poem as I can perceive it is its effect on me only, but I hope and suspect that by analyzing what in a poem produces its effect, I can carry over key features in translation and craft a poem that will have—this is the ideal—much the same effect on a reader as the original would if he or she could read it in French. Sometimes in a poem, a striking image can be translated in words very different from the original, since it is the visual that matters. Sometimes, it is a powerful word that captures the reader, and the work of the translator is to supply a single word in English of equal power.

But as I remarked above, a poem is more than words and images. There is sound too, and structure. The translator of a rhymed poem into prose can account for words and images with relative ease, and even sound—if not in rhymes, in the sound of the words in the prose. This does not come near to capturing the poem’s effect. The translator of a rhymed poem into unrhymed verse comes closer, working with structure, which is so much of the feel of a poem. Yet still something is wanting. The structure is incomplete, since rhyme is as integral to the verse form that uses it as are syllables or stresses. For the complete effect, we need the complete form.

“Forma,” says Hugo, “beauty” (Utilité du beau 18). That is, the Latin from which our word

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“form” comes means “beauty” as well as structural form; the two were rolled into one, and Hugo uses this as proof that the form is essential to the work.

Now, if I am to work within form when I translate, what form? Most poets who do maintain form in their translations choose to use a domestic form—as we see in the next chapter, it is common for an alexandrine sonnet in French to be translated into iambic pentameter in

English. The oft-repeated aim in the translators’ prefaces that Hayes looks at is “to make Virgil

(or Homer, or Cervantes) speak as though he is a compatriot of the translator.” No doubt Victor

Hugo as an Englishman would have used English meter, but in that case, “he probably would have written something quite different” (19). This is part of the problem of domesticizing translation that Venuti writes about. Beyond the matter of its ideological pitfalls, it simply doesn’t make sense.

The alternative to a domesticizing translation is foreignizing one, but this term is at heart something of an oxymoron. The foreign is unintelligible to the uninitiated, whence the need for translation; the logical extreme of retaining the foreign in a text is simply not translating it.

Taking the analogy of making a foreign author speak as though he were a domestic one, I would like to propose my own analogy for what translation should be: making the reader feel like a traveler in a foreign country, knowing the language well but not as a mother-tongue. It is letting the domestic reader encounter the foreign, not forcing the foreign writer to appear domestic. Like so much in this discipline, it is a middle way.

I had no particular agenda in choosing the poems I translated. During the course of this project I took a class in French poetry from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and one covering the nineteenth and twentieth Many of the poems that I translated were highlights from these classes, while others were simply poems I knew from elsewhere and liked. As I cited in the

Armstrong 34 last chapter, Paul Valéry said this about the impulse to translate: “When a poem compels one to read it with passion, the reader feels he is momentarily its author, and that is how he knows the poem is beautiful” (Schulte and Biguenet 122). I find this to be true. Quite often when I’ve read a poem that strikes me in some special way, I find turns of phrase and rhyme for a possible translation coming to me almost involuntarily. I become momentarily the poem’s author, as though the poem existed only as ideas in my mind to be put down on paper in verse. Sometimes I have deliberately set about translating a poem because it is famous, as in the case of Hugo’s

“Demain, dès l’aube . . .”; more often though, the poems seem to present themselves to me. I draw my oldest works from the formative years of modern French poetry during the

Renaissance; since my project is to translate in rhymed verse, I draw my most recent from the end of the period when traditional formalism dominated, the late nineteenth Tzara would require different techniques from those employed here.

Timothy Steele cautions us that “to be effective, meters must suit the languages they serve, and nowhere is this truer than in English” (8). I have chosen to stick to the French syllabic meters for my translations, and this does oftentimes lead to an alien feeling. I would contend, however, that the alexandrine (or octosyllabic or decasyllabic line, etc.) is not unsuited to

English meter, but is merely unusual—foreign—to the reader’s ear. When I started putting alexandrines into English, they sounded unwieldy and unnatural to my ear; now they can sound to me as good as any line in iambic pentameter. Where my alexandrines are awkward, it is the fault of my translation, and not of any inherent unsuitability of the line to the language. I hope that the best of my lines will prove this.

What I have not done is to adhere strictly to the French patterns of stress in the alexandrine line. Stress in English words functions so differently from stress in French words

Armstrong 35 that I could not practically do this. Often my English alexandrines do have four stresses like the classical French alexandrine, as here in my translation of “Tristesse d’Olympio”:

x x / x x / x x / x x / Till his heart sank to sorrow as stark as the tomb,

This is effectively anapestic tetrameter, as used in Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of

Sennacherib” (Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry 115):

x x / x x / x x / x x / And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

At other times the basic structure of the anapestic tetrameter line is “shifted” by a syllable in one direction or the other, usually to account for a feminine rhyme, in effect producing amphibrachic tetrameter—again from my version of “Tristesse d’Olympio”:

x / x x / x x / x x / x By stony-faced Nature it all is retaken.

Still other times no such pattern is identifiable. I try to simply use my ear, and read my translations out loud, to determine whether a rhythm works or not. The reader will best be able to judge if I have succeeded by likewise trying these poems out loud.

In counting syllables, I have allowed myself certain liberties. Just as the French poets were comfortable assigning different syllable counts to the same word according to need, so have

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I sometimes counted such words as “flower” as either one or two, to fit the line. Such cases should be apparent to the reader; at any rate, I do not believe I take greater liberty here than most

English poets. There may be an exception or two, but I have usually not allowed myself to use more antiquated forms of elision, as in the case where “the apple” would be read as “th’apple.”

Again, I think there is one exception (indicated by a grave accent over the “e”), but I have avoided the forced sounding of “-ed” verb suffixes.

Harder to reproduce in translation than meter is rhyme. Sometimes the translator of poetry is lucky, and two cognate words will end a pair of rhymed lines in the French original, allowing for an easy transfer. We find this in Louise Labé’s eighteenth sonnet, in which “apaise” and “aise” in English mean literally “appease” and “ease”. Most of the time, however, a rhymed translation requires creative use of synonyms, equivalent expressions, and rearranged syntax or ideas. This is why many translators choose not to rhyme their translated poems, since it is easier to stay truer to the original words when one doesn’t have to cajole them into rhymes in a new language. For the reasons I have explained above, though, this doesn’t satisfy me—it breaks the whole of the poem’s effect on the reader. Since I wish to respect the form of the original poem as much as possible, I don’t believe in rhyming what the poet didn’t, as with the version of Psalm

23 in the previous chapter, but where the poet rhymed, so shall I. It seems rare to find a translator who meets both of these conditions—as a rule, it seems like most translators prior to the early twentieth century prefer to rhyme even the originally-unrhymed, and most from the mid- twentieth century onward prefer not to rhyme even the originally-rhymedis the approach of Toru

Dutt, whose work we’ll look at in the next chapter. When translating rhymed French originals, she produced rhymed translations; when translating unrhymed Sanskrit originals, her translations were unrhymed.

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I have respected the rhyme schemes of my source material, with one exception: In sixteenthIt is a sacrifice of form to freedom of maintaining other poetic elements for easier rhyme, and while I respect other translators who have been more faithful to the original rhyme scheme, a comparison of translations will show that they have had to make sacrifices elsewhere for their fidelity to rhyme. Where I have maintained such multiple rhymes is in places where it is not mere convention, but is exceptional and thus a more important part of the poem’s structure.

Such poems include Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir” and Verlaine’s “Nevermore.”

I have not followed the French rule of alternating masculine and feminine rhymes in my translations. The devices are related but different in the two languages, and I feel that to alternate them in English would be distracting rather than respectful of the form. See the Browning example in the chapter on versification; the alternation of masculine and feminine rhyme gives the poem a sing-song feel.

My rhymes have sometimes strayed into the realm of what Steele calls “facile assonantal rhymes endemic in pop-song lyrics” along the lines of “mist/kiss” (194). At other times, I have employed off-rhymes. An example of both comes from my translation of Gautier’s “The Ghost of the Rose”:

Oh, you who tolled my dying note,

You will not be able to rid

Yourself of this rose-tinted ghost

That dances tonight by your bed.

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As far as off-rhymes go, I have tried to use them sparingly, and not to use extremely jarring ones.

Assonantal rhymes are more common, but I have avoided anything that sounds bad to me when read aloud. My rhymes by and large ignore the presence of a final plural “s,” as in these lines from Chénier:

Palës still has green refuges to give to me,

Love so many kisses, the Muses melodies;

More so than with meter, these transgressions of strictest rules of rhyme have been part of the compromise inherent to rhymed verse translation. It would take a poet of greater skill than I have to make reasonably “faithful” translations with stricter rhymes. Though this is no excuse, I at least take comfort in the fact that such accomplished translators as Dr. Crosby liberally employ rhymes like these:

Like some poor debauchee who kisses, licks, and chews

The martyrized, old breast of any ancient whore,

In passing we indulge ourselves in furtive sport

And squeeze it like a shriveled orange for its juice.

and on occasion allow themselves as much of a stretch as this:

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Provides an easeful rest for the enchanted self,

And all the precious struts and fibers of resolve.

Both of these examples are from his translation of Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” (17). As for homophonic rhymes, I have used them less than many French poets, and more than many

English poets; I have tried to avoid their excessive use but not shunned them entirely. My hope is that they will contribute to the “foreign” feel of my verse, rather than just seeming sloppy.

Finally, a word on literalism: I have, I think, erred on the side of literality, sometimes more, sometimes less, but perhaps more than I should have. In part this is the reason I have included the French originals of all my translations; the reader who knows some French can judge the translation on its literality and poetry—on how well it does, in fact, produce the effect of the original.

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Borrowers and Borrowings in Poetry

That which hath been is that which shall be,

And that which hath been done is that which shall be done;

And there is nothing new under the sun.

—Ecclesiastes 1:99

Of course, England and France are neighbors in geography and culture. I doubt if very many pairs of languages have been as much mutually translated over the centuries as these two, and the literary record is at times over-full of translations of the same works. One such work is the justifiably famous Sonnet XXXI from Du Bellay’s Regrets (“Heureux qui, comme

Ulysse . . .”)—the starting-point for my own project at hand. Its ubiquity in translation makes it a prime candidate for a case-study, as well as an excellent tool for readers unfamiliar with French to see the variability from an original that translation entails. Here is the original (my own translation is to be found on page 86):

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,

Ou comme cestuy la qui conquit la toison,

Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,

Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son aage !

Quand revoiray-je, hélas, de mon petit village

9 The Holy Scriptures (JPS Version) 1102.

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Fumer la cheminee, et en quelle saison

Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,

Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage ?

Plus me plaist le sejour qu’ont basti mes ayeux,

Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,

Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l’ardoise fine :

Plus mon Loyre gaulois, que le Tybre Latin,

Plus mon petit Lyré, que le mont Palatin,

Et plus que l’air marin, la doulceur Angevine.

Here we have a typical specimen of the French alexandrine sonnet, from the formative years of modern French poetry. The rhyme scheme is one common to the period: abba abba ccd eed. The caesura between the hemistiches is regular and pronounced. In this single sonnet’s peregrinations through our language, how have these features been respected, and how neglected? What about the content of the poem—its classical and geographical allusions, its haunting notes of nostalgia and disappointment?

The first poet whose work on Du Bellay’s sonnet we shall examine is Toru Dutt, who deserves some introduction. She was born in 1856 in Calcutta to a wealthy Indian family—her father was an officer in the colonial administration. She spent a brief stint in France and England during her teenage years, but mainly from home learned French, German, and Sanskrit on top of

Bengali and English. Her father relates that she was an avid reader, a keen wit, and a linguist of near-encyclopedic knowledge (Dutt ix-xxvii). In 1877, at the age of twenty-one, she published a volume of just over two hundred translations of French poems into English; before the year was

Armstrong 42 over she was dead of a long illness. Aside from the collection of poetry—called A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, for which my own volume is named—she left a manuscript novel in French and sundry original and translated poems in several languages. In 1878 a second edition of Dutt’s translated poetry appeared, containing some additional translations by her sister Aru, who predeceased her. Here is Toru’s translation of “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse . . .” (13-14):

Happy is he, who, like the Ithacan sage

Or the brave hero of the golden fleece,

Having far travelled, finds his troubles cease,

Amidst his own, in ripe-experienced age.

When shall I turn again to life’s first page?

From the world’s tumult when obtain release?

And greet the village, and the home of Peace

Where sweet affections quell each passion’s rage?

Dearer to me that home my grandsires built,

Than Roman palaces with pillars brave,

Dearer those roofs of slate than marble gilt,

Dearer my Loire than Tiber’s sacred wave,

Dearer my Lyré than the Palatine,

And oh how dear, thou climate Angivine!

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The meter can be scanned as iambic pentameter with inverted feet, or as ten-syllable syllabic meter; either way it is a departure from the alexandrines of the original. While Dutt alters the rhyme scheme in the two concluding tercets, she uses the original’s abba abba scheme in the two quatrains. Translating verse such that it rhymes is a challenge, and maintaining a rhyme across more than two lines is all the more impressive. The replacement of the name

“Ulysses” with “the Ithacan Sage” is disappointing, since the name in the first line is an important part of the poem’s identity. Beyond that the translation is sturdy and pleasing. It is amusing to remark that Dutt’s “built/gilt” rhyme is one I also employed in my translation, well before I discovered her version. The last line of the sonnet seems to me one of the hardest to satisfactorily capture, and I think that “oh how dear, thou climate Angevine!” is a lovely expression of it.

Advancing by a few decades, we come to G. K. Chesterton of Father Brown fame, who published his translation of the sonnet in 1923 (Chesterton 162):

Happy, who like Ulysses or that lord

Who raped the fleece, returning full and sage,

With usage and the world’s wide reason stored,

With his own kin can wait the end of age.

When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows!

My little village smoke; or pass the door,

The old dear door of that unhappy house

That is to me a kingdom and much more?

Mightier to me the house my fathers made

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Than your audacious heads, O Halls of Rome!

More than immortal marbles undecayed,

The thin sad slates that cover up my home;

More than your Tiber is my Loire to me,

Than Palatine my little Lyré there;

And more than all the winds of all the sea

The quiet kindness of the Angevin air.

This is a nicely poetic translation, preserving the name of Ulysses, and closely reflecting the way the original obscures the name of Jason. Its form, however, differs considerably from the original. Most strikingly, it has two lines more than the 14 of Du Bellay’s sonnet. The meter is iambic pentameter, and the rhyme scheme differs greatly from the original even accounting for the greater lenght: abab cdcd efef ghgh. The line “That is to me a kingdom and much more” is the best transfer of this particular thought from French to English of any of the translations I’ve read. The main defect of this version is the attribution of such sadness to the longed-for home, which I don’t see in Du Bellay’s lines—he is sad for home, but his home is not sad itself. “More than all the winds of all the sea / The quiet kindness of the Angevin air” is breathtaking, but is spoiled by the unfortunate elision of “the Angevin” and the jarring problems of stress it causes in

“Angevin.”

Next is a twentieth-century formalist, Anthony Hecht. Born in 1923, his works were known for “high style and diction,” being called anything from “Baroque” to “Victorian” in nature. He died in 2004 (“Anthony Hecht”). Here is his version of Du Bellay’s sonnet (Hecht

37):

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Great joy be to the sailor if he chart

The Odyssey or bear away the Fleece

Yet unto wisdom's laurel and the peace

Of his own kind come lastly to his start.

And when shall I, being migrant, bring my heart

Home to its plots of parsley, its proper earth,

Pot hooks, cow dung, black chimney bricks whose worth

I have not skill to honor in my art.

My home, my father's and grandfather's home.

Not the imperial porphyry of Rome

But slate is my true stone, slate is my blue.

And bluer the Loire is to my reckoning

Than Caesar's Tiber, and more nourishing

Than salt spray is the breathing of Anjou.

This translation retains the rhyme scheme of the tercets, but each quatrain gets its own pair of rhymes. The meter is well-executed iambic pentameter. Again the name of Ulysses is absent. The translation has its sublime moments (“When shall I, being migrant, bring my heart / home . . . to its proper earth”), but is too exaggerated for my taste. The contrast between “cow dung” and “imperial porphyry” seems to steer the translation into burlesque territory—in the

French, the longed-for home is modest, but not a hovel. The opacity of meaning in the line “slate

Armstrong 46 is my blue” is entirely contrary to speaker’s desire for unaffected solidity that I read in the corresponding sentiment of the French original. The crucial final line, however, is evocative and aurally pleasing. Perhaps we should grant this poem some leeway, since Hecht labels it not as a translation per se but as “after Du Bellay.”

At last we come to Richard Wilbur’s version, from the Translations by American Poets anthology (361):

Happy the man who, journeying far and wide

As Jason or Ulysses did, can then

Turn homeward, seasoned in the ways of men,

And claim his own, and there in peace abide!

When shall I see the chimney-smoke divide

The sky above my little town: ah, when

Stroll the small gardens of that house again

Which is my realm and crown, and more beside?

Better I love the plain, secluded home

My fathers built, than bold façades of Rome;

Slate pleases me as marble cannot do;

Better than Tiber's flood my quiet Loire,

Those little hills than these, and dearer far

Than great sea winds the zephyrs of Anjou.

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This translation is impressive for perfectly maintaining the rhyme scheme of the original, right down to the repeated rhymes in the quatrains. The meter is not alexandrine, but, as the others we have seen, iambic pentameter. The reduction of Jason and Ulysses to two examples of the same thing is regrettable, since they represent distinct virtues in the original. Overall, this seems to be to me neither the best nor the worst translation of “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse . . .” but likely the most balanced between form and content. The final line’s “zephyrs of Anjou” feels affected and leaves a bad impression at the end of the poem.

It’s worth noting that “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse . . .” is Du Bellay’s most-translated sonnet, but not the only one which has found its way into English. Edmund Spenser translated the thirty-two sonnets of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome into English, of which I have translated numbers VII and XXX below. The originals are on pages 87 and 89. Here are Spenser’s versions, of number VII (154):

Ye sacred ruines, and ye tragick sights,

Which onely doo the name of Rome retaine,

Olde moniments, which of so famous sprights

The honour yet in ashes doo maintaine,

Triumphant arcks, spyres neighbours to the skie,

That you to see doth th’heaven it selfe appall,

Alas! by little ye to nothing flie,

The peoples fable, and the spoyle of all!

And though your frames do for a time make warre

Gainst Time, yet Time in time shall ruinate

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Your workes and names, and your last reliques marre.

My sad desires, rest therefore moderate!

For if that Time make ende of things so sure,

It als will end the paine which I endure.

and of XXX (166):

Like as the seeded field greene grasse first showes,

Then from greene grasse into a stalke doth spring,

And from a stalke into an eare forth-growes,

Which eare the frutefull graine doth shortly bring,

And as in season due the husband mowes

The waving lockes of those faire yeallow heares,

Which, bound in sheaves, and layd in comely rowes,

Upon the naked fields in stalkes he reares,

So grew the Romane empire by degree,

Till that barbarian hands it quite did spill,

And left of it but these olde markes to see,

Of which all passers by doo somewhat pill,

As they which gleane, the reliques use to gather

Which th’husbandman behind him chanst to scatter.

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The first of these two, Sonnet VII, is a fascinating case. Du Bellay’s version in fact is itself a translation from the Italian of Baldassare Castiglione, composed likely between 1513 and

1521 (Honnacker 167):

Superbi colli, e voi sacre ruine,

che’l nome sol di Roma ancor tenete,

ahi, che reliquie miserande avete

di tant’anime eccelse e pellegrine !

Colossi, archi, teatri, opre divine,

trionfal pompe gloriose e liete,

in poco cener pur converse siete

e fatte al vulgo vil favola al fine.

Così, se ben un tempo al tempo guerra

fanno l’opre famose, a passo lento

e l’opre e i nomi il tempo invido atterra.

Vivrò dunque fra’ miei martir contento :

ché se’l tempo dà fine a ciò ch’è in terra,

darà forse ancor fine al mio tormento.

Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome all deal with the lost grandeur of Imperial Rome, but only this one focuses specifically on the contrast between Rome’s eternal name and decaying

Armstrong 50 physical remains (however, Castiglione and Du Bellay suggest that the name too will eventually perish).

The theme of an eternal name outliving the things of this world is taken up also by Pierre de Ronsard in his fifth sonnet to Hélène de Surgères. Ronsard is well known for comparing women, and their transient beauty, to roses; this sonnet is no exception, but goes further by suggesting that the woman’s name has been immortalized. William Butler Yeats included a poem in his 1893 collection The Rose called “When You are Old” (76) that on Holmes’ diagram would likely be considered an imitation; it undoubtedly draws on Ronsard’s sonnet. The original

French is on page 95.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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Yeats’ version is indeed only loosely based on Ronsard’s; the essential elements of the eternal name and of the rose are gone. What becomes interesting is a comparison of the eternal name in Ronsard’s sonnet with its use in Du Bellay’s/Castiglione’s.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa) ends with its narrator citing a line of medieval Latin poetry: “Stat rosa pristinia nomine, nomina nuda tenemus” (Eco, Il nome della rosa 503)—“The rose remains pristine in name; we retain but naked names.” The verse comes from a twelfth-century poem by the monk Bernard of Morlay, “De contemptu mundi.” In his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Eco explains that this poem is a typical medieval work exploring themes of “the great of yesteryear, the once-famous cities, the lovely princesses: everything [disappearing] into the void,” and cites Villon’s “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” as a better-known example of the genre. What sets Morlay’s work apart in the genre, says Eco, is the novel observation on the persistence of the names of departed things (Eco, Postscript 1). In

The Author and his Interpreters, however, Eco remarks that certain manuscripts of De contemptu mundi read not “rosa,” but “stat Roma pristina nomine”10 (Capozzi 66). This is where I begin to speculate: we have two traditions of Morlay’s poem: a rosa tradition, and a Roma tradition. The poem seems to have been well-known. Du Bellay and Ronsard were both widely-read Latin scholars—it is interesting to wonder whether one or both of them might have drawn, consciously or unconsciously, their repetition of this otherwise-rare theme of the eternal name of the rose/Rome from different traditions of this medieval poem. I have no evidence to suggest that this is the case; it is merely an intriguing thought.

10 The edition of Morlay’s work that I consulted in Ohio University’s library did not, as it turned out, include the line in either form.

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Moving forward in time with my chosen poets, we come to the sole seventeenth-century author that I have translated. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables were based on diverse sources, among whom was the Roman fabulist Phaedrus, from whom one of the examples I have translated may be drawn. Phaedrus’ versions of “The Crow and the Fox” (French on p. 99) is as follows

(Wheelock 344-345):

Qui se laudari Gaudet verbis subdolis,

fere dat poenas turpi paenitentia.

Cum de fenestra corvus raptum caseum

comesse vellet, Celsa residens arbore,

hunc vidit vulpes, deinde sic coepit loqui :

“O qui tuarum, corve, pennarum est nitor!

Quantum decoris corpore et vultu geris!

Si vocem haberes, nulla prior ales foret.”

At ille stultus, dum vult vocem ostendere,

emisit ore caseum, quem celeriter

dolosa vulpes avidis rapuit dentibus.

La Fontaine’s version of this fable is not very different from the Latin, except that La Fontaine’s moral comes at the end and is delivered by the fox, where here it comes at the beginning, and is delivered by the narrating voice. Phaedrus himself was in fact a translator, or re-teller, and most of his work is based on Æsop (it would be impossible to find the original source of these stories,

Armstrong 53 of course). I cannot read the Greek, but translated into English by V. S. Vernon Jones, here is

Æsop’s version of “The Fox and the Crow” (6):

A crow was sitting on a branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a Fox

observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese.

Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, “What a noble bird I see

above me! Her beauty is without equal, the hue of her plumage exquisite. If only her

voice is as sweet as her looks are fair, she ought without doubt to be Queen of the Birds.”

The Crow was hugely flattered by this, and just to show the Fox that she could sing she

gave a loud caw. Down came the cheese, of course, and the Fox, snatching it up, said,

“You have a voice, madam, I see: what you want is wits.”

Looking at these two versions of the fable, it seems likely that La Fontaine was working from Æsop’s version, or something closer to it. The dialogue is closer here than in the Phaedrus version, and the moral is delivered at the end of the fable by the fox. The main difference is that the crow is feminine in at least the translation of Æsop, while in Phaedrus it is masculine as in the French; this is likely just a function of grammatical gender in these different languages.

Moving into the eighteenth century, Toru Dutt’s sister Aru provides a translation (3-5) of

André Chénier’s “La Jeune captive” (French on pp. 112-114):

The budding shoot ripens unharmed by the scythe,

Without fear of the press, on vine-branches lithe,

Through spring-tide the green clusters bloom.

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Is’t strange, then, that I in my life’s morning hour,

Though troubles like clouds on the dark present lower,

Half-frightened shrink back from my doom?

Let the stern-hearted stoic run boldly on death!

I—I weep and I hope; to the north wind’s chill breath

I bend,—then erect is my form!

If days there are bitter, there are days also sweet,

Enjoyment unmixed where on earth may we meet?

What ocean has never a storm?

Illusions the fairest assuage half my pain,

The walls of a prison enclose me in vain,

The strong wings of hope bear me far;

So escapes from the net of the fowler the bird,

So darts he through ether, while his music is heard

Like showers of sweet sound from a star.

Comes Death unto me? I sleep tranquil and calm,

And Peace when I wake stands by with her balm,

Remorse is the offspring of crimes;

My welcome each morning smiles forth in all eyes,

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My presence is here to sad brows, a surprise

Which kindles to pleasure at times.

The end of my journey seemed so far to my view;

Of the elm-trees which border the long avenue,

The nearest are only past by;

At the banquet of life I have barely sat down,

My lips have but pressed the bright foaming crown

Of the wine in my cup bubbling high.

I am only in spring,—the harvest I’d see,

From season to season like the sun I would be

Intent on completing my round;

Shining bright in the garden,—its honor and queen;

As yet but the beams of the morning I’ve seen,

I wait for eve’s stillness profound.

Oh Death, thou canst wait; leave, leave me to dream,

And strike at the hearts where Despair is supreme,

And shame hails thy dart as a boon!

For me, Pales has arbors unknown to the throngs,

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The world has delights, the Muses have songs,

I wish not to perish too soon.

A prisoner myself broken-hearted and crushed,

From my heart to my lips all my sympathies rushed,

And my lyre from its slumbers awoke;

At these sorrows, these wishes, of a captive, I heard,

And to rhyme and to measure I married each word

As softly and simply she spoke.

Should this song of my prison hereafter inspire

Some student with leisure her name to enquire,

This answer at least may be given,—

That grace marked her figure, her action, her speech,

And such as lived near her, blameless might teach

That life is the best gift of heaven.

There is much to commend here. Cleary Aru’s talent did not fall far short of her sister’s.

From this one poem we get a sense of a very keen ear for rhythm, possibly better than Toru’s, even if word choice and regular syntax can sometimes seem to have been sacrificed to the lively, well-polished meter.

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One of the most impressive works of poetic translation that I have come across is E. H. and A. M. Blackmore’s six hundred-page tome of translations from Victor Hugo. Having taken on major selections from all Hugo’s important poetic works, the Blackmores did not see fit to follow the verse forms of the original, arguing that what was inventive in nineteenth-century

French verse would feel stilted in contemporary English, and that besides, “no English verse form corresponds, even remotely, to the French alexandrine” (xviii). Instead, the Blackmores opt for a varied approach. Their translation of “Demain, dès l’aube . . .” preserves the alternating rhymes of the original; “Réponse à un acte d’accusation” makes blank verse out of the original’s rhymed couplets; “Tristesse d’Olympio” in its soliloquy section uses a quatrain of two unrhymed and two rhymed lines. Indeed, the translators state that their aim “was to use the full range of metrical resources that an adventurous nineteenth-century English poet might have adopted”

(xviii). The Blackmores’ approach might thus be criticized as domesticizing or at least overly- hypothetical, but the variety of the results is worth something. Of the four Hugo poems I have selected, the Blackmores translated “Tristesse d’Olympio” (95-105), “Nuits de juin” (109), and

“Demain dès l’aube . . .” (199). The first of these (“The Melancholy of Olympio”) is too long to give the whole, but here is the beginning of the soliloquy (French on pp. 124-125):

“O how I wanted, in my grief, to see

Whether this cup still holds its wine—to find

What this contented vale might still retain

Of all the sentiments I left behind!

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How quickly everything can be transformed!

How soon, serene-browed Nature, you forget!

And, as you alter, how you break the threads

In which our hearts were once so finely set!

Our arbors have been turned to thickets now;

The trees we used to carve is down or dead;

Our roses in the clearing have been crushed

Beneath some ditch-defying schoolboy’s tread.

The Blackmores’ “Nuits de juin” (“June Nights”) does captures wonderfully the ethereal, sublime quality of the French (on p. 144), and also illustrate a point of poetic translation: sometimes rhyme pairs do suggest themselves, as evidenced by the fact that, although I made my translation before seeing theirs, both they and I rhymed “sublime” and “time” in the second quatrain:

In summer, when the day is over, plains

Covered with flowers shed forth a potent scent;

Eyes closed, ears partly open to soft strains,

We sleep a half-sleep, somnolent.

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The stars are purer, the dark more sublime;

A faint half-glow tints the eternal height;

And the dawn, soft and pale, waiting her time,

Seems to roam heaven’s foot throughout the night.

Meanwhile, their “Demain, dès l’aube . . .” (“At dawn tomorrow, when the plains grow bright . . .”) sounds a touching note, but damages the effect somewhat with a weak final line—in my own version I opt for a worse second line to the final quatrain in order to preserve the power of the last line (French on p. 148):

At dawn tomorrow, when the plains grow bright,

I’ll go. You wait for me: I know you do.

I’ll cross the woods, I’ll cross the mountain-height.

No longer can I keep away from you.

I’ll walk along with my eyes fixed on my mind—

The world around I’ll neither hear nor see—

Alone, unknown, hands crossed, and back inclined;

And day and night will be alike to me.

I’ll see neither the gold of evening gloom

Nor the sails off to Harfleur far away;

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And when I come, I’ll place upon your tomb

Some flowering heather and a holly spray.

Continuing on, “Fantaisie” is possibly the most famous of Gérard de Nerval’s Odelettes, and very likely the best-known of his earlier works. Toru Dutt gives a haunting translation (29) very much in the spirit of the original (French on p. 153):

There is an air for which I’d freely change

All Rosini’s, Mozart’s, and Weber’s spells,

An old, old air, that of some sorrow tells,

Sad, fascinating, endless, weird, and strange.

Each time I hear that air, my soul is borne

Back through the vista of two hundred years,

Reigns “Louis Treize,”—and in my sight appears

A hillside green, where fading sunbeams mourn.

Then suddenly, a noble castle towers,

Brick, with stone fretwork, and red glass that glows,

Girt by a park, through which a river flows,

Bent over by innumerable ferns and flowers.

And then a lady at a window high,

Fair, with dark eyes, in which a tear I trace,

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Oh, is it in my dreams I’ve seen that face?

Or have I ever lived in times gone by?

From Translations by American Poets, Barbara Howes provides a partially-rhymed version of the same poem (177):

There is a tune for which I would exchange

All Weber, all Rossini, all Mozart,

An ancient tune, funereal and slow,

Whose hidden charms speak only to my heart.

Each time I come on it again, by two

Centuries is my soul made young: Behold,

Louis the Thirteenth’s reign . . . I see a green

Hill the setting sun has turned to gold.

Beyond, a brick chateau with corners of stone,

Great leaded panes glowing with ruddy color,

Girdled with splendid parks, where a clear stream

Bathes its feet, flowing among flowers.

Framed by her lofty windows, a lady stands,

Fair, with black eyes, is she on whom I gaze,

In ancient dress . . . One whom in another life

I may have known!—and recognize always!

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A great translator and a frequent borrower, it is no surprise that Leconte de Lisle owes debts to previous works in the two selections I have translated. “Les Elfes” (French on pp. 173-

175) bears some resemblance to Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” in which a father and his young son, rather than a knight on the way to his bride, have a tragic encounter with an Elf King, but has more in common with a Scandinavian ballad called (with many variations) “Sir Olof.” A version of this adapted into English was recorded in 1975 by English folk band Steeleye Span, under the title

“Dance With Me” (Zierke):

A knight he rode his lonely way,

Thinking about his wedding day;

As he rode through a forest near

The Elf King’s daughter did appear.

Out she stepped from the elfin band,

Smiling she held out her hand:

“Welcome Sir Knight, why such speed?

Come with me the dance to lead.”

Chorus:

Dance, dance, follow me,

Round and round the greenwood tree.

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Dance, dance, while you may:

Tomorrow is your dying day.

Dance with me, dance with me.

“Listen Sir Knight, come dance with me,

Spurs of gold I’ll give to thee.”

“Dance neither I will nor may,

Tomorrow is my wedding day!”

“Please Sir Knight come dance with me,

A shirt of silk I’ll give to thee,

A shirt of silk so white and fine,

My mother has bleached in the moon-beams’ shine.”

Chorus

“Please Sir Knight come dance with me,

A crown of gold I’ll give to thee.”

“Your crown of gold I’ll freely take,

But I’ll not join your elfin wake.”

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“Do you refuse to dance with me,

A plague of death shall follow thee!”

Between his shoulders a blow she dealt,

Such a blow he’d never felt.

Chorus.

The other Leconte de Lisle poem I have translated, “Annie,” (French on pp. 169-170) comes from a section of his Poésies barbares entitled “Chansons écossaises”—“Scottish Songs.”

All but one of these are imitations of the songs of Robert Burns (Bercot et al. 1417), and the one which inspired “Annie” was “The Rigs o’ Barley” (Burns 334):

It was upon a Lammas night,

When corn rigs are bonnie,

Beneath the moon’s unclouded light,

I heft awa to Annie:

The time flew by with tentless heed,

Till ‘tween the late and early,

Wi’ sma’ persuasion she agreed

To see me through the barley.

Chorus:

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Corn rigs and barley rigs,

And corn rigs are bonnie;

I’ll ne’er forget that happy night

Amang the rigs wi’ Annie.

The sky was blue, the wind was still,

The moon was shining clearly;

I sat her down wi’ right good will

Amang the rigs o’ barley;

I kent her heart was a’ my ain,

I lov’d her most sincerely;

I kissed her owre and owre again,

Amang the rigs o’ barley.

Chorus

I lock’d her in my fond embrace,

Her heart was beating rarely;

My blessings on that happy place,

Amang the rigs o’ barley.

But by the moon and stars so bright,

That shone that hour so clearly,

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She aye shall bless this happy night

Amang the rigs o’ barley.

Chorus.

Although the Burns poem differs markedly from Leconte de Lisle’s adaptation of it,

William Jacks remarks in his Robert Burns in Other Tongues that of all the Chansons écossaises, this one is “perhaps nearer to the original than any of the writer’s other efforts” (360). This is not itself grounds for criticizing Leconte de Lisle; with Holmes’ diagram in mind, we can see

“Annie” as a sort of imitation that takes the essential elements of “The Rigs o’ Barley” and recasts it in the precise formal detail of Parnassianism.

Next we come to Baudelaire. Wilbur and Hecht have both translated his poems and translated them well, but none of the same ones as I have. To find these I turn to the work of Dr.

William Crosby. Crosby served as a U.S. Army surgeon in the Second World War, and finished a distinguished medical career as Director of Hematology at the Chapman Cancer Center in

Missouri. In his spare time, he translated and published essentially the complete poetic works of

Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen—the only translator I’ve encountered who

(mostly) sticks to the original syllabic verse form as well as the rhyme. My own translations from Baudelaire are on pages 183-189; here are Crosby’s renderings of “Le Coucher du soleil romantique” (265), “Harmonie du soir” (95-97), “L’Ennemi” (39), and “Le Guignon” (41):

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Setting of the Romantic Sun (French on p. 188)

How beautiful the Sun appears at dawn’s first gleam,

And hurls at us like an explosion his good-day!

—But blessed is the fellow who with love can say,

Greeting to the sunset, more splendid than a dream!

I recollect! . . . I’ve seen them all, rill, flower, and furrow,

Swooning beneath his eye like hearts that palpitate. . . .

—Let’s race to the horizon, fast, run fast, it’s late;

Let’s catch at least one slanting beam before tomorrow!

But I pursue in vain the God who must retire;

Relentless Night can now establish his empire,

Humid, black, disastrous; shuddering prevails;

Within the darkness odors of the graveyard float,

And at the margin of the swamp my fearful foot

Draws back from unexpected toads and clammy snails.

Evening Harmony (French on p. 186)

The hour has come at last when, trembling to and fro,

Each flower is a censer sifting its perfume;

The scent and sounds all swirl in evening’s gentle fume;

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A melancholy waltz, a languid vertigo!

Each flower is a censer sifting its perfume;

A violin’s vibrato wounds the heart of woe;

A melancholy waltz, a languid vertigo!

The sky, a lofty altar, lovely in the gloom,

A violin’s vibrato wounds the heart of woe;

A tender heart detests the black of nullity,

The sky, a lofty altar, lovely in the gloom;

The sun is drowning in the evening’s blood-red glow.

A tender heart detests the black of nullity,

And lovingly preserves each trace of long ago!

The sun is drowning in the evening’s blood-red glow. . .

Your memory shines through me like an ostensory!

The Enemy (French on p. 182)

Lightning and thunderclap, rain upon rain

Laid waste my youth. While sunlight might transform

My garden here and there, the gloomy storm

Has ravaged it; few ripened fruits remain.

Now comes my autumn, one last chance to save

With rake and spade and unremitting toil

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The sodden remnants of the garden’s soil,

To backfill gullies deeper than a grave.

And who knows if the flowers that I plan

To cultivate in washed-out furrows can

Find mystic sustenance to make them bud?

—O grief! O grief! How Time devours our life,

The hidden Foe who conquers without strife,

Who gnaws our hearts and fattens on our blood!

Bad Luck (French on p. 184)

One needs your stamina to heave,

O Sisyphus, so great a weight!

The will to work must dominate,

For Art is long and Time is brief.

Far off from famous burial grounds

My heart moves toward a lonely tomb;

In cadence like a muffled drum,

It beats as though a dead march sounds.

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—Many a jewel, buried deep

Within the darkness, lies asleep,

Far from the pickaxe and the drill;

Many a flower, to its despair,

Must waste its scent on desert air

Where solitude is deep and still.

Let us end our study of borrowers and borrowings with a closer look at this particular

Baudelaire poem—in French titled “Le Guignon,” a word which is itself impossible to translate well into English; “bad luck” does not do it justice. In a projected but unused preface to his

Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire notes various instances of “plagiarism” in his poetry; two can be found in this one short lyric. The two quatrains expand upon a stanza from Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” published 1839 (Longfellow 9):

Art is long and Time is fleeting,11

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

11 Longfellow himself likely gets this line from Seneca’s “Ars longa, vita brevis,” and Seneca from Hippocrates. Myself, Crosby, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Seneca, Hippocrates—nothing new under the sun.

Armstrong 71 while the tercets come from Thomas Gray’s 1750 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

(Gray 46):

Full many a Gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;

Full many a Flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

If Baudelaire’s poem is a collage, it is one with great coherence. Dr. Johnson tells us in the eighteenth that Gray’s elegy was admired in England from its publication, because it

“abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo” (502), but this supposed universality does not seem to have extended across the channel until Baudelaire’s day—Hayes numbers Gray among the “melancholy English writers to whom French literary aesthetics was most resistant” around the same time that Johnson was writing (226). Such is the value of translation.

Each of these borrowers above, and each of their borrowings, represents a point of contact between two worlds. The main view that we get in surveying them is of the border between the Francophone and Anglophone worlds, but glimpses are offered of more distant spheres, of encounters farther off in space and time. In the realm of renaissance Europe, where there is a very weak sense of boundaries between the states that make up the new Republic of

Letters, Du Bellay translates Castiglione and is in turn translated by Spenser, with each claiming a degree of authorship. In the golden age of France’s roi soleil, Jean de La Fontaine keeps alive a tradition of fables that stretches back to Æsop and transcends all cultural frontiers. At the height

Armstrong 72 of British Imperial power, Toru Dutt—a native woman with an uncommon amount of privilege in the colonial regime—enriches the literary patrimony of the world as she translates from her third language into her second. In the twentieth century, on both shores of the Atlantic, poets like

Chesterton, Hecht, and Wilbur still find inspiration in Du Bellay’s ageless yearning for the familiarity of home. And now I find myself here too, in the company of these men and women. I feel a kinship to them as fellow-explorers, and from them I gain a sense of just how much remains to be explored in this new world. With Keats, I stand—

. . . like stout Cortez when with his eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry 189)

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Part II: Poets and Poems

Note on the texts:

The order in which the poets below are presented follows their order in the Bibliothèque de la

Pléiade anthologies—that is to say, essentially chronological. The poems themselves follow their orders in the volumes in which I find them, and in the case of poems from more than one collection by the same poet, the order of publication of those collections. Dates given with poems are dates of first publication, unless otherwise indicated. Spelling and punctuation are maintained as they appear in my sources. For this reason, the poems of Labé and Du Bellay appear in Middle French, while the poems of Ronsard from the same century provide an interesting contrast, with their spellings modernized. Likewise, while many of these poems appear in diverse versions, I have naturally given the French versions upon which my translations are based; the versions used are those that appear in the volumes cited. Formatting of poems largely follows their source texts, but with less stringency than for spelling etc. Sources for the poems translated are given in a line at the end of each poet’s biography.

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Louise Labé

“Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.”

—Catullus12

Louise Labé was born in Lyon about 1522 to a well-off ropemaker. Married before 1542 to another ropemaker, she gained the nickname “la Belle Cordière”—the beautiful (female) ropemaker (Appelbaum, French Poetry 33). She epitomized the intelligent, educated upper-class woman of her time, being trained in music and multiple languages—we see this in her poetry, in both Italian and French, where she writes of singing and lute-playing. Her salon was a center of

Lyonnais society, attracting numerous luminaries, admirers, and lovers (Chauveau et al. 1367), including the poet Olivier de Magny (an acquaintance of Joachim Du Bellay), to whom it has been speculated her passionate sonnets are addressed (Appelbaum, French Poetry 33).

Labé’s œuvre—at least what has come down to us—is small: A prose discourse, three elegies, and twenty-four sonnets, published in one volume in 1555, along with a collection of poems in her honor composed by her friends and admirers. She died in 1566. As intelligent and creative women often have been throughout history, Labé was a controversial figure during her life and after. Even before the death of her husband around 1559, the gossip-mongers of Lyon and of Europe speculated as to whether she was, as many contemporary Italian poetesses were, an elite courtesan (Appelbaum, French Poetry 33-34); John Calvin himself is said to have denounced her as such. Debate and controversy around Labé continue in the present century,

12Catulli Veronensis Liber 7-9.

Armstrong 75 with Mireille Huchon publishing a book in 2006 that claimed Labé was nothing but a fiction, the collective creation of a group of sixteenth-century (male) poets who collaborated on what we know as the works of Louise Labé (Chauveau et al. 1367). If her identity is in question, at least

Labé enjoys the good company of Homer and Shakespeare.

Sonnet VIII is a powerful study in paradox that might remind the reader of “Oh

Susannah.” Sonnet XIV expresses an almost indominable resilience—but the key is almost, and the poem sounds a very dark note at its end. Sonnet XVIII echoes, perhaps, the above lines from the Catullus poem above (“Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred / Then a thousand more, then again a hundred / Then yet another thousand, then a hundred.”) I haven’t seen any scholarship on the matter, but it is entirely plausible that Labé was familiar with Catullus. The timelessness of these poems springs from their burning, sharp, clear expression of the pangs of intense and unfortunate love; they are remarkably frank and explicit in their turns of phrase.

They are among the poems that I have seen fit to translate using thou/thee pronouns for the

French tu/toi; it seems to me appropriate to the poems’ age, and a necessary way to indicate the intimacy of the use of the tu in the original—something the reader will not find in Ronsard’s love poetry later on.

Poems: Chauveau et al. 592, 595-596, 598.

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Sonnet VIII (1555)

Je vis, je meurs : je me brule et me noye.

J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure :

La vie m’est trop molle et trop dure.

J’ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye.

Tout en un coup je ris et je larmoye,

Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j’endure :

Mon bien s’en va, et jamais il dure :

Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye.

Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine :

Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,

Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.

Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certaine,

Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,

Il me remet en mon premier malheur.

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Sonnet VIII

I live, and I die; I burn, and I drown;

I swelter in the sun until I freeze:

Life is too much hardship, too much ease;

My every smile betrays a hidden frown.

All at once am I laughing as I cry,

And in every pleasure find naught but woes;

My joy seems to abide, and yet it goes,

As all at once in verdancy I’m dry.

Thus blindly led by Love’s inconstancy,

One moment paralyzed in hard duress,

The next I quite forget what torments me.

Then, from seemingly-certain ecstasy,

From the heights of my long-hoped happiness,

Love casts me back into my old distress.

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Sonnet XIV (1555)

Tant que mes yeux pourront larmes espandre,

À l'heur passé avec toy regretter :

Et qu'aus sanglots et soupirs resister

Pourra ma voix, et un peu faire entendre :

Tant que ma main pourra les cordes tendre

Du mignart Lut, pour tes graces chanter :

Tant que l'esprit se voudra contenter

De ne vouloir rien fors que toy comprendre :

Je ne souhaitte encore point mourir.

Mais quand mes yeus je sentiray tarir,

Ma voix cassée, et ma main impuissante,

Et mon esprit en ce mortel sejour

Ne pouvant plus montrer signe d'amante :

Prirey la Mort noircir mon plus cler jour.

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Sonnet XIV

As long as my eyes have tears yet to shed

For how our happy hours are sorely missed;

And as long as my voice can yet resist

Sobs and sighs, leaving not my thoughts unsaid;

As long as my hands have dexterity

Enough to praise thee on the dainty lute;

As long as my mind remains resolute

In turning to nothing other than thee,

Then not yet, not yet do I hope to die.

But when I feel my eyes begin to dry,

My voice shorn of force, my hand’s wit broken,

And my mind, bound here in this mortal stay,

Of love unable to show a token,

I shall pray death darken my brightest day.

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Sonnet XVIII (1555)

Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise :

Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus,

Donne m’en un de tes plus amoureus :

Je t’en rendray quatre plus chaus que braise.

Las, te pleins tu ? ça que ce mal j’apaise,

En t’en donnant dix autres doucereus.

Ainsi meslans nos baisers tant heureus

Jouissons nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise.

Lors double vie à chacun en suivra.

Chacun en soy et son ami vivra.

Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie :

Tousjours suis mal, vivant discrettement,

Et ne me puis donner contentement,

Si hors de moy ne fay quelque saillie.

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Sonnet XVIII

Kiss me again, kiss me, kiss me once more:

Give me one of thy sweetest-tasting ones,

Give me one of thy warm-embracing ones:

Like fire, where thou givest one, I’ll give four.

Alas, thou protest? Then permit me, please,

To quiet thy qualms with ten kisses’ powers.

Thus in mingling our lips for countless hours

Let us enjoy each other at our ease.

Each of us leads a double life, I fear:

I live in myself, and in thee, my dear.

Allow me, my love, this giddy flight of mind:

Living discreetly, I ever am ill;

I need, if with content I’m to be filled,

To go beyond myself from time to time.

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Joachim Du Bellay

“Qu’à Du Bellay mon hymne soit . . .”

—Ronsard13

Du Bellay was born about 1522, into a minor branch of an aristocratic family from the province of Anjou in the Loire valley. His parents died when he was young, and his care was entrusted to an older brother, who neglected his education. Despite this, Du Bellay managed to familiarize himself with at least Latin and Italian, as evidenced by his works. In his twenties he studied law, and met the poet Jacques Peletier du Mans, who became an early influence. During this time, Du Bellay also made the acquaintance of fellow-student Pierre de Ronsard, his distant relation; in 1547 he moved to Paris to join Ronsard in studying classics under Jean Dorat.

Around these two a group of aspiring young student-poets coalesced—they called themselves the

Brigade, but have gone down in literary history as the Pléiade, so-called after a third-century

B.C. group of poets from Alexandria (Appelbaum, French Poetry 37).

It was Du Bellay who wrote and published the ars poetica of the Pléade, the manifesto of a new philosophy of poetry—the Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise of 1549. At a time when European vernacular languages were beginning to come into their own, but were still not seen as the literary equals of Greek and Latin, the Deffense et Illustration sought both to champion the use of French in literature, and to urge its improvement by the incorporation of classical forms and vocabulary into French poetry. In the same fecund year, Du Bellay published his Olive, a collection of sonnets, and Vers lyriques, which put into practice the ideas of the

13 Poésies choisies 28.

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Deffense et Illustration by showing the form of classical ode put to use in French (Appelbaum,

French Poetry 37-38).

Du Bellay’s life took an important turn in 1553. His uncle, Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, gave

Joachim a post as his secretary in Rome, and to a young poet enamored of the classical world, it was a chance not to be missed. Rome, however, was a disappointment to Du Bellay: looking for the great city of his imagination, he found ruined stone and shadows of former glory. The

Antiquitez de Rome, composed during his Italian stay and published in 1558, reveal the poet’s disillusionment and the meditations it inspired on history, society, and humanity. The collection was noteworthy for being the first use of the sonnet to treat matters beyond its traditional subject of love (Appelbaum, French Poetry 38). Two sonnets from the Antiquitez de Rome are translated below, numbers VII and XXX, of which the former is a translation of an Italian sonnet by

Baldassare Castiglione; J. Jolliffe notes in his edition of the Regrets and Antiquitez that this explains the apparent reference to “the pains of love” in the final tercet of the sonnet, a theme that appears nowhere else in the cycle of the Antiquitez (280).

From the four years that Du Bellay spent in Rome came also the work for which he is best known, the 191 sonnets of the Regrets. Where the Antiquitez express Du Bellay’s disappointment with the city of Rome itself, the Regrets are full of longing, homesickness, and dissatisfaction with life in the ecclesiastical courts. Translated below is sonnet XXXI from the

Regrets, the most famous of Du Bellay’s poems and one of the best-known in the French language. See pages 29-33 for a survey of translations of this famous sonnet into English.

Upon his return from Rome in 1558, Du Bellay published the Antiquitez, the Regrets, and two other major collections (one in French, one in Latin). He died the first day of 1560, vying with Ronsard for the position of pre-eminent poet of his day (Chauveau et al. 1375). Edmund

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Spenser admired and translated Du Bellay, but Appelbaum (French Poetry 37) and M. A.

Screech (Du Bellay 26) award him second place to his friend Ronsard14.

Poems: Du Bellay 98, 280, 304.

14 Of the two, I personally prefer Du Bellay. My thesis advisor has suggested that Ronsard tends to grow more appealing with age.

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Les Regrets XXXI (1558)

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,

Ou comme cestuy la qui conquit la toison,

Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,

Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son aage !

Quand revoiray-je, helas, de mon petit village

Fumer la cheminee, et en quelle saison,

Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,

Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage ?

Plus me plaist le séjour qu’ont basty mes ayeux,

Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,

Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l’ardoise fine :

Plus mon Loyre Gaulois, que le Tybre Latin,

Plus mon petit Lyré, que le mont Palatin,

Et plus que l’air marin, la doulceur Angevine.

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Regrets XXXI

Happy he who, like Ulysses, travels done,

Or like the Argonaut who won his golden prize,

Has finally returned, experienced and wise,

To live among his friends, till sets his final sun!

When shall I see again, alas, my childhood home?

Which season will I find smoke rising from the hearth,

Above my poor house, and my little plot of earth,

All so much the better, for being called my own?

I cherish more the threshold that my fathers built

Than Roman palaces in ostentatious gilt.

Marble does not so well as slate to please my eye.

Palatine or Tiber, were I to have the chance,

I’d trade for Loir, Liré, or any field of France,

Or Italian air, for my sweet Angevine sky.

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Antiquitez de Rome VII (1558)

Sacrez costeaux, et vous sainctes ruines,

Qui le seul nom de Rome retenez,

Vieux monuments, qui encor soustenez

L’honneur poudreux de tant d’ames divines,

Arcz triomphaux, pointes du ciel voisines,

Qui de vous voir le ciel mesme estonnez,

Las peu à peu cendre vous devenez,

Fable du peuple, et publiques rapines !

Et bien qu’au temps pour un temps facent guerre

Les bastimens, si est-ce que le temps

Œuvres et noms finablement atterre.

Tristes désirs, vivez donques contents :

Car si le temps finist chose si dure,

Il finira la peine que j’endure.

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Antiquities of Rome VII

You, holy ruins, and you, hallowed hills,

Who of Rome are only the testament

Of the name, you, the agèd monuments

Of saintly souls’ honor supported still:

Triumphal arcs, obelisks like steeples,

Who astound the sky rising up so tall,

Alas, slowly, surely in ash you fall,

A fable to a rapacious people!

And although for a time against time strove

Your buildings, yet at length the monuments

And names indeed were finally laid low.

Thus, O sorrowful yearnings, live content:

For if by time such hardy things are slain,

Then surely will it lay to rest my pain.

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Antiquitez de Rome XXX (1558)

Comme le champ semé en verdure foisonne,

De verdure se haulse en tuyau verdissant,

Du tuyau se herisse en epic florissant,

D’epic jaunit en grain, que le chauld assaisonne ;

Et comme en la saison le rustique moissonne

Les undoyans cheveux du sillon blondissant

Les met d’ordre en javelle, et du blé jaunissant,

Sur le champ despouillé mille gerbes façonne :

Ainsi de peu à peu creut l’Empire Romain,

Tant qu’il fut despouillé par la Barbare main,

Qui ne laissa de luy que ces marques antiques,

Que chacun va pillant, comme on void le gleneur

Cheminant pas à pas recueillir les reliques

De ce qui va tumbant apres le moissonneur.

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Antiquities of Rome XXX

As the corn-sown field grows in greenery replete,

From green upon the ground, in stalks springs towering,

From towering stalks in ears bursts forth flowering,

From new ears turns to gold grain, seasoned by the heat;

As the villein in season comes to reap the yield

Of the furrows rippling with sun-blonded hair

Of golden wheat, and orderly sheaves to prepare

To stack a thousand shocks, on the newly-mown field:

Thus little by little grew the Empire of Rome,

And thus in turn by Barbarous hands it was mown,

Who left relics only of its mighty domains,

Which each goes to pillage: like the gleaner creeping

Slowly through the field to gather in the remains

Of what was left fallen to earth in the reaping.

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Pierre de Ronsard

“Si je vous envoie quelques-uns de ces vers . . . c’est que j’aime en vous, bien naïvement, un descendant de Ronsard . . .”

—Rimbaud15

“The prince of poets and the poet of princes,” as Ronsard came to be called, was born

1524 near Vendôme, in the valley of the Loire. He studied classics under Jean Dorat in Paris, along with Du Bellay. He received some religious education, and although never actually ordained, served for a time as royal chaplain. Following in the footsteps of his father Loys,

Ronsard led a courtier’s life from a young age—as early as 1538, at the age of fourteen, he accompanied a French court delegation to Scotland. As the Pléiade coalesced and developed its poetic theories, Ronsard shot to remarkable fame. He was a favorite poet in the courts of four kings—Henri II, François II, Charles IX, and, to a lesser extent, Henri III—as well as a close friend of Mary, Queen of Scots (Appelbaum, French Poetry 43-45).

The body of Ronsard’s poetic work is enormous, having been compared to the work of

Victor Hugo in volume and in its importance and influence upon French language and literature.

Ronsard was the first major French poet to be versed in ancient Greek literature, and freely drew from both the forms and subjects of his favorite classical authors. He first sought to model himself upon Pindar and Anacreon, and his popular early works largely take the form of classically-patterned odes; later he settled upon Virgil and Homer as his models (Ronsard, ii-v).

15 Selected Verse 3-4.

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Though known today for his passionate love sonnets, as a court poet Ronsard earned his bread and wine composing works in honor of his kings and their courtiers, for occasions like marriages and funerals. He also wrote love poetry on commission for aristocrats who fell, like him, under the influence of cupid, but less so under that of the muses. It is often a matter of scholarly dispute whether any given sonnet is addressed to one of Ronsard’s actual lovers, or to the flamme of some fellow-courtier (Appelbaum, French Poetry 43).

Ronsard’s major works include his Odes of 1550, the Amours in several installments from 1552 to 1556, the Hymns of 1555 and 1556, and the ambitious but uncompleted Franciade, envisioned as a virgilian French national epic, but of which only the first book was published, in

1572. Ronsard is famous for his continuous exploration, or exploitation, of the theme of the Rose as a symbol for the transience of beauty. During the reign of Henri III Ronsard lost some of his popularity to younger poets, and chose to spend more and more of his time in a rustic retreat in the countryside of his native Vendôme. He continued to write until his death in 1585, by which time six editions of his collected works had been published (Appelbaum, French Poetry 43-45).

The first translated selection below is from Ronsard’s first collection of Amours, addressed to the lovely young Italian Casandre Salviati; this poem is one with several commonly-seen variants. The second is an example of Ronsard’s many and various “rose” poems (but see the discussion of it on pages 35-36), addressed to Hélène de Surgères and published in 1578, much later than his original Amours. Though it revisits the well-worn rose theme, it does so through a lens of touching retrospect. This sonnet also provided the inspiration for a well-known poem by W. B. Yeats from his nostalgic, yearning 1893 collection The Rose.

Poems: Ronsard 74-75, 131.

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Les Amours de Cassandre VIII (1552)

Amour me tue, et si je ne veux dire

Le plaisant mal que ce m’est de mourir,

Tant j’ai grand-peur qu’on veuille secourir

Ce doux tourment pour lequel je soupire.

Il est bien vrai que ma langueur désire

Qu’avec le temps je me puisse guérir :

Mais je ne veux ma dame requérir

Pour ma santé, tant me plaît mon martyre.

Tais-toi, langueur, je sens venir le jour

Que ma maîtresse après si long séjour,

Voyant le mal que son orgueil me donne,

À la douceur la rigueur fera lieu,

En imitant la nature de Dieu,

Qui nous châtie, et puis il nous pardonne.

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Amours of Cassandre VIII

Love is killing me, and yet thus to die

Is such a sweet ill, I shan’t say a word

For the fear I have that I shall be cured

Of this pleasant torment for which I sigh.

Verily, my languor bids time to come

That time may help me to succor myself:

Yet I seek not to require for my health

My lady, for I love my martyrdom.

Hush, languor, I feel the day drawing nigh

When to my prayers my love will deign reply,

Seeing the ill her pride inflicts on me,

So she will cede rigor to tenderness

Like the Lord himself in his holiness,

Who gives chastisement, and then clemency.

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Sonnets pour Hélène V (1578)

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,

Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,

Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :

« Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle. »

Lors vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,

Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,

Qui au bruit de Ronsard ne s’aille réveillant,

Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

Je serai sous la terre, et fantôme sans os ;

Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos ;

Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.

Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain ;

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.

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Sonnets for Hélène V

When you have grown old, in the candle-glow of night,

Seated by the fire while you spin and while you wind,

You will marvel to say, as you sing my lines:

“Ronsard sang my praise when I burned with beauty’s light.”

Then none of your servants, upon hearing the same,

Though they beneath burdens be by sleep half-taken,

But hearing the sound of Ronsard will awaken,

And with immortal praise will bless your fabled name.

A spirit without bones, I shall lie underground:

By shadowy myrtles, where my rest I have found;

You will be old and bent, by the dying hearth’s gloom;

For lost love and your haughty pride you will sorrow.

Believe these things, and live; do not wait for tomorrow:

But begin to pluck today life’s roses in bloom.

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Jean de La Fontaine

“There is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything.”

—G. K. Chesterton16

Jean de La Fontaine was born 1621 in Château-Thierry, in the province of Champagne.

He received a good education, studying for a time under a religious order in Paris, and later as a student of law. He returned home to Chateau-Thierry to marry in 1647, and upon his father’s death soon thereafter, inherited the position of local administrator of forests. Allegedly, he made neither a good husband nor a good forester (Appelbaum, French Poetry 59).

Having already begun a poetic career, he gained the official patronage of the French minister of finance, Fouquet, in the late 1650’s. This happy state of affairs was not to last.

Fouquet fell from favor in 1661, and with him fell La Fontaine’s fortunes. After travelling for a short time he found protection in the Paris household of the duchess of Orléans; during this period he was met with the great success of his Contes et nouvelles en vers. Appearing first in

1665 and with new volumes coming out for several years thereafter, these were witty, licentious tales drawn from the works of a variety of popular European authors. 1668 saw the publication of the first six books of La Fontaine’s Fables, for which he would ultimately be best remembered at home and abroad (Appelbaum, French Poetry 59-60).

In 1672 the Duchess died, and La Fontaine found another protectress in Madame de La

Sablière. While living in her home La Fontaine published further collections of fables in 1678,

1679, and 1693—twelve books of them in all (Appelbaum, French Poetry 60). The early fables

16 Vernon-Jones xi.

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(including the two translated below) draw mainly from Æsop and his successors, both classical and renaissance; the later volumes found their sources in everything from Descartes to the ancient Indian Panchatantra (Chauveau et al. 1532).

The Fables are true classics, “quoted, consciously or otherwise, in everyday French conversation as often as Shakespeare in English daily speech” (Appelbaum, French Poetry 59), yet many French people would not immediately think of them as poetry, per se—they are beloved stories, equally suited to the amusement of schoolchildren and the perusal of adults, but not to be counted in the same category as Ronsard’s Amours or Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal! No matter; they are taught in American university courses on French poetry, and included in English and French anthologies, including the authoritative Anthologie de la poésie française in the

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series. Perhaps the question of their status comes in part from their use of free verse, otherwise essentially unheard of in literature from the French classical period.

La Fontaine likely considered free verse appropriate for the light, satiric subjects of his fables, but in other genres, he was a master of the alexandrine (Chauveau et al. 1533). His complete works include elegies, epigrams, and verse epistles, as well as discourses on a variety of subjects in verse and prose. Elected to the French Academy in 1683 after some controversy

(the king favored Nicolas Boileau, a more “serious” poet), La Fontaine became increasingly religious in later life, and in 1693 publicly denounced the scandalous Contes et nouvelles of his earlier years. In the same year, Madame de La Sablière died; La Fontaine lived out his final years at the d’Hervart estate, dying in 1695 (Appelbaum, French Poetry 61).

Poems: La Fontaine 3, 17 (Book I fables II and XIII)

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Le Corbeau et le Renard (1668)

Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché,

Tenoit en son bec un fromage.

Maître Renard, par l’odeur alléché,

Lui tint à peu-près ce langage :

Hé ! bon jour, Monsieur du Corbeau !

Que vous êtes joli ! que vous me semblez beau !

Sans mentir, si votre ramage

Se rapporte à votre plumage,

Vous êtes le Phœnix des hôtes de ces bois.

À ces mots, le Corbeau ne se sent pas de joie ;

Et, pour montrer sa belle voix,

Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.

Le Renard s’en saisit, et dit : Mon bon Monsieur,

Apprenez que tout flatteur

Vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute :

Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute.

Le Corbeau, honteux et confus,

Jura, mais un peu tard, qu’on ne l’y prendrait plus.

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The Crow and the Fox

Master Crow, relaxing among the trees

Held a piece of cheese in his beak.

Master Fox, drawn by the scent on the breeze

In words something like these did speak:

“Good morning to you, Lord Crow.

How handsome you are! And what’s more, do you know,

In truth, if it be that your song

Matches your plumage sleek and long,

Then you are the forest’s Phoenix, the king over all.”

At these remarks the crow did not yet rejoice;

To demonstrate his lovely voice

He opened wide his beak, and let his treasure fall.

The Fox seized it, and said to him: Crow, my good sir,

Learn that every flatterer

Lives at the expense of whoever heeds:

This lesson, I ween, is worth a morsel of cheese.

The crow, ashamed at this remark,

Vowed too late to never again become a mark.

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Les Voleurs et l’Âne (1668)

Pour un Âne enlevé deux Voleurs se battoient :

L’un vouloit le garder, l’autre vouloit vendre.

Tandis que coups de poings trottoient,

Et que nos champions songoient à se défendre,

Arrive un troisième Larron,

Qui saisit Maître Aliboron.

L’Âne, c’est quelquefois une pauvre Province :

Les Voleurs, sont tel et tel Prince,

Comme le Transylvain, le Turc et le Hongrois.

Au lieu de deux j’en ai rencontré trois :

Il est asses de cette marchandise.

De nul d’eux n’est la Province conquise.

Un quart Voleur survient qui les accorde net,

En se saisissant du Baudet.

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The Thieves and the Ass

Two Thieves for a stolen Ass had an argument:

The one preferred to keep it, the other to sell.

While punches flew and clothing rent,

And our champions defended their cases so well,

Another Scoundrel sauntered past

Who saw and stole poor Mister Ass.

Sometimes the Donkey is an unlucky Demesne,

The Thieves this or that King or Queen

Of Turkey, Transylvania, or Hungary.

Instead of two I have encountered three:

There is no dearth of them beneath the sun.

Oft by none of the three will the Province be won:

For a fourth Thief appears, who suddenly brings peace

Absconding with the poor old beast.

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The Abbé de Lattaignant

“L’Abbé, ta noirceur se dévoile !”

—Verlaine17

Gabriel-Charles de Lattaignant (also attested as L’Attaignant) was born 1697. His name suggests an aristocratic background, and his title suggests he must have had a religious education. It is possible he was a younger son of an aristocratic family, as it was fairly common at the time for such younger sons to enter the priesthood and become abbés in the court—abbé was a clerical title peculiar to pre-revolutionary France, a priest appointed by the king, receiving income from a monastery but without any parochial duties. Abbés in the centuries leading up to the revolution were notorious for their often literary, often libertine leanings, as expressed by

Verlaine in the above line from his Fêtes Gallantes, a series of poems that capture the frivolities—sometimes light, sometimes dark—of life in the eighteenth-century French court.

For a time he was a canon at the cathedral of Reims. Bercot et al. note of Lattaignant that

“he is the incarnation of our image of the court abbé: spiritual, ready to versify at the drop of a hat, beloved of his friends. In his poems he professes a somewhat racy philosophy, and his good humor his contagious” (1283). These tendencies are on perfect display in Le Cabinet du philosophe, a delightful, witty poem that I have been unable to find anywhere else translated into

English. The poem given here is the “short version” of 1751 (Bercot et al. 1284); I have not seen the longer version.

17 Fêtes galantes/Romances sans paroles 99.

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Lattaignant collaborated on and published comic operas during his career, but his poetry was intended for private circulation among his friends, rather than publication—the 1751 edition of his poems, which the Abbé himself did not authorize, was titled Pièces Dérobées à un Ami

(Pieces pilfered from a friend). The best-known work attributed to him is “Le Mot et la chose,”

(“The Word and the Thing”) an amorous word-game in which the ending of every line alternates between the words “mot” and “chose.” This poem, though attributed to Lattaignant, does not appear in volumes of his published works from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (Bercot et al. 1284). Whether or not it is from the pen of the Abbé, it is in the spirit and style of such poems as “Le Cabinet du philosophe.”

Towards the end of his life, Latttaignant seems to have grown more religious, as he spent his final years in the congregation of the order of the Fathers of Christian Doctrine. He died in

1779.

Poem: Bercot et al. 93-94.

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Le Cabinet du philosophe (1751)

J’aime beaucoup mon cabinet ;

Je passe en ce réduit secret

Plus de la moitié de ma vie ;

Mais ne crois pas pauvre idiot,

Que là je lise et j’étudie,

Non, non, je ne suis pas si sot.

Ce n’est Descartes, ni Newton,

Ni Virgile, ni Cicéron ;

Ce n’est Socrate, ni Sénèque,

Ni Platon, surnommé divin,

Qui forment ma bibliothèque ;

Mais force liqueur, et bon vin.

Thémire, dont je suis la loi,

Vient philosopher avec moi :

Le spectacle de la nature,

Que tour à tour nous nous prêtons,

Y fait notre unique lecture ;

Nuit et jour nous le feuilletons.

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Entre nous, jamais d’ergo

Ni sophisme en baroco.

Nous laissons ces vaines sciences,

Et nous tirons tout simplement

Nous preuves, et nos conséquences

Du fond même du sentiment.

C’est dans cet aimable réduit,

Que nous travaillons jour et nuit ;

Des lois de la saine physique,

Nous faisons notre amusement,

Et nous réduisons en pratique

Les principes du mouvement.

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The Philosopher’s Chamber

I love my chamber very well;

Quite happily within this cell

I spend the best part of my time;

But don’t think, knave, that it’s a school,

Where I slave o’er theorem and rhyme;

No, no: for I am no such fool.

It’s not Descartes nor Cicero,

Nor Newton nor Boccaccio,

Nor even Socrates himself,

Nor Plato, whom men call divine,

Who sit in rows upon my shelf;

But liquor strong and fine old wine.

My cunning mistress Themirë

Comes to philosophize with me.

The depths of Nature’s secret lore

Are endless sources of delight,

And all our joy is to explore

Their hidden reaches day and night.

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We despise every cogito

And sophism and baroco;

Such pursuit is vain illusion.

But instead we seek to fashion

Each premise and conclusion

From the very depths of passion.

It’s in this much-loved hideaway

That we examine night and day

The laws of physicality,

And we make our own amusement

Testing the practicality

Of the principles of movement.

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André Chénier

“Jean Prouvaire était amoureux, cultivait un pot de fleurs, jouait de la flûte, faisait des vers, aimait le peuple, plaignait la femme, pleurait sur l’enfant, confondait dans la même confiance l’avenir et Dieu, et blâmait la Révolution d’avoir fait tomber une tête royale ; celle d’André

Chénier.”

—Hugo18

Beloved of the first generation of French Romantics—among them Victor Hugo and his fictional poet Jean Prouvaire, who, like Chénier, died young during a revolution—André Chenier was born 1762 in Constantinople, son of a French diplomat and a Levantine mother. In 1765 he was sent to France to live with family in Carcassone, and spent his teenage years in Paris at the

Collège de Navarre. Here he mingled with libertine aristocrats and enlightenment intellectuals

(and, of course, with enlightenment aristocrats and libertine intellectuals), picking up much of the thought and attitude of the volatile pre-revolutionary years. Between 1782 and 1790 Chenier travelled throughout France, Switzerland, Italy, and England—chasing military commissions, pursuing libertine adventures, sightseeing, and periodically suffering from bouts of serious ill- health (Appelbaum, French Poetry 71).

In 1790, shortly after the outbreak of the French revolution, Chenier returned to Paris. He committed himself to a life as a political activist and journalist, a dangerous position for anybody to occupy in the years ahead. He was a member of the Feuillants Club, a moderate-reformist party which had split from the radical Jacobin party. Chenier was a royalist, favoring the

18 Les Misérables 666.

Armstrong 110 abolition of feudal privilege, but vehemently opposing the “indiscipline and disorder” of the

Jacobins. Likely fearing the increasingly uncertain and violent political atmosphere, he left Paris in August of 1792 for the provinces. A few months later, the Republic was declared and King

Louis XVI executed; in July of 1793 Charlotte Corday assassinated the radical Jacobin journalist

Marat, and Chénier wrote (but did not publish) a poem celebrating her (Appelbaum, French

Poetry 71-73).

On March 7th, 1794, at the very height of the Reign of Terror, Chénier was arrested for his opposition to the Jacobins and his association with other opponents of the radical turn that the

Revolution had taken. He was imprisoned at Saint-Lazare in Paris, and executed on July 28th of the same year—the very same day as Maximillian Robespierre was guillotined, heralding the end of the Reign of Terror (Appelbaum, French Poetry 72).

During his life, Chénier published only two poems. Though a journalist, his literary reputation was overshadowed by that of his brother Marie-Joseph, an accomplished playwright.

It was not until 1819 that the main body of Chénier’s poetry saw the light of day, but when it did, it excited the attention of the likes of Hugo and Lamartine. For although his forms and subjects are firmly rooted in his own classical century (Bercot et al. 1364-1365)—nymphs, shepherds, and philosophical discourse being much in evidence—the poetry of Chénier, like the prose of

Rousseau, contains something new in its emotion and evocations of nature, at its best calling to mind the odes of Keats.

Chenier’s manuscripts present a challenge to the scholar—much of his work is unfinished, with pages crowded with notes and variants (Bercot et al. 1364-1365). He wrote some of his best poems while in prison, smuggling them to friends on scraps of paper hidden in his laundry (Appelbaum, French Poetry 73). His most famous work is likely “La Jeune

Armstrong 111

Tarentine,” an elegy brimming with classical allusions; a close second is “La Jeune captive,” translated below. Based on Chénier’s real experience in prison, the anonymous, hopeful beauty of the poem is generally agreed to have been Aimée de Coigny, duchess of Fleury, who escaped the guillotine and lived to see the monarchy restored. “La Jeune captive” was published in 1797 in an almanac, long before the general discovery of Chénier, with this note: “Massacred 7

Thermidor . . . André Chenier was but thirty years old. He had studied much, written much, and published very little. The poetry, philosophy, and antique erudition in him made his an irreparable loss” (Bercot et al. 1365-1367).

Poem: Bercot et al. 384-386.

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La Jeune Captive (Written 1794)

« L'épi naissant mûrit de la faux respecté ;

Sans crainte du pressoir, le pampre tout l'été

Boit les doux présents de l'aurore ;

Et moi, comme lui belle, et jeune comme lui,

Quoi que l'heure présente ait de trouble et d'ennui,

Je ne veux point mourir encore.

« Qu'un stoïque aux yeux secs vole embrasser la mort,

Moi je pleure et j'espère ; au noir souffle du Nord

Je plie et relève ma tête.

S'il est des jours amers, il en est de si doux !

Hélas ! quel miel jamais n'a laissé de dégoûts ?

Quelle mer n'a point de tempête ?

« L'illusion féconde habite dans mon sein.

D'une prison sur moi les murs pèsent en vain.

J'ai les ailes de l'espérance :

Échappée aux réseaux de l'oiseleur cruel,

Plus vive, plus heureuse, aux campagnes du ciel

Philomèle chante et s'élance.

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« Est-ce à moi de mourir ? Tranquille je m'endors,

Et tranquille je veille ; et ma veille aux remords

Ni mon sommeil ne sont en proie.

Ma bienvenue au jour me rit dans tous les yeux ;

Sur des fronts abattus, mon aspect dans ces lieux

Ranime presque de la joie.

« Mon beau voyage encore est si loin de sa fin !

Je pars, et des ormeaux qui bordent le chemin

J'ai passé les premiers à peine,

Au banquet de la vie à peine commencé,

Un instant seulement mes lèvres ont pressé

La coupe en mes mains encor pleine.

« Je ne suis qu'au printemps, je veux voir la moisson ;

Et comme le soleil, de saison en saison,

Je veux achever mon année.

Brillante sur ma tige et l'honneur du jardin,

Je n'ai vu luire encor que les feux du matin ;

Je veux achever ma journée.

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« Ô mort ! tu peux attendre ; éloigne, éloigne-toi ;

Va consoler les cœurs que la honte, l'effroi,

Le pâle désespoir dévore.

Pour moi Palès encore a des asiles verts,

Les Amours des baisers, les Muses des concerts.

Je ne veux point mourir encore. »

Ainsi, triste et captif, ma lyre toutefois

S'éveillait, écoutant ces plaintes, cette voix,

Ces vœux d'une jeune captive ;

Et secouant le faix de mes jours languissants,

Aux douces lois des vers je pliais les accents

De sa bouche aimable et naïve.

Ces chants, de ma prison témoins harmonieux,

Feront à quelque amant des loisirs studieux

Chercher quelle fut cette belle :

La grâce décorait son front et ses discours,

Et, comme elle, craindront de voir finir leurs jours

Ceux qui les passeront près d'elle.

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The Young Captive

“The scythe respects the corn as it grows strong;

Unfearful of the press, the vine all summer long

Drinks the gift of the morning sky;

And I, young as these are, and like them beautiful,

Though the hour at hand brims with strife and trouble full,

Still not yet do I wish to die.

“The dry-eyed stoic rushes off embracing death,

But I cry and I hope, in the black north wind’s breath

I bow and then I stand up tall.

If there be bitter days, then there are sweet ones too!

Alas! what promised sweetness remains ever true?

What ocean never knows a squall?

“There’s a fertile illusion alive in my brain.

The walls of my prison weigh upon me in vain;

Upon the wings of hope I fly;

Escaping from the cruelty of the fowler’s snare,

Happier and livelier in the realm of air,

Philomela sings in the sky.

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“Is it my lot to die? Tranquil I go to bed,

And tranquil I stand vigil, and to my regret

Neither vigil nor sleep succumbs.

My hail to the day smiles back in every visage;

My aspect on downtrodden faces the image

Of joy restored almost becomes.

“My beautiful voyage is still so far from done!

Of the elms that border the path I’ve scarce begun

Hardly the first few have I passed.

At the banquet of life only now starting out

For but one fleeting moment I’ve pressed to my mouth

The still-full chalice that I grasp.

“Barely in spring, I want to see the harvest done;

And from season to season, just as the sun,

I want to see my whole year through.

The pride of the garden, on my stem gleaming bright,

I have seen inflame only the morning’s first light;

I want to see my whole day through.

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“O death! You can wait; away, fly away from here;

Go comfort those hearts consumed by shame and by fear,

By pale despair and sobbing sighs.

Palës still has green refuges to give to me,

Love so many kisses, the Muses melodies;

Still not yet do I wish to die!”

Thus, in sorrow and bondage, my lyre nonetheless

Would awake to that voice, to those cries of distress,

This young prisoner and her vows;

And lightening the charge of my captivity,

I formed the words by the sweet laws of poetry

That fell from her innocent mouth.

These songs, of my imprisonment witness in rhyme,

To seek who she was, this beauty, to pass his time,

Some ardent lover will inspire:

Grace her words and her face each sublimely displays,

And like her they will fear to see finish their days,

All those who will pass them beside her.

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Victor Hugo

“Victor Hugo était un fou qui se croyait Victor Hugo.”

—Jean Cocteau19

In 1802, François-René de Chateaubriand published his Génie du christianisme, a landmark in the literary shift between Classicism and the nascent Romantic movement in France.

In Besançon, on February 26th of that year, Victor Hugo was born to the colonel Joseph-Léopold

Hugo and his wife Sophie Trébuchet. A precocious child with literary aspirations from an early age, the young Hugo wrote in his journal at the age of fourteen “I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing” (Hugo, Contemplations 416).

Hugo had begun writing poetry at the age of thirteen, and at fifteen attracted the attention of the French Academy for an opera and a tragedy. In his early life, Hugo shared

Chateaubriand’s political leanings as well as his literary tastes; he was a devoted royalist, and in

1819 founded the literary newsletter Le Conservateur littéraire (the Literary Conservative) along with his brother Abel. The same year, he met and fell in love with Adèle Foucher (Hugo, Chants du crépuscule 353). Just as his father threatened to cut Hugo off financially if he did not renounce his literary aspirations, Adèle’s family refused to consent to a marriage with such bleak prospects (Chevaillier and Audiat 53). Everything changed in 1822, with the publication of Odes et poésies diverses. Before the year was out, Victor and Adèle were married; successive editions brought further acclaim and financial success. In the preface to the 1824 edition we find the poet

19 Blackmore and Blackmore xvi.

Armstrong 119 discussing the term romantique; by 1828 the work had expanded to become the Odes et ballades, and a career was made (Chevaillier and Audiat 15-21).

Other triumphs followed. 1829 saw the publication of Les Orientales, exotic and innovative poems inspired in part by the Greek war for independence—the same war in which

Lord Byron died. Théophile Gautier records the “battle” that he and Gérard de Nerval witnessed at the 1830 premier of their mutual friend Hugo’s drama Hernani, which scandalized its audience by challenging established norms of theater (Hugo, Hernani 263). Likewise, in 1831,

Notre-Dame de Paris revolutionized the concept of the novel. Passing by several other plays and collections of poetry, we come in 1840 to Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows), from which “Tristesse d’Olympio” and “Nuits de juin” below are drawn—the former20 inspired by

Hugo’s time with his mistress Juliette Drouet (Hugo, Chants du crépuscule 354).

In 1841, Hugo came to a high point in his career with his election to the French

Academy, but in 1843 his personal and professional lives suffered a grave blow when his newly- married daughter Léopoldine drowned in the Seine on her honeymoon—a tragedy which would later inspire the moving “Deman, dès l’aube . . .” Although he ceased to publish for some years after Léopoldine’s death, Hugo became more active in politics during this time, in accordance with his belief that the poet’s role in society was an active one. In 1845 he was named a Peer of France, and began to slowly turn away from his conservative political leanings.

Although he was elected to the Legislative Assembly after the 1848 establishment of the Second

Republic as a conservative deputy, he became increasingly attached to the causes of reform and liberalism (Hugo, Contemplations 419-421).

20 “Tristesse d’Olympio” is a masterpiece, but I have to note that for all the poem’s evocation of the tragedies of aging, the frustrations of faded youth, and the ambiguous value of memory, the poet was only thirty-five when he composed it.

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The Second Republic did not last long. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of

Napoleon I, seized power in a coup-d’état in 1851. Victor Hugo was an outspoken opponent of the coup, and was exiled from France in 1852 after declaring the new Emperor a traitor . Hugo spent the next eighteen years in Brussels, Jersey, and Guernsey. During his exile he produced moving works on personal loss, despairs and hopes surrounding the political situation at home, and reflections on a life that was already full of experiences. From this period came 1856’s Les

Contemplations, where we find the starkly contrasting “Demain, dès l’aube . . .” and “Viens !— une flute invisible” (Hugo, Contemplations 421).

The next year, 1857, Baudelaire published his Fleurs du mal. This signaled a definitive shift in French literature away from the hugolian aesthetic, but Hugo himself was an admirer of

Baudelaire’s work. Among various works of poetry and criticism, and among plenty of other novels, Les Misérables, published 1862, stands out as a manifesto of Hugo’s sympathy for the downtrodden and belief in social progress: having started his career as an idealistic young conservative, Hugo turned more and more liberal with age. In 1870, the defeat of France in the

Franco-Prussian war brought down the régime of Louis-Napoleon, and Hugo returned to Paris.

His poetic output in his later years assumed an often-epic dimension. The book-length L’Année terrible (The Terrible Year) of 1872 chronicled the recent war, La Légende des siècles (The

Legend of the Centuries) of 1859-1883 attempted to capture the essence of all human history in poetry, and two religious epics, Dieu and La Fin de Satan (God and Satan’s End) appeared posthumously (Hugo, Contemplations 422-425).

Hugo died in 1885, and was buried with great honor and ceremony in the Panthéon.

During his life of sex, drugs, and poetry—at least four of his extramarital affairs are recorded, and he was a leading member of the Club des Hashishins—Hugo saw most of a century unfold,

Armstrong 121 and helped to shape its course. In his eighty-three years he lived through nine régime changes in

France (Hugo, Chants du crépuscule 354-356), and lived the life of poet, journalist, novelist, politician, and persecuted dissident. He left a body of work comparable to no other literary figure of any place or time. Touching on every topic under the sun, so copious is his œuvre that large numbers of poetic fragments were still being published as late as 1951 (Appelbaum, French

Poetry 91). Hugo likely put it best himself: “A poet,” he wrote, “is a world enclosed within a man” (Bercot et al. 1395).

Poems: Hugo, Les Chants du crépuscule etc. 315-320, 341; Les Contemplations 81, 208.

Armstrong 122

Tristesse d’Olympio (Written 1837)

Les champs n'étaient point noirs, les cieux n'étaient pas mornes.

Non, le jour rayonnait dans un azur sans bornes

Sur la terre étendu,

L'air était plein d'encens et les prés de verdures

Quand il revit ces lieux où par tant de blessures

Son cœur s'est répandu !

L'automne souriait ; les coteaux vers la plaine

Penchaient leurs bois charmants qui jaunissaient à peine ;

Le ciel était doré ;

Et les oiseaux, tournés vers celui que tout nomme,

Disant peut-être à Dieu quelque chose de l'homme,

Chantaient leur chant sacré !

Il voulut tout revoir, l'étang près de la source,

La masure où l'aumône avait vidé leur bourse,

Le vieux frêne plié,

Les retraites d'amour au fond des bois perdues,

L'arbre où dans les baisers leurs âmes confondues

Avaient tout oublié !

Armstrong 123

Il chercha le jardin, la maison isolée,

La grille d'où l'œil plonge en une oblique allée,

Les vergers en talus.

Pâle, il marchait.—Au bruit de son pas grave et sombre,

Il voyait à chaque arbre, hélas ! se dresser l'ombre

Des jours qui ne sont plus !

Il entendait frémir dans la forêt qu'il aime

Ce doux vent qui, faisant tout vibrer en nous-même,

Y réveille l'amour,

Et, remuant le chêne ou balançant la rose,

Semble l'âme de tout qui va sur chaque chose

Se poser tour à tour !

Les feuilles qui gisaient dans le bois solitaire,

S'efforçant sous ses pas de s'élever de terre,

Couraient dans le jardin ;

Ainsi, parfois, quand l'âme est triste, nos pensées

S'envolent un moment sur leurs ailes blessées,

Puis retombent soudain.

Armstrong 124

Il contempla longtemps les formes magnifiques

Que la nature prend dans les champs pacifiques ;

Il rêva jusqu'au soir ;

Tout le jour il erra le long de la ravine,

Admirant tour à tour le ciel, face divine,

Le lac, divin miroir !

Hélas ! se rappelant ses douces aventures,

Regardant, sans entrer, par-dessus les clôtures,

Ainsi qu'un paria,

Il erra tout le jour, vers l'heure où la nuit tombe,

Il se sentit le cœur triste comme une tombe,

Alors il s'écria :

« Ô douleur ! j'ai voulu, moi dont l'âme est troublée,

Savoir si l'urne encor conservait la liqueur,

Et voir ce qu'avait fait cette heureuse vallée

De tout ce que j'avais laissé là de mon cœur !

Armstrong 125

« Que peu de temps suffit pour changer toutes choses !

Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez !

Et comme vous brisez dans vos métamorphoses

Les fils mystérieux où nos cœurs sont liés !

« Nos chambres de feuillage en halliers sont changées !

L'arbre où fut notre chiffre est mort ou renversé ;

Nos roses dans l'enclos ont été ravagées

Par les petits enfants qui sautent le fossé.

« Un mur clôt la fontaine où, par l'heure échauffée,

Folâtre, elle buvait en descendant des bois ;

Elle prenait de l'eau dans sa main, douce fée,

Et laissait retomber des perles de ses doigts !

« On a pavé la route âpre et mal aplanie,

Où, dans le sable pur se dessinant si bien,

Et de sa petitesse étalant l'ironie,

Son pied charmant semblait rire à côté du mien !

Armstrong 126

« La borne du chemin, qui vit des jours sans nombre,

Où jadis pour m'attendre elle aimait à s'asseoir,

S'est usée en heurtant, lorsque la route est sombre,

Les grands chars gémissants qui reviennent le soir.

« La forêt ici manque et là s'est agrandie.

De tout ce qui fut nous presque rien n'est vivant ;

Et, comme un tas de cendre éteinte et refroidie,

L'amas des souvenirs se disperse à tout vent !

« N'existons-nous donc plus ? Avons-nous eu notre heure ?

Rien ne la rendra-t-il à nos cris superflus ?

L'air joue avec la branche au moment où je pleure ;

Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus.

« D'autres vont maintenant passer où nous passâmes.

Nous y sommes venus, d'autres vont y venir ;

Et le songe qu'avaient ébauché nos deux âmes,

Ils le continueront sans pouvoir le finir !

Armstrong 127

« Car personne ici-bas ne termine et n'achève ;

Les pires des humains sont comme les meilleurs ;

Nous nous réveillons tous au même endroit du rêve.

Tout commence en ce monde et tout finit ailleurs.

« Oui, d'autres à leur tour viendront, couples sans tache,

Puiser dans cet asile heureux, calme, enchanté,

Tout ce que la nature à l'amour qui se cache

Mêle de rêverie et de solennité !

« D'autres auront nos champs, nos sentiers, nos retraites ;

Ton bois, ma bien-aimée, est à des inconnus.

D'autres femmes viendront, baigneuses indiscrètes,

Troubler le flot sacré qu'ont touché tes pieds nus !

« Quoi donc ! c'est vainement qu'ici nous nous aimâmes !

Rien ne nous restera de ces coteaux fleuris

Où nous fondions notre être en y mêlant nos flammes !

L'impassible nature a déjà tout repris.

Armstrong 128

« Oh ! dites-moi, ravins, frais ruisseaux, treilles mûres,

Rameaux chargés de nids, grottes, forêts, buissons,

Est-ce que vous ferez pour d'autres vos murmures ?

Est-ce que vous direz à d'autres vos chansons ?

« Nous vous comprenions tant ! doux, attentifs, austères,

Tous nos échos s'ouvraient si bien à votre voix !

Et nous prêtions si bien, sans troubler vos mystères,

L'oreille aux mots profonds que vous dites parfois !

« Répondez, vallon pur, répondez, solitude,

Ô nature abritée en ce désert si beau,

Lorsque nous dormirons tous deux dans l'attitude

Que donne aux morts pensifs la forme du tombeau,

« Est-ce que vous serez à ce point insensible

De nous savoir couchés, morts avec nos amours,

Et de continuer votre fête paisible,

Et de toujours sourire et de chanter toujours ?

Armstrong 129

« Est-ce que, nous sentant errer dans vos retraites,

Fantômes reconnus par vos monts et vos bois,

Vous ne nous direz pas de ces choses secrètes

Qu'on dit en revoyant des amis d'autrefois ?

« Est-ce que vous pourrez, sans tristesse et sans plainte,

Voir nos ombres flotter où marchèrent nos pas,

Et la voir m'entraîner, dans une morne étreinte,

Vers quelque source en pleurs qui sanglote tout bas ?

« Et s'il est quelque part, dans l'ombre où rien ne veille,

Deux amants sous vos fleurs abritant leurs transports,

Ne leur irez-vous pas murmurer à l'oreille :

—Vous qui vivez, donnez une pensée aux morts !

« Dieu nous prête un moment les prés et les fontaines,

Les grands bois frissonnants, les rocs profonds et sourds

Et les cieux azurés et les lacs et les plaines,

Pour y mettre nos cœurs, nos rêves, nos amours ;

Armstrong 130

« Puis il nous les retire. Il souffle notre flamme ;

Il plonge dans la nuit l'antre où nous rayonnons ;

Et dit à la vallée, où s'imprima notre âme,

D'effacer notre trace et d'oublier nos noms.

« Eh bien ! oubliez-nous, maison, jardin, ombrages !

Herbe, use notre seuil ! ronce, cache nos pas !

Chantez, oiseaux ! ruisseaux, coulez ! croissez, feuillages !

Ceux que vous oubliez ne vous oublieront pas.

« Car vous êtes pour nous l'ombre de l'amour même !

Vous êtes l'oasis qu'on rencontre en chemin !

Vous êtes, ô vallon, la retraite suprême

Où nous avons pleuré nous tenant par la main !

« Toutes les passions s'éloignent avec l'âge,

L'une emportant son masque et l'autre son couteau,

Comme un essaim chantant d'histrions en voyage

Dont le groupe décroît derrière le coteau.

Armstrong 131

« Mais toi, rien ne t'efface, amour ! toi qui nous charmes,

Toi qui, torche ou flambeau, luis dans notre brouillard !

Tu nous tiens par la joie, et surtout par les larmes.

Jeune homme on te maudit, on t'adore vieillard.

« Dans ces jours où la tête au poids des ans s'incline,

Où l'homme, sans projets, sans but, sans visions,

Sent qu'il n'est déjà plus qu'une tombe en ruine

Où gisent ses vertus et ses illusions ;

« Quand notre âme en rêvant descend dans nos entrailles,

Comptant dans notre cœur, qu'enfin la glace atteint,

Comme on compte les morts sur un champ de batailles,

Chaque douleur tombée et chaque songe éteint,

« Comme quelqu'un qui cherche en tenant une lampe,

Loin des objets réels, loin du monde rieur,

Elle arrive à pas lents par une obscure rampe

Jusqu'au fond désolé du gouffre intérieur ;

Armstrong 132

« Et là, dans cette nuit qu'aucun rayon n'étoile,

L'âme, en un repli sombre où tout semble finir,

Sent quelque chose encor palpiter sous un voile . . .

C'est toi qui dors dans l'ombre, ô sacré souvenir ! »

Armstrong 133

Sorrow of Olympio

Over unshadowed fields not a cloud passed in view;

No, the day shone in splendor from limitless blue

Upon the earth spread out;

The air was full of balm, the meadows full of blooms,

When he revisited where from so many wounds

His youthful heart bled out!

The autumn smiled; away toward the plain the trees

Stood thick upon the hills with their yellowing leaves;

The heavens were of gold;

And the birds, turned to Him with whom all things began,

Sang, confiding to God perhaps something of man,

Their sacred songs of old!

He came to see it again, the pool fresh and calm,

And the croft where their purses were emptied in alms,

The old ash bent but tall,

Love’s retreats in the wood that no other could find,

And the oak where in kisses their souls intertwined

Had unremembered all!

Armstrong 134

He was seeking the garden, the long sloping drive

Up to the half-hidden house where the eye arrives,

The orchard-slopes beyond.

Pallid, he walked, and with his footsteps’ somber sound

He saw the trees cast shadows, dark across the ground,

Of days forever gone!

In the forest he loves he heard whistling the wind

That brushes us, till something vibrating within

Stirs love to wakefulness,

And rustling through the oak leaves or swaying the rose,

Seems the soul of everything, as to each it goes,

And for a moment rests!

In the solitary wood, the leaves lying dead

Strove to flutter up from earth beneath every tread,

And fly across the ground.

Likewise sometimes the lonely soul its sorrow brings

Unto our thoughts, which take to flight on wounded wings,

Then suddenly fall down.

Armstrong 135

The magnificent figures of Nature’s display

He pondered, strolling through tranquil meadows all day;

He dreamed till evening’s chime:

At length he wandered through the groves, for memory’s sake,

Admiring the divine face of the sky, the lake

Reflecting the divine!

Alas! Recalling adventures of innocence,

He felt himself, as he peered through the rusting fence,

A pariah cast out;

The day long he wandered, till the dusk turned to gloom,

Till his heart sank to sorrow as stark as the tomb,

Then he stood and cried out:

“Woe is me! I had hoped, I whose soul is dismayed,

To know what of the joys of the past I could find,

And to see what this jubilant valley had made

Of each piece of my heart that I left here behind!

Armstrong 136

“How fleeting, how ephemeral everything is!

Nature, how you have forgotten, yet never sighed!

And how you sever in your metamorphosis

The mysterious strands by which our hearts are tied!

“Our bowers of green are now thickets dark and dense!

The tree that bore our mark is dead or blown over;

And by little children jumping over the fence,

Our roses are ravaged within their enclosure.

“Walking gay through the woods as the day grew hotter,

She would drink, but her fountain’s now stopped by a wall;

Fairy-like, her slight hands would scoop up the water,

And through her slender fingers let shining pearls fall!

“Paved now is the old rough and rutted unplaned way,

Where tracing out so well in the sand pure and fine,

Putting the irony of its size on display,

Her tiny charming foot seemed to laugh beside mine!

Armstrong 137

“The old milestone, witness to numberless days,

Where waiting for me, in time gone by she would sit,

Those great creaking carts struck till it crumbled away,

When in the falling dusk the lane was dimly lit.

“The forest here is grown up and there is cut down.

Almost nothing is left of all that we have been;

And, like a pile of ashes burnt out and cooled down,

The heap of memories is dispersed to the wind!

“Do we exist, then, no more? Have we had our day?

Will nothing harken to our superfluous cries?

Even now as I weep, the air and branches play:

My house looks back at me with cold unknowing eyes.

“Now others will see all those things that we have seen.

Where once we two have been, others in turn will come.

And pick up the plans our two souls together dreamed,

Though they never can finish what they have begun!

Armstrong 138

“For no one down here completes what they undertake;

The best of humans are no different from the worst;

At the same point in the dream we’re startled awake,

And all finishes beyond that starts on this Earth.

“Yes, others in turn will come, couples free from sin,

To this enchanted refuge, and take what they find,

Where a coy, hiding love is by Nature mixed in

With a daydreaming heart and a serious mind!

“Yes, others will find our fields, our paths, our retreats;

Your wood, my beloved, is left to unknown hearts.

Other women will come, and bathing indiscreet,

Mar the waves sanctified by your innocent arts!

“But what now! We have loved in these places in vain!

By these flowering hills we’re now wholly forsaken,

Where we fused our being by combining our flames!

By stony-faced Nature, it all is retaken.

Armstrong 139

“Oh! Banks of the stream where the bridge overleaps it,

Tell me—bird-nested branches, vines trailing along—

In time, will you whisper to others your secret?

And in time, will you sing unto others your songs?

“We understand you well! Gentle, eager, austere,

To your voice our echoes shed their veils all away;

Without troubling your mysteries, we lent you our ears,

To hear the words of wisdom that sometimes you say!

“Tell me then, solitude—tell me then, virgin vale,

O nature sheltering in this beautiful waste,

When at last we both sleep in the shade of the veil

That the tomb lays to cover each pensive dead face,

“Could you be so unfeeling to see, in that day,

Loves and lovers alike, lying dead together,

To pursue even then the same lighthearted play,

And forever to smile, and to sing forever?

Armstrong 140

“Will you not for a sole moment cease thus to sing,

When by mountains and woods under unchanging skies

Pass our ghosts, and confide to us such secret things

As one says to old friends one sees from days gone by?

“And will you be able, with unchanging face,

To see where once we walked, our gloomy shadows err,

And see her lead me on in a mournful embrace

Towards some tearful spring that sobs in quiet despair?

“If there are, in some green spot where no one comes near,

Two pure lovers, a shoulder that comforts a head,

Will you not come to them, and murmur in their ears

‘Lucky you who live yet, spare a thought for the dead!’

“For a moment God lends us the springs and the leas,

The black pebble below and blue heaven above,

The mute cliffs, the cool lakes, and the shivering trees,

As a stage for our hearts, and our dreams, and our loves;

Armstrong 141

“Then He lets the curtain fall. He gives to us rest

So that where we blazed bright an eternal night reigns,

And commands the green vale where our souls were impressed

To efface all our traces and bury our names.

“Ah, so be it! Forget us, my garden and door!

May thorns smother our footsteps, moss eat our stones through!

Sing, O birds; grow, O trees; flow O streams, evermore!

Those you so soon forget will not soon forget you.

“For to us you’re the echo of love that remains!

The oasis you are, in this desert so wide!

The eternal retreat, O ye valleys and plains,

Where hand in hand holding each other we cried!

“With age every passion fades slowly away,

One takes with it its mask, another takes its blade,

Like a jongleur’s troupe singing songs on their way

Till the laughter and din of their revelries fade.

Armstrong 142

“But nothing makes thee fade, love! Thee whom we adore,

Be thou beacon or torch, who shinest through our mist!

Thou capturest us with joy, with tears even more.

By young men art thou cursed, as by old thou art blest.

“In this age when man knows not his purpose nor doom,

When his burdened head bows from the weight of his days,

He sees naught before him, naught but a crumbling tomb

Where his bones and illusions and virtues decay.

“When the dreaming soul turns to the internal dark,

Just as after a battle to number the dead,

To count, in the chill of the slowly-freezing heart,

Every anguish of something undone or unsaid,

“Like somebody searching, someone holding a lamp,

Far from the mocking world, where no solid thing is,

It at last arrives, by some way unlit and damp,

To the ultimate depth of the inward abyss;

Armstrong 143

“And in that starless night where all hope seems to fail,

The soul, where the final fold of shade seems to be,

Feels still something that palpitates under a veil . . .

—It’s thou who sleepest here, O holy memory!”

Armstrong 144

Nuits de juin (1840)

L’été, lorsque le jour a fui, de fleurs couverte

La plaine verse au loin un parfum enivrant ;

Les yeux fermés, l’oreille aux rumeurs entrouverte,

On ne dort qu’à demi d’un sommeil transparent.

Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure ;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ;

Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

Armstrong 145

June Nights

Rich with blooms, when daylight has faded in summer,

The plain pours off its scent like a bouquet of wine;

With eyelids closed, but ears half-open to rumor,

Lucid half-sleeping dreams fill the transparent mind.

The starlight seems more pure, the shadow more refined;

A vague almost-daylight tints the dome without years;

And a dawn soft and pallid, awaiting her time,

Seems to linger all night on the edge of the spheres.

Armstrong 146

Les Contemplations II:XIII (1856)

Viens !— une flûte invisible

Soupire dans les vergers.—

La chanson la plus paisible

Est la chanson des bergers.

Le vent ride, sous l'yeuse,

Le sombre miroir des eaux.—

La chanson la plus joyeuse

Est la chanson des oiseaux.

Que nul soin ne te tourmente.

Aimons-nous ! aimons toujours !—

La chanson la plus charmante

Est la chanson des amours.

Armstrong 147

Contemplations II:XIII

O come!—for a flute unseen

In the orchard sighs an omen.—

The song that’s the most serene

Is the work-song of the yeomen.

The water’s mirror-like light

Shatters in the diving breeze.—

The song of the most delight

Is the bird-song in the trees.

May no care leave you fearing.

May we e’er love each other!—

The song the most endearing

Is the heart-song of lovers.

Armstrong 148

Les Contemplations IV:XIV (Written 1847)

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,

Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.

J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.

Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,

Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,

Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,

Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,

Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,

Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe

Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

Armstrong 149

Contemplations IV:XIV

Tomorrow, at dawn, when the countryside shines white,

I shall leave. I know that you’re waiting for me too.

I will pass the forest’s depth and the mountain’s height.

I can no longer stand to be away from you.

I shall walk with my eyes fixed inwards on my thoughts,

Without the sense of any outward sound or sight,

Alone, unknown, my back doubled and my hands crossed:

Sad, and the day for me will be just as the night.

I’ll look not on the evening’s falling golden gloom,

Nor the sails going down to Harfleur together,

And when I arrive, I shall place upon your tomb

A bouquet of green holly and flowering heather.

Armstrong 150

Gérard de Nerval

“Nerval est le premier à fonder la poésie sur une rêverie lucide, un délire maîtrisé.”

—Gaëton Picon21

Gérard de Nerval was born Gérard Labrunie in 1808, in Paris. His father was a doctor in

Napoléon’s army, and his mother died not long after Gérard’s birth while accompanying her husband on a campaign in Germany (Appelbaum, French Poetry 95). Gérard was sent to live with a great-uncle in the country outside of Paris, and his childhood was marked by its idyllic rural setting tempered by the pain of the loss of his mother. As an adolescent he was sent back to the capital to study; here he befriended classmate Théophile Gautier, with whom he began frequenting the Romantic literary salon known as the Cénacle. Members of the salon included all the big names in the first generation of French Romanticism—Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Hugo

(Rincé 113). It was during this time, too, that Gérard began going by the noble-sounding appellation de Nerval, in keeping with the monarchist and medievalist tastes of the Romantic movement (Appelbaum, French Poetry 95).

Nerval was deeply influenced by the German Romantics (Marks 14), and his first major literary success was an 1828 translation of Goethe’s Faust. During this period he lived the life of a literary dandy upon a large inheritance (Appelbaum, French Poetry 95). He fought as a partisan of Victor Hugo in the “battle” that broke out at the fateful premier of Hugo’s play

Hernani in 1830, and a widely-circulated anecdote that he walked a pet lobster called Thibault through the gardens of Paris seems to be confirmed by the letters he left. “Lobsters, Nerval

21 Rincé 126.

Armstrong 151 wrote, “are tranquil and serious, and know the secrets of the deep” (Horton). Between 1830 and

1835 he published his successful Odelettes, from which the two selections below are drawn

(Bercot et al. 1403). Both are typically Romantic. Fantasie is the best-known of his early poems and explores an ever-present nervalian theme of an unknown, idealized woman; Notre-Dame de

Paris celebrates Victor Hugo’s landmark novel of the same name and its immortalization of the cathedral.22

Nerval’s heady early period came to an end in 1836. His inheritance ran out, and for the rest of his life he was plagued by debts (Appelbaum, French Poetry 95) The same year a failed romance with the actress Jenny Colon left him deepening the spiritual and literary pursuit of his

Ideal of femininity that had its roots in the loss of his mother. In 1841 he faced the first of several institutionalizations for mental illness. Nerval’s mental troubles were exacerbated by a vivid internal life of ancient myth, reincarnation, orientalism, paganism, and occultism (Rincé 113-

114), but at the same time the poet considered his craft as a vehicle to personal salvation, as well as a therapeutic validation of his internal world (Marks 15). The rest of the decade saw a series of voyages throughout Europe and the Near East, publications of travel writing as well as plays and poems, and episodes of madness (Nerval 426-427).

In 1851 Nerval published a popular travel account, Voyage en Orient. In 1854 he published Les Filles de feu, a series of novellas each exploring a facet of the ideal-woman theme.

Sylvie, one of these, is considered to be Nerval’s magnum opus. Published along with the Filles du feu were the Chimères, twelve sonnets mingling the poet’s travel experiences with the transcendental mythology of his imagination, and “colored by Nerval’s expectation that the

22 There is an irony here: In the novel, Hugo devotes an entire chapter to explaining how the printed book killed the Gothic cathedral (Ceci tuera cela, pp. 198-211). Nerval suggests that Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris would immortalize the memory of the cathedral, but in fact the public interest aroused by the book’s publication was a major impetus for Viollet-le-Duc’s 1844 restoration of the long-neglected structure. The spire destroyed in 2019’s fire was the most prominent exterior part of Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration.

Armstrong 152 resurgence of an enlightened paganism would not destroy, but subsume, the ethos of

Christianity” (Appelbaum, French Poetry 95-97). In the early days of 1855 he published Aurélia, a final exposition of the intense world of dreams he inhabited, and at dawn on January 26th of that year Nerval was found hanged in a dark Paris alley. His family would have nothing to do with his funeral arrangements, which were paid for and handled by the Society of Men of

Letters. Despite the fact that he had committed suicide, Nerval’s funeral was held at the cathedral of Notre-Dame, at the time mid-way through Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration (Nerval 429).

Poems: Bercot et al. 553, Notre-Dame de Paris (Poetica.fr).

Armstrong 153

Fantaisie (1835)

Il est un air pour qui je donnerais

Tout Rossini, tout Mozart et tout Weber,

Un air très vieux, languissant et funèbre,

Qui pour moi seul a des charmes secrets.

Or, chaque fois que je viens à l’entendre,

De deux cents ans mon âme rajeunit :

C’est sous Louis treize ; et je crois voir s’étendre

Un coteau vert, que le couchant jaunit,

Puis un château de brique à coins de pierre,

Aux vitraux teints de rougeâtres couleurs,

Ceint de grands parcs, avec une rivière

Baignant ses pieds, qui coule entre des fleurs ;

Puis une dame, à sa haute fenêtre,

Blonde aux yeux noirs, en ses habits anciens,

Que, dans une autre existence peut-être,

J’ai déjà vue . . .—et dont je me souviens !

Armstrong 154

Fantasia

There is an ancient air for which I’d trade

All Mozart, all Rossini’s shining gold,

A languid air, funereal and old,

Whose secret charms for me alone were made.

And every time I hear this melody

My soul sloughs off two centuries of ills:

Louis the Thirteenth reigns; and now I see,

A yellow sunset gilds the verdant hills.

A red-brick manor with worn stone corners,

And its windows tinted a living red

Has river and parkland for its borders—

The river with flowers round it spread:

See—the highest window frames a lady,

Well-dressed, with hair of gold and eyes of black,

Who in some distant existence, maybe,

I’ve seen—and recognize, on looking back!

Armstrong 155

Notre-Dame de Paris (1835)

Notre-Dame est bien vieille : on la verra peut-être

Enterrer cependant Paris qu’elle a vu naître ;

Mais, dans quelque mille ans, le Temps fera broncher

Comme un loup fait un bœuf, cette carcasse lourde,

Tordra ses nerfs de fer, et puis d’une dent sourde

Rongera tristement ses vieux os de rocher !

Bien des hommes, de tous les pays de la terre

Viendront, pour contempler cette ruine austère,

Rêveurs, et relisant le livre de Victor :

—Alors ils croiront voir la vieille basilique,

Toute ainsi qu’elle était, puissante et magnifique,

Se lever devant eux comme l’ombre d’un mort !

Armstrong 156

Notre-Dame de Paris

Our Lady is aging: we may live to see yet

When she buries this Paris she helped to beget;

But some millennium on, Time will make her groan

As when a wolf strikes a cow, claim the heavy corpse,

Distort her iron nerves, and with unhearing force,

Mourning, gnaw the stonework of her ancient bones!

From every country on the earth men will wander

To behold the somber ruins and to ponder,

And Victor’s book in reveries will be reread:

—Thus they will think to see once more the splendid towers,

Precisely as they were, magnificent in power,

Arise before them, like a shadow from the dead!

Armstrong 157

Théophile Gautier

“Au poëte impeccable, au parfait magicien ès lettres françaises, à mon très-cher et très vénéré maître et ami, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, avec les sentiments de la plus profonde humilité je dédie ces fleurs maladives.”

—Baudelaire23

Théophile Gautier was born 1811 in Tarbes, in the Pyrenees. When he was three his father took a job in Paris, bringing his family with him. Gautier received some education in painting, and the imagery of much of his poetry reveals an artist’s eye—this is in evidence in his

Sonnet I below, but even more so elsewhere in his œuvre (Appelbaum, French Poetry 105).

Gautier became a close friend of Gérard de Nerval, and the two are remembered as animating figures in the turbulent literary times of the early 1830’s. In true Romantic spirit, Gautier shocked theatergoers at the premier of Hugo’s Hernani when he arrived dressed in a bright red doublet, antiquated but flamboyant—a statement of taste that no doubt fanned the flames when the “battle” of Hernani broke out between supporters of Hugo and traditionalists who were appalled by his attack on literary convention (Bercot et al. 1412).

Soon, however, Gautier began to turn away from the Romanticism represented by the likes of Hugo, with its tendency towards personal reflection and its insistence upon social engagement (Appelbaum, French Poetry 105). Seeking a retreat from the world to devote himself to art alone, the poet declared of himself that

23 Dedication of the Fleurs du Mal (29).

Armstrong 158

He has seen nothing of the world but what one sees through the window, and has no

desire to see any more of it. He has no political color; he is not red, nor white, nor even

tricolored; he is blank, and becomes aware of revolutions only when bullets begin to

break his window-panes. He would rather be sitting than standing, and sleeping than

sitting.—It’s a well-established habit by the time death comes to make us sleep

forever.—He writes verse in order to have a pretext for doing nothing, and does nothing

under the pretext of writing verse (Gautier 3).

Yet for all his sardonic self-satisfaction here, this is far from a complete portrait of

Théophile Gautier. He saw much of the world beyond his window, much more than most of his contemporaries could ever hope to see. Indeed, from the mid-1830’s on he found much of his income in writing travel accounts of his voyages through Italy and Spain, Germany and Russia,

Algeria and Egypt (Appelbaum, French Poetry 105). Though Gautier labored to grant the artist the right to create art for its own sake, his was not at all a view turned solely inward: Baudelaire praised him as a “man who knows how to express everything,” with a defining “view towards the non-me” (Bercot et al. 1411). His travel writing, art history and criticism, novels, ballets, and plays, as well as his poetry, certainly reveal a mind of catholic taste and liberal perception.

Gautier’s first volume of poetry was published in 1830. His most important collection is his Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos), first published in 1852 and expanded in installments through the year of the author’s death in 1872 (Bercot et al. 1412). Gautier’s literary legacy, aside from its own considerable value, is the fascinating transition he represents between hugolian Romanticism and the scintillant decadence of Baudelaire. As early as 1832 he was producing poems like “Le Cavalier poursuivi,” in which a portrait of a galloping horse and

Armstrong 159 sturdy horseman, which seems worthy of a Romantic like Alfred de Vigny, ends up profoundly anticipating Baudelaire in its sensual idealization of an exotic creole woman, in its sense of horror at the pursuit of a Vampire—a monster—a vague but all-consuming fiend that proves to be none other than a personified Ennui (Gautier 116-119). In one poem here is the echo of

Hugo’s Orientales, and in the same poem here is the herald of the Fleurs du Mal.

Poems: Gautier 16, 269-270.

Armstrong 160

Sonnet I (Written c. 1830-1832)

Aux vitraux diaprés des sombres basiliques,

Les flammes du couchant s'éteignent tour à tour ;

D'un âge qui n'est plus précieuses reliques,

Leurs dômes dans l'azur tracent un noir contour ;

Et la lune paraît, de ses rayons obliques

Argentant à demi l'aiguille de la tour

Et les derniers rameaux des pins mélancoliques

Dont l'ombre se balance et s'étend alentour.

Alors les vibrements de la cloche qui tinte

D'un monde aérien semblent la voix éteinte

Qui, par le vent portée, en ce monde parvient ;

Et le poète, assis près des flots, sur la grève,

Écoute ces accents fugitifs comme un rêve,

Lève les yeux au ciel et, triste, se souvient.

Armstrong 161

Sonnet I

On somber basilicas, in ancient stained glass,

One by one die the flames of the sun as it sets:

The glorious relics of an age now long past

Whose domes in the azure trace darkling silhouettes;

And the moon now appears, whose beam obliquely shines

Half-silvering the steeple, high above the town,

And the last lofty boughs of melancholy pines

Whose shadows drift and waver, growing all around,

And the bells in the tower in pealing vibration

Of aerial realms seem the mute declaration

Which, borne upon the wind, then into this world falls,

And the poet, reclined by the bank of the stream,

Hears those fugitive accents that fade like a dream,

Looks up to the heavens, sighs, and sadly recalls.

Armstrong 162

Le Spectre de la rose (Written 1837)

Soulève ta paupière close

Qu’effleure un songe virginal ;

Je suis le spectre de la rose

Que tu portais hier au bal.

Tu me pris encore emperlée

Des pleurs d’argent de l’arrosoir,

Et parmi la fête étoilée

Tu me promenas tout le soir.

Ô toi qui de ma mort fus cause,

Sans que tu puisses le chasser,

Toute la nuit mon spectre rose

À ton chevet viendra danser.

Mais ne crains rien, je ne réclame

Ni messe ni De profundis ;

Ce léger parfum est mon âme,

Et j’arrive du paradis.

Armstrong 163

Mon destin fut digne d’envie :

Pour avoir un trépas si beau,

Plus d’un aurait donné sa vie,

Car j’ai ta gorge pour tombeau,

Et sur l’albâtre où je repose

Un poète avec un baiser

Écrivit : Ci-gît une rose

Que tous les rois vont jalouser.

Armstrong 164

The Ghost of the Rose

Open your eyes, where lids still closed

Bloom with dreams of virgin delight;

I am here, the ghost of the rose

That you wore at the ball last night.

You plucked me still kissed with the fall

Of the silver tears of the dew;

Through the starlit air of the ball

We tarried the whole evening through.

Oh, you who tolled my dying note,

You will not be able to rid

Yourself of this rose-tinted ghost

That dances tonight by your bed.

But fear not; I do not presume

To ask a rosary or mass:

For now my soul, this sweet perfume,

Abides in Paradise at last.

Armstrong 165

A fate to be envied was mine:

More than one would have sought his doom

To win a demise so divine,

For I have your breast for a tomb;

On alabaster I repose

Where is graved what a poet sings

With a kiss: Here lies a rose

That will be the envy of kings!

Armstrong 166

Leconte de Lisle

“Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?”

—Goethe24

As a poet known simply as Leconte de Lisle, Charles Leconte was born on the French- held Île Bourbon (today Réunion) in the Indian Ocean in 1818. A youth spent in the tropics left a lasting impression on Leconte de Lisle, who went to France to study law at Rennes as a young man. He did not pursue these studies for long, but having begun a writing career, returned to the

Île Bourbon one final time in 1843. After two years he installed himself permanently in Paris, where his poetic aspirations were interrupted by the Revolution of 1848. This was the uprising in which the Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine famously calmed a violent mob waving the red flag of revolution with an eloquent speech in defense of liberty, the Republic, and the Tricolor flag. Such political action was quite in keeping with the spirit of Lamartine’s generation of poets, but younger writers like Gautier had already grown cynical and skeptical of the activist poet, seeking refuge instead in their doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. Leconte de Lisle, though later associated with this doctrine, was not yet among its adherents: he left his writing aside during the revolution and entered politics (Bercot et al. 1416). Though his public career was brief, Leconte de Lisle’s stand somewhere between the poetic politics of the older and younger generations would be reflected in his poetry later in life.

In 1852 Leconte de Lisle published his first collection of poetry, Poèmes antiques. In his preface to this volume he sets forth a vision of a long-term restoration of poetry, over the course

24 “Erlkönig.”

Armstrong 167 of two centuries perhaps, to a status as “the immediate and inspired Word of the human soul.”

This is the vision of a Romantic, but Leconte de Lisle had something to add—“while we await the hour of this rebirth,” he says, all that we can do is study and profit by poetry’s glorious past, hence the name of the collection (Bercot et al. 1416). Such drawing upon the past produced poems inspired by or imitating everything from the anacreontic ode to the Bible to the songs of

Robert Burns—all marked by an attention to formal precision that paralleled Gautier’s break with the Romantics. The first of the two poems below is an imitation of Burns’ “The Rigs o’

Barley,” (see Chapter 5) while the second is likely inspired by old Scandinavian ballads. Another important collection, Poésies barbares, appeared in 1862, inspired in many instances by Leconte de Lisle’s efforts to translate ancient Greek and Roman epics, drama, and lyrics.

A new poetic movement was forming. In 1866 a publisher by the name of Alphonse

Lemerre began a project to bring together several of the innovative poets writing in the new precise, art-for-art style, and published the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain (The

Contemporary Parnassus). Leconte de Lisle was among the contributors to this groundbreaking anthology, along with the likes of Mallarmé and Verlaine (Bercot et al. 451). Such was the significance of Le Parnasse contemporain that it lent is name to the movement it consolidated, and Leconte de Lisle was henceforth a leading voice among the Parnassian poets.

In association with the Parnassian movement, Leconte de Lisle has been attributed an

“icy indifference” and labelled the “Imperturbable Prince.” This is true only in part. His works often feel cold and carefully-cultivated, but the poet never wholly gave up on political speech.

During the crisis of the Franco-Prussian war that brought down the Second Empire in 1870-71,

Leconte de Lisle published a People’s Catechism of Republicanism. In a similar vein, Bercot et al. mention certain poems like his “La Passion” as evidence of nuance and genuine emotion in

Armstrong 168 the work of the great Parnassian (1416). It is true that our two selections below recall some of the color of the Romantics, though perhaps more so in Les Elfes than in Annie, which captures well the Parnassian feel.

Leconte de Lisle published Poèmes tragiques in 1884, and expansions of Poèmes barbares in 1872 and 1889. He died in 1894, and a posthumous collection entitled Derniers poèmes appeared the following year (Bercot et al. 1416).

Poems: Annie and Les Elfes, Poésie Française.

Armstrong 169

Annie (1852)

La lune n’était point ternie,

Le ciel était tout étoilé ;

Et moi, j’allai trouver Annie

Dans les sillons d’orge et de blé.

Oh ! les sillons d’orge et de blé !

Le cœur de ma chère maîtresse

Était étrangement troublé.

Je baisai le bout de sa tresse,

Dans les sillons d’orge et de blé !

Oh ! les sillons d’orge et de blé !

Que sa chevelure était fine !

Qu’un baiser est vite envolé !

Je la pressai sur ma poitrine,

Dans les sillons d’orge et de blé.

Oh ! les sillons d’orge et de blé !

Armstrong 170

Notre ivresse était infinie,

Et nul de nous n’avait parlé . . .

Oh ! la douce nuit, chère Annie,

Dans les sillons d’orge et de blé !

Oh ! les sillons d’orge et de blé !

Armstrong 171

Annie

The stars in the sky were many,

The moon shone renewed and complete;

And I went looking for Annie

In the fields of barley and wheat.

Oh! the fields of barley and wheat!

A strange and perplexing distress

Weighed dark on the heart of my sweet.

I kissed at the base of her tress,

In the fields of barley and wheat!

Oh! the fields of barley and wheat!

How her tresses were textured fine!

How a kiss dissolves in the heat!

I pressed her form closer to mine,

In the fields of barley and wheat.

Oh! the fields of barley and wheat!

Armstrong 172

Infinite, drunken, uncanny,

No words stirred our hearts in their beat . . .

Oh! the soft night, my dear Annie,

In the fields of barley and wheat!

Oh! the fields of barley and wheat!

Armstrong 173

Les Elfes (1862)

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine.

Du sentier des bois aux daims familier,

Sur un noir cheval, sort un chevalier.

Son éperon d’or brille en la nuit brune ;

Et, quand il traverse un rayon de lune,

On voit resplendir, d’un reflet changeant,

Sur sa chevelure un casque d’argent.

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine.

Ils l’entourent tous d’un essaim léger

Qui dans l’air muet semble voltiger.

—Hardi chevalier, par la nuit sereine,

Où vas-tu si tard ? dit la jeune Reine.

De mauvais esprits hantent les forêts

Viens danser plutôt sur les gazons frais.

Armstrong 174

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine.

—Non ! ma fiancée aux yeux clairs et doux

M’attend, et demain nous serons époux.

Laissez-moi passer, Elfes des prairies,

Qui foulez en rond les mousses fleuries ;

Ne m’attardez pas loin de mon amour,

Car voici déjà les lueurs du jour.

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine.

—Reste, chevalier. Je te donnerai

L’opale magique et l’anneau doré,

Et, ce qui vaut mieux que gloire et fortune,

Ma robe filée au clair de la lune.

—Non ! dit-il.—Va donc !—Et de son doigt blanc

Elle touche au cœur le guerrier tremblant.

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine.

Armstrong 175

Et sous l’éperon le noir cheval part.

Il court, il bondit et va sans retard ;

Mais le chevalier frissonne et se penche ;

Il voit sur la route une forme blanche

Qui marche sans bruit et lui tend les bras :

—Elfe, esprit, démon, ne m’arrête pas !

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine

Ne m’arrête pas, fantôme odieux !

Je vais épouser ma belle aux doux yeux.

—Ô mon cher époux, la tombe éternelle

Sera notre lit de noce, dit-elle.

Je suis morte !—Et lui, la voyant ainsi,

D’angoisse et d’amour tombe mort aussi.

Couronnés de thym et de marjolaine,

Les Elfes joyeux dansent sur la plaine.

Armstrong 176

The Elves

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

From woodland paths known to no living wight,

On a darkling horse rides a noble knight.

His golden spurs flash in the midnight gloom;

As he passes through a ray of the moon

One sees fleeting reflections in the elms,

On his golden hair, from his silver helm.

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

They in their dainty host the knight surround,

With silent feet that barely brush the ground.

—O gallant knight, by this evening serene,

Where goest thou so late? asks the young Elf-Queen.

The wood is the haunt of spirits and fauns:

Come dance with me, rather, on dew-fresh lawns.

Armstrong 177

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

—No! ‘Tis for my betrothed who waits I ride,

And who on the morrow will be my bride.

Then suffer me to pass, Elves of the plain,

Sprung up like fairy-rings after the rain.

Keep me not from my love; I must away,

For I sense the first rising light of day.

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

—Stay, gallant knight, and receive as thine own

The ring of Elf-gold, and the magic stone,

And, worth more than fortune, the wise have said,

My raiment finely-spun of moonbeam-thread.

—No! says he.—Away!—And her hand so white

Touches at the heart of the trembling knight.

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

Armstrong 178

Beneath the fearful spur the black horse runs,

Bounding through the wood for the rising sun.

But the knight now shivers in mortal fear,

And sees in his path a specter appear,

Moving without sound, offering an arm:

—Avaunt! Elf, spirit, faun, do me no harm!

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

Stop me not, phantom in infamy clothed!

I ride to marry my waiting betrothed!

—O my dear husband, our honeymoon bed

Is fated to be the tomb of the dead,

For so I am! says she. Seeing this true,

In anguish and love, the knight falls dead too.

Diademed with thyme and with rosemary,

The Elves upon the plain dance merrily.

Armstrong 179

Charles Baudelaire

“Eh bien, lisez-le. Ce sceptique vous consolidera, ce lâche vous enflammera, ce corrompu vous assainira ; et de la lecture de cet homme qui n’est pas bon, vous sortirez meilleur.”

—Hugo25

Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in Paris. His father died before Charles was six, and his mother married an army officer soon after. Baudelaire did well in his early school days, and began to write verse in French and Latin. After his Baccalaureate in 1839 Baudelaire began to pursue a debauched and costly life in Paris, frequenting literary salons and prostitutes, and making friends with the likes of Nerval and Balzac. This alarmed his parents, such that in

1841 Baudelaire’s stepfather arranged for Charles to travel to India to remove him from the temptations of Paris (Baudelaire 261-262).

Baudelaire, for his part, had a knack for finding temptations. He never reached Calcutta, but tarried several months on the islands of Mauritius and Réunion, where his idyll provided inspiration for later poems’ invocation of faraway paradises and creole women. Returning to

France upon reaching the age of majority in 1842, Baudelaire came into a fortune left by his dead father. Back in Paris, and with money in his pockets, Baudelaire resumed in earnest the decadent life he had left behind for the Indies. During this period he began to publish, but he also incurred serious debts (Baudelaire 262). These became so concerning to his parents that in 1844 they placed Charles under a legal guardianship, limiting once again his financial independence

(Appelbaum, French Poetry 111).

25 Hugo wrote this of Horace, but I wonder if he didn’t have Baudelaire in mind, too (Utilité du Beau 18).

Armstrong 180

In 1845 Baudelaire attempted suicide; in the following years he published several works of criticism and made the life-altering discovery of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he began to translate.

When the revolution of 1848 broke out Baudelaire found himself editing first a socialist newspaper, then a moderate republican one, and finally a conservative journal (Baudelaire

263)—it is evident that personal politics were not the motivation here, but that the opportunity to earn some money was worth seizing wherever it presented itself. Indeed, wishing for an Art distanced from the concerns of society, Baudelaire viewed “political quibbling as a sign of foolishness” (Pia 137).

As well as criticism and translations of Poe, Baudelaire had begun publishing innovative poems on themes of altered consciousness, decadence, and exoticism. In 1855 eighteen of these were collected as Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) in a magazine, and the next year

Baudelaire contracted with a publisher for a complete volume of Fleurs du Mal. The first edition appeared in June 1857, and caused a stir with its depictions of the sordid, the erotic, the exotic, and the decadent. Baudelaire wrote of absinthe and wine, sex and death, and a longing for another realm—a tropical isle, ecstasy with a woman, the release of the opium pipe, perhaps even a religious sublime. This was material that had never before been made verse in French, but delivered with a high diction and intoxicating sonority that equaled the best of classical or contemporary poets. Some, like Victor Hugo, recognized the revolution that the Fleurs du Mal implied, and heaped praise upon it and its author. Others, notably the newspaper critic Gustave

Bourdin, faced Baudelaire’s bombshell with varying degrees of outrage, derision, and dismissiveness. It was supposedly Bourdin’s review that brought the Fleurs du Mal to the attention of the authorities (Baudelaire 263); less than two months after publication, Baudelaire

Armstrong 181 found himself in court on charges of indecency and blasphemy. He received a fine, and six poems were censored from the book (Appelbaum, French Poetry 112).

The censure of the Fleurs du Mal only contributed to their popularity, and to Baudelaire’s fame (Marks 15). 1860 saw the preparation of a second edition of the Fleurs du Mal, as well as a collection entitled Les Paradis artificiels in which the poet continued his pursuit of the new and the unknown. Such was Baudelaire’s fame that in 1861 he posed his candidacy, though without success, to the French Academy. Further poems followed in various journals, including several innovative prose poems, and in 1866 the Épaves (Scraps or Wrecks) finally made available those works censored from the original Fleurs du Mal—including “Le Coucher du soleil Romantique,” translated below (Baudelaire 264-265).

As might be imagined, Baudelaire’s seedy life took a toll on him. Indebted and syphilitic, and still under the concerned supervision of his mother, Baudelaire died on August 31st, 1867.

Théophile Gautier, to whom he had dedicated his Fleurs du Mal, wrote a preface for their posthumous third edition (Baudelaire 265). Though his career was short, Baudelaire is the only poet who can contend with Hugo as a defining voice in nineteenth-century French literature.

While Hugo wrote more and longer, most critics today would easily accord Baudelaire the laurels for ushering in poetic modernity.

Poems: Baudelaire 43, 44, 77, 177.

Armstrong 182

L’Ennemi (1857)

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage,

Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils ;

Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,

Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées,

Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux

Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,

Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve

Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève

Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur ?

—Ô douleur ! ô douleur ! Le Temps mange la vie,

Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur

Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie !

Armstrong 183

The Enemy

My youth was nothing but a shadow-casting squall,

And such were the ravages of thunder and rain,

That though here and there dazzling sunrays would fall,

In my garden how few red ripening fruits remain!

Behold: I am arrived at the autumn of thought,

And it will take much laboring with rakes and spades

To make anew the inundated earth from naught,

Where water hollows giant holes that gape like graves.

And who can know if my new fantastic-dreamed flowers

Will find in the depleted furrows, torrent-scoured,

The mystic manna that nourished them from the start?

O suffering! O pain! Life by Time is devoured,

And the unseen Enemy that gnaws at the heart,

On the blood that we lose, grows in stature and power!

Armstrong 184

Le Guignon (1857)

Pour soulever un poids si lourd,

Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage !

Bien qu’on ait du cœur à l’ouvrage,

L’Art est long et le Temps est court.

Loin des sépultures célèbres,

Vers un cimetière isolé,

Mon cœur, comme un tambour voilé,

Va battant des marches funèbres.

—Maint joyau dort enseveli

Dans les ténèbres et l’oubli,

Bien loin des pioches et des sondes ;

Mainte fleur épanche à regret

Son parfum doux comme un secret

Dans les solitudes profondes.

Armstrong 185

Cursed Luck

To bear a burden so profound

The strength of Sisyphus I’d ask!

The heart would strive to meet the task,

Yet Art expands while Time has bounds.

Away from tombs of high renown,

Towards a graveyard set alone,

My heart wends; in veiled monotone,

Drums dirges of its muffled sound.

—Many a jewel sleeps underground

In dark forgetfulness unfound,

Where neither pick nor probe intrudes;

Many a flower, in sorrow bent,

In secrecy decants its scent

Within profoundest solitudes.

Armstrong 186

Harmonie du soir (1857)

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige

Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir ;

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir ;

Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige !

Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir ;

Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige ;

Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige !

Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige,

Un cœur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir !

Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir ;

Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un cœur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,

Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige !

Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige . . .

Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir !

Armstrong 187

Evening Harmony

Now comes on the hour when abuzz above the ground

Each flower has dissolved like incense-smoke and flown;

In the air of the night circle perfume and tone;

Melancholic waltz, dizzying languor in round!

Each flower has dissolved like incense-smoke and flown;

The violin echoes the heart’s torment in sound;

Melancholic waltz, dizzying languor in round!

The sky’s sad beauty looms huge like an altar-stone.

The violin echoes the heart’s torment in sound;

A sensitive heart, that hates the vast black unknown!

The sky’s sad beauty looms huge like an altar-stone;

In its own pooling blood the willing sun has drowned.

A sensitive heart, that hates the vast black unknown,

Gleans the luminous past for what still may be found!

In its own pooling blood the willing sun has drowned . . .

Your memory shines in me, as monstrances have shone!

Armstrong 188

Le Coucher du soleil romantique (1866)

Que le soleil est beau quand tout frais il se lève,

Comme une explosion nous lançant son bonjour !

—Bienheureux celui-là qui peut avec amour

Saluer son coucher plus glorieux qu’un rêve !

Je me souviens ! J’ai vu tout, fleur, source, sillon,

Se pâmer sous son œil comme un cœur qui palpite . . .

—Courons vers l’horizon, il est tard, courons vite,

Pour attraper au moins un oblique rayon !

Mais je poursuis en vain le Dieu qui se retire ;

L’irrésistible Nuit établit son empire,

Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons ;

Une odeur de tombeau dans les ténèbres nage,

Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marécage,

Des crapauds imprévus et de froids limaçons.

Armstrong 189

The Romantic Sunset

How beautiful is the sunrise; how fresh it seems

Throwing us its hello like a gold explosion!

—Happy he who still may, with tender emotion,

Salute it when it sets, more regal than a dream!

Field and fruit, I recall how it all, day by day,

Swooned beneath that eye like a heart that palpitates . . .

—Let us run for the horizon, quick, it is late,

Let us run to trap at least a last fading ray!

But in vain I pursue that God who now retreats;

Irresistible Night now usurps his high seat,

Black and dank, dark and rank, and full of chills and wails;

An odor of the tomb swims through the falling fog,

And my fearful foot brushes, stumbling by the bog,

Odd unexpected toads and insensible snails.

Armstrong 190

Stéphane Mallarmé

“Mais vrai, j’ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.

Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :

L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.

Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j’aille à la mer !”

—Rimbaud26

Stéphane Mallarmé is a poet of paradox. Born 1842 in Paris to a family of civil servants

(Appelbaum, French Poetry 117), Marks calls him “a literary saint, or a literary martyr” who deliberately eschewed comprehensibility in favor of a personal vision of sacred literary purity

(16-17). When Mallarmé was five his mother died (Appelbaum, French Poetry 117). In 1862 he travelled to London to study English, writing later to Verlaine that this had been mainly for the purpose of reading Poe (Mallarmé, Edgar Poe 145). Back in France in 1863, he married and began teaching English throughout the South of France. English seems to have influenced

Mallarmé’s work right down to the syntactical level: Appelbaum remarks that he was the first

French poet to dispense with a dependence on Latin forms (117) while Marks numbers Mallarmé

(Along with Verlaine and Rimbaud) among Gallic poets likely to appeal to Anglo-Saxon tastes with his rejection of a lingering neo-Classical rhetoric and logic (18)—something the French

Romantics had failed to purge from their poetry, unlike their English counterparts.

26 Selected Verse 171.

Armstrong 191

Yet here lies one of Mallarmé’s paradoxes. Though his poetry contained a certain anglicizing influence, the Blackmores note that Mallarmé is commonly cited as the untranslatable French poet (xxv). Perhaps this is because Mallarmé’s vision of poetry went beyond the regular confines of language. The language Mallarmé sought for poetry was akin to a system of musical notation, a deconstructed array of building-blocks (Marks 16-17)—words, syllables, and sounds—that dissolved reality upon contact and in its stead erected self-contained universes, wherein the elements of poetry were “electric charges” carefully manipulated by the poet to have a desired effect upon the reader dedicated enough to sound their depths

(Appelbaum, French Poetry 117). The nearest equivalent in English may be in some of the later, more opaque works of Yeats, who was a friend and admirer of Mallarmé.

Mallarmé’s earliest works, though, are a little more down-to-earth, showing a baudelairean influence in aesthetics and in subject matter. His first published poems were ten pieces in Le Parnasse contemporain of 1866 (Appelbaum, French Poetry 117), including “Brise marine” (“Sea Breeze”), the selection below. This poem harkens to some of Baudelaire’s yearnings for travel, for an escape at all costs from the humdrum normal, in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. No mere pastiche of Baudelaire, “Brise marine” overlays baudelairean wanderlust with a nascent theme of paralysis, of approaching poetic infertility, that would characterize Mallarmé’s later work. As Marks explains, “Mallarmé brought language and poetry to a point of immobility, the white unsullied page. His insistence upon the absolute purification of his means of expression could lead only to silence” (17).

In 1871 the chaos and bloodshed of the war with Prussia and the subsequent Paris

Commune abated, and Mallarmé returned to Paris from the provinces. In 1874 he began publishing a highbrow fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, doing most of the writing himself

Armstrong 192 under women’s names. In 1875 his first stand-alone book was L’Après-midi d’un faune (The

Afternoon of a Faun), a long poem with illustrations by Manet. Mallarmé’s fame began to rise in the 1880’s when his home salon became the center of the Symbolist school of poetry, frequented by major names in turn-of-the-century art from both sides of the Channel—among them Paul

Valéry, André Gide, Paul Gauguin, W. B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde. An edition of his collected poems appeared in 1887, but much of his work remained uncollected until 1898, the year

Mallarmé died at his country house in Valvins, southeast of Paris (Appelbaum, French Poetry

117-119).

Poem: Mallarmé, Poésies 40.

Armstrong 193

Brise marine (1866)

La chair est triste, hélas ! et j’ai lu tous les livres.

Fuir ! là-bas fuir ! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres

D’être parmi l’écume inconnue et les cieux !

Rien, ni les vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux

Ne retiendra ce cœur qui dans la mer se trempe

Ô nuits ! ni la clarté déserte de ma lampe

Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend

Et ni la jeune femme allaitant son enfant.

Je partirai ! Steamer balançant ta mâture,

Lève l’ancre pour une exotique nature !

Un Ennui, désolé par les cruels espoirs,

Croit encore à l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs !

Et, peut-être, les mâts, invitant les orages,

Sont-ils de ceux qu’un vent penche sur les naufrages

Perdus, sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots . . .

Mais, ô mon cœur, entends le chant des matelots !

Armstrong 194

Sea Breeze

The flesh is sad, alas! and the books I’ve all read.

To flee! Fly away! I feel how it spins the heads

Of birds to be between the unknown spumes and skies!

Not a thing, not old gardens’ reflection in eyes

Will restrain this heart that steeps itself in the sea

O nights! Nor my candle’s desolate clarity

On paper where whiteness and stasis are curses,

Nor the young wife at home, nor the child she nurses.

I shall leave! Steamer, brandishing mizzen and main,

Weigh your anchor and seek an exotic domain!

An Ennui overwhelmed by its hopeful beliefs

Keeps faith in the final wave of handkerchiefs!

And perhaps, the masts, inviting to errant storms,

Are like the ones a sea-wind bends on shipwrecked forms

Lost, without masts, without masts, nor fertile islands . . .

But hearken, O my heart, to the sailors’ siren!

Armstrong 195

Paul Verlaine

“Situations have ended sad

Relationships have all been bad

Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

But there’s no way I can compare

All those scenes to this affair

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go”

—Bob Dylan27

Paul Verlaine was born 1844 in Metz, in the Eastern province of Lorraine, to a father in the army. After travels through the South of France, the family moved to Paris in 1851, where

Verlaine attended school and began writing poems—at the age of fourteen he sent a sample of his poetry to Victor Hugo. After some law studies, Verlaine found a post as a minor civil servant, but his life was becoming marked by periods of violent instability, alcoholism, and promiscuity.

In 1866 he published seven pieces in Le Parnasse contemporain, as well his first volume of poetry: Poèmes saturniens, from which the selection below is drawn. At the time, Mallarmé was almost alone in admiring this new poetic voice. Partially in hopes of laying to rest some of the troubles plaguing his personal life, Verlaine married in 1870, but the relationship was not fated to be a happy one for long. The next year Verlaine began a correspondence with an unknown young poet from Charleville, near the Belgian border—Arthur Rimbaud, a dreaming, ne’er-do- well teenage poet with whom the story of Paul Verlaine is inexorably tied up (Verlaine 157-158).

27 “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”

Armstrong 196

Rimbaud impressed Verlaine enormously with the poems he sent, such that Verlaine bade him “come, beloved great soul, you are called, you are awaited” (Rimbaud xvii). Rimbaud came, and in September 1871 moved in with Verlaine, who at the time was living with his wife and her parents in Paris. Verlaine and Rimbaud hit it off, spending numberless nights and days frequenting cafés and bars, intoxicated by absinthe, poetry, hashish, and their own budding love affair. All of this shocked Verlaine’s wife and parents-in-law, naturally; he separated from his wife in January and in May left with Rimbaud for Belgium and England (Verlaine 158-159).

During this period the two poets continued to find new avenues for the pursuit of their life of debauchery. From this turbulence and fertility came what Appelbaum calls Verlaine’s “most admired volume,” Romances sans paroles, which was published in 1874 (French Poetry 121). A turbulent period it was indeed. Verlaine began to quarrel, sometimes violently, with Rimbaud; in

July of 1873 he drunkenly shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was imprisoned for over a year

(Verlaine 159).

While in prison Verlaine continued to write and publish some of his best work, much of which would find its way into the collection Sagesse. He found some peace in converting to

Catholicism, but was legally separated from his wife and lost the custody of his child. A divorce, however, would not be finalized for some years. Upon his release from prison in 1875 he tried but failed to make amends with his wife, and instead sought Rimbaud again. They soon relapsed into argument, and parted ways for the last time. Verlaine took a succession of teaching positions in England and France, and began a long-term affair with a student, Lucien Létinois. The two travelled and tried their hand at farming up until the death of Létinois in 1883; after this the poet lived in poverty with his mother until her death in 1886. The next ten years saw the publication of multiple novels and volumes of poetry, increasingly frequent stays in hospital, and various

Armstrong 197 romantic liaisons (Verlaine 159-162). Verlaine’s poetry during this period is sometimes devout, as in his collections Amour and Bonheur, but sometimes downright pornographic, as in Femmes and Hombres (Appelbaum, French Poetry 122). As well as his own works, Verlaine saw to the publication of Rimbaud’s poetry, Rimbaud having abandoned literature some years prior without publishing much, and having predeceased Verlaine. In January of 1896 Verlaine called a priest to the house of his mistress, where he was staying, and died the next day of a pulmonary congestion

(Verlaine 161-162).

If Elaine Marks sees something in Mallarmé that she thinks likely to appeal to an Anglo-

Saxon readership, she awards Verlaine the first place in this respect, for accomplishing “what is often considered in English poetry the highest attainment: poetry that is a song” (18). This musical quality is apparent in the early selection below, where careful use of vowel sounds creates a plaintive monotony that is characteristic of Verlaine’s melancholy, atmospheric work.

“Nevermore” is of a more traditional form than much of Verlaine’s poetry—a sonnet in alexandrines, by a poet who often favored short, odd-numbered lines and innovative stanza arrangements. Even so, in tone and subject it is a good introduction to one of the most prolific poets of the later nineteenth century.

Poem: Verlaine 39.

Armstrong 198

Nevermore (1866)

Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu ? L'automne

Faisait voler la grive à travers l'air atone,

Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone

Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone.

Nous étions seul à seule et marchions en rêvant,

Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensée au vent.

Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard émouvant

« Quel fut ton plus beau jour ? » fit sa voix d'or vivant,

Sa voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre angélique.

Un sourire discret lui donna la réplique,

Et je baisai sa main blanche, dévotement.

—Ah ! les premières fleurs, qu'elles sont parfumées !

Et qu'il bruit avec un murmure charmant

Le premier oui qui sort de lèvres bien-aimées !

Armstrong 199

Nevermore

Memory, memory, let me go on my way!

Autumn drove the thrush across the atonal day,

And the sun, taking aim, fired its monotone ray

To strike the yellowing wood where the cruel winds play.

Alone with ourselves, we walked on in reveries,

She and I, hair and thoughts floating loose on the breeze

When her voice of living gold asked, turning to me,

“Which of your days holds the loveliest memories?”

—In its sonorous timbre, her voice low and sweet.

She found her reply in a smile mute and discreet,

And I bent to kiss her pale hand in devotion.

—Ah! The first flowers, how their perfume is the best!

And how, in a murmur so charged with emotion,

Slips freely from well-loved lips, the very first yes!

Armstrong 200

Arthur Rimbaud

“. . . while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems . . .”

—Annie Dillard28

In October of 1854, in Charleville, a small provincial town near the Belgian border, Jean-

Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born. His mother, domineering and strict, was the heiress of a landowning family; his father, something of a self-made man and a scholar, was an army captain who abandoned his family when Arthur was six years old. The young Rimbaud stood out at school from the age of ten for his writing. By thirteen he had written sixty Latin hexameters for the occasion of the Imperial Prince’s first communion, while the discovery of his father’s translation of the Koran into French was all the precocious boy needed to teach himself Arabic.

Rimbaud would eventually acquaint himself with Greek, English, Spanish, Italian, German, and

Dutch as well. In 1869 his first published poem appeared in a literary review (Rimbaud xv-xvi).

Sick of provincial life in Charleville and full of adolescent restlessness, the sixteen-year- old Rimbaud ran away from home twice in 1870. This was the year that France declared war on

Prussia, with disastrous results, and Rimbaud—an ardent Communist—set out for Paris in

August hoping to see the fall of the régime. He was soon sent home by friends of his mother, but barely a week later ran away again, this time to Charleroi and Brussels. Now writing poetry in earnest, including “Sensation” and “Ma Bohème” below, Rimbaud witnessed the horror and spectacle of the war first-hand when his mother again convinced him to return home (Rimbaud xvi).

28 Holy the Firm 17.

Armstrong 201

Again feeling stifled by Charleville, where he spent his days shocking the local librarians with his taste in literature, Rimbaud ran away to Paris in February of 1871 but returned just before the victorious Prussian army took the capital, slipping through enemy lines on his way.

Over the next several months Rimbaud harassed priests in the street, begged for money, and wrote Communist tracts in addition to his poetry. Never having seen the sea, it was during this period that Rimbaud wrote “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”), a surreal marine adventure and the masterpiece of his earlier writings. Some of this poetry was sent to Paul Verlaine, who fatefully invited Rimbaud to stay with him in Paris. Not one to pass up such a chance, the just- shy-of-seventeen-year-old poet arrived in late September. He shocked Verlaine’s family with his abominable hygiene, his complete disregard for social propriety, and his radical opinions, but

Verlaine and Rimbaud immediately took to one another (Rimbaud xvii-xviii). Witnessing the reconstruction of Paris after the disastrous Prussian siege, Rimbaud wrote “Bonne pensée du matin,” translated below.

Punctuated by occasional trips home to his mother in Charleville, Rimbaud spent much of the latter part of 1872 and 1873 in Belgium and London with Verlaine. Their love affair, their life of excess in alcohol, opium, and whatever else they could get their hands on, were to

Rimbaud all part of a poetic philosophy of trying to capture the totality of possible experience, but combined with Verlaine’s clinginess their excesses eventually led to the tensions that culminated in Verlaine’s shooting of Rimbaud. Verlaine was imprisoned soon after the two parted ways (Rimbaud xviii-xx). Back at home Rimbaud put the finishing touches on his Une

Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). This series of cryptic prose poems served as Rimbaud’s farewell to poetry. By this time he had decided that writing would not allow him to “change life” or “reinvent love,” and though he arranged to have Une Saison en enfer printed, it was not

Armstrong 202 distributed (Appelbaum, French Poetry 128). The rest of his poetic work, “which he left to us with a sort of disdain, and not having taken the trouble to publish nearly any of it” (Rimbaud xxiii), was published by others, including Verlaine, after 1886 (Appelbaum, French Poetry 128).

It is possible that Rimbaud did some minor work on what would become his collection

Illuminations as late as 1875, but he very much had made a definitive break with his promising literary past. Between 1875 and 1880 Rimbaud traveled through Europe and Egypt looking for work, joined the Dutch army and deserted in Java, and took a job in a quarry in Cyprus

(Appelbaum, French Poetry 127-129). He eventually wound up in Aden, where he worked for a time with a trading firm who sent him on exploratory expeditions in Somaliland and elsewhere; in 1883 he became the first European to explore the region of Ogadine. Leaving the firm to set up on his own, Rimbaud failed as an arms dealer when King Menelik of Choa cheated him out of his inventory. He continued to pursue business ventures in the coffee, perfume, and slave trades throughout Africa, Turkey, and Arabia until 1891, when a tumor in the knee forced him to return to France to seek medical attention. Despite the amputation of his leg the cancer spread, and

Rimbaud died that August in Marseilles at the age of 36 (Rimbaud xxi-xxii).

Poems: Rimbaud 61, 99-101, 111-112, 212-213.

Armstrong 203

Sensation (Written March 1870)

Par les soirs bleus d’été, j’irai dans les sentiers,

Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue :

Rêveur, j’en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.

Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :

Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’âme,

Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,

Par la Nature,—heureux comme avec une femme.

Armstrong 204

Sensation

In blue eves of summer, I’ll wander green ways,

To tread the trampled grass and be pricked by the wheat:

Dreaming hatless, in the wind I’ll let my head bathe,

And feel the freshness of the earth beneath my feet,

With nothing to say, and with nothing to ponder,

But infinite love will swell in my soul laid bare.

I’ll wander far, as a bohemian wanders,

In Nature—happy as though a woman were there.

Armstrong 205

Roman (Written September 1870)

I.

On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.

—Un beau soir, foin des bocks et de la limonade,

Des cafés tapageurs aux lustres éclatants !

—On va sous les tilleuls verts de la promenade.

Les tilleuls sentent bon dans les bons soirs de juin !

L'air est parfois si doux, qu'on ferme la paupière ;

Le vent chargé de bruits—la ville n'est pas loin—

A des parfums de vigne et des parfums de bière. . . .

II.

—Voilà qu'on aperçoit un tout petit chiffon

D'azur sombre, encadré d'une petite branche,

Piqué d'une mauvaise étoile, qui se fond

Avec de doux frissons, petite et toute blanche . . .

Armstrong 206

Nuit de juin ! Dix-sept ans !—On se laisse griser.

La sève est du champagne et vous monte à la tête . . .

On divague ; on se sent aux lèvres un baiser

Qui palpite là, comme une petite bête. . . .

III.

Le cœur fou Robinsonne à travers les romans,

Lorsque, dans la clarté d'un pâle réverbère,

Passe une demoiselle aux petits airs charmants,

Sous l'ombre du faux col effrayant de son père . . .

Et, comme elle vous trouve immensément naïf,

Tout en faisant trotter ses petites bottines,

Elle se tourne, alerte et d'un mouvement vif. . . .

—Sur vos lèvres alors meurent les cavatines . . .

IV.

Vous êtes amoureux. Loué jusqu'au mois d'août.

Vous êtes amoureux.—Vos sonnets La font rire.

Tous vos amis s'en vont, vous êtes mauvais goût.

—Puis l'adorée, un soir, a daigné vous écrire . . . !

Armstrong 207

—Ce soir-là, . . .—vous rentrez aux cafés éclatants,

Vous demandez des bocks ou de la limonade . . .

—On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans

Et qu'on a des tilleuls verts sur la promenade.

Armstrong 208

Romance

I.

A lad is not serious, when he’s seventeen.

—Some fine evening, fed up with bocks and lemonade,

Of clattering cafés with their dazzling sheen!

—He walks along the green linden-lined promenade.

In the pretty June nights, the lindens smell pretty!

He closes his eyes, the air is sometimes so fine;

The wind charged with sounds—not too far from the city—

Comes with perfumes of beer and with perfumes of vines . . .

II.

Now he sees a small scrap of cloth in somber blue,

Framed by a tiny branch in the evening light.

A burning malevolent star pierces it through

Melting into whispers, small and completely white . . .

Armstrong 209

Night in June! Seventeen! —He lets himself get pissed.

The sap is champagne and rises right to your hair . . .

He wanders about; he feels at his lips a kiss

Like a little animal palpitating there . . .

III.

The mad heart runs Robinson through High Romances,

—When there passes through the pale glare of streetlamp-light

A little lady with charming, well-placed glances,

In the shadow of her father’s collar, starched white . . .

And, since she finds you to be so very naïve,

Her little boots tapping as she saunters along,

She turns, moving vividly, and quick to perceive, . . .

—So then, upon your lips, die diminutive songs . . .

IV.

You are in love. Right till August you are taken.

You are in love.—She laughs at the sonnets you write.

In bad taste, so your friends think, you’re soon forsaken.

Then—the Beloved has deigned leave a note, one night . . . !

Armstrong 210

That night . . . You’re back to the cafés’ dazzling sheen,

And you ask for a bock, or for some lemonade . . .

A lad is not serious, when he’s seventeen

And when there are green lindens on the promenade.

Armstrong 211

Ma bohème (Fantaisie) (Written October 1870)

Je m’en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées ;

Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal ;

J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ;

Oh ! là ! là ! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvées !

Mon unique culotte avait un large trou.

—Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course

Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse.

—Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou.

Et je les écoutais, assis au bord des routes,

Ces bons soirs de septembre où je sentais des gouttes

De rosée à mon front, comme un vin de vigueur ;

Où, rimant au milieu des ombres fantastiques,

Comme des lyres, je tirais les élastiques

De mes souliers blessés, un pied près de mon cœur !

Armstrong 212

My Bohemian Fantasy

I went away, fists in pockets torn at the seams;

My coat nearly ideal, in tatters and tassels,

I went beneath the sky, Muse!—being your vassal;

Ah, my goodness, Muse! what splendid loves did I dream!

My only pair of breeches was threadbare and thin.

—Daydreaming Tom Thumb, I scattered rhymes as I fared,

And rested my feet at the sign of the Great Bear.

—On a breeze from the sky my stars softly swished in.

Sitting by the roadside, I listened to their light,

Those fair September evenings, where the dew alights,

Like a wine of vigor, that warms my every part;

Where, rhyming in midst of penumbras fantastic,

Like the strings of a lyre, I plucked the elastic

Of my way-worn shoes, one foot drawn up to my heart!

Armstrong 213

Bonne pensée du matin (Written May 1872)

À quatre heures du matin, l’été,

Le sommeil d’amour dure encore.

Sous les bosquets l’aube évapore

L’odeur du soir fêté.

Mais là-bas dans l’immense chantier

Vers le soleil des Hespérides,

En bras de chemise, les charpentiers

Déjà s’agitent.

Dans leur désert de mousse, tranquilles,

Ils préparent les lambris précieux

Où la richesse de la ville

Rira sous de faux cieux.

Ah ! pour ces Ouvriers charmants

Sujets d’un roi de Babylone,

Vénus ! laisse un peu les Amants,

Dont l’âme est en couronne.

Armstrong 214

Ô Reine des Bergers !

Porte aux travailleurs l’eau-de-vie,

Pour que leurs forces soient en paix

En attendant le bain dans la mer, à midi.

Armstrong 215

Well-Meaning Morning Thought

Summer, four-in-the-morning light,

The sleep of love is not yet spent.

Through leaves the dawn burns off the scent

Of the revelrous night.

But to their huge work-site below

In the Hesperidean sun,

The Carpenters in working-clothes

Already come.

In their desert-moss tranquility

They make precious panels arise,

Where the city's gentility

Will laugh beneath false skies.

Ah! For these charming Working-men

To a king of Babylon bound,

Venus! Leave a while Lovers, then,

Lovers whose soul is crowned.

Armstrong 216

O Morning Star, as alms,

Bring the workers some eau-de-vie!

That their fortitude may be calm,

As they wait for noontide, when they bathe in the sea.

Armstrong 217

Appendices

Timeline of French Political and Literary History, 1500-190029

1500: Under Louis XII, France is at war in Italy, acquiring territory, wealth, and the literary ideas

of the Italian Renaissance.

1522: Birth of Louise Labé (?) and of Joachim Du Bellay.

1524: Birth of Pierre de Ronsard (?).

1534: Against a background of religious and political intrigue, placards denouncing the papacy

are surreptitiously posted throughout the royal palace, leading to the first major royal

persecution of Protestants in France.

1547: Du Bellay meets Ronsard; Pléiade begins to form.

1549: Du Bellay publishes La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoise.

1552: Ronsard publishes the Amours de Cassandre.

1553-1557: Du Bellay in Rome.

1555: Publication of Labé’s sonnets.

1558: Publication of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome and Regrets.

1560: Death of Joachim Du Bellay.

1562: First War of Religion breaks out in France. The violence will last for the rest of the

century, tearing the country apart and leading to a substantial exodus of capital and talent.

1566: Death of Louise Labé.

1578: Ronsard publishes the Sonnets pour Hélène.

1585: Death of Pierre de Ronsard.

29 All historical information is from Bezbakh pp. 198-427. All literary information is from sources cited in authors’ biographies in part II.

Armstrong 218

1594: The Protestant Henri of Navarre is crowned Henri IV of France. To unify his country, he

converts to Catholicism and in 1596 issues the Edict of Nantes, which grants limited

freedom of religion to Protestants and ends the Wars of Religion. A popular king, Henri

IV does much to rebuild the economy and infrastructure of France after decades of war.

1610: Henri VI is assassinated by a radical Catholic monk. His nine-year-old son takes the throne

as Louis XIII, under the regency of the boy’s mother, Marie de Médicis.

1621: Birth of Jean de La Fontaine.

1624: The Cardinal de Richelieu is called to the king’s council and becomes largely responsible

for running the kingdom. Richelieu pursues policies of centralizing state power,

colonialism, and patronage of the arts, ushering in the classical Golden Age of France.

1635: Richelieu founds the Académie Française to oversee and encourage French letters and

language.

1643: Death of Louis XIII. At the age of four, Louis XIV, the future roi soleil, becomes king.

The Cardinal Mazarin, as successor to Richelieu, runs the country.

1648-1652: By putting down a series of insurrections of parliamentarians and aristocrats

collectively known as La Fronde, Mazarin assures domestic peace and brings the nobility

further under royal control.

1661: Mazarin dies, and Louis XIV begins his personal reign. He continues the policy of

establishing centralized state control, and introduces an opulence to court life that

becomes the envy of Europe, but strains France’s finances.

1668-1693: Publication, in several installments, of La Fontaine’s Fables.

1685: As part of his centralizing and absolutist policy, Louis XIV revokes the protection of

religious dissenters established in the Edict of Nantes.

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1695: Death of Jean de La Fontaine.

1697: Birth of Gabriel-Charles de Lattaignant.

1715: Louis XIV dies, leaving behind marvels like the palace of Versailles, but an increasingly

strained economic and social system in which the aristocracy live in frivolous excess

while the poor struggle under feudal oppression. At the age of five, Louis XIV’s

grandson becomes Louis XV. The old king had confided the regency to one of his

illegitimate sons, but a party of aristocrats led by Philippe, Duke of Orléans, assumes

control.

1751: Publication of Lattaignant’s Pièces dérobées à un Ami.

1756-1763: France is engaged in the Seven Years’ War, losing important colonies in America,

Africa, and India.

1762: Birth of André Chénier.

1774: Death of Louis XV. The internal stresses plaguing the kingdom at the death of Louis XIV

have hardly been eased nearly sixty years on, but there is great public optimism when

Louis XVI ascends to the throne—many hope to find in him a new Henri IV who can

unite the country, bring economic prosperity, and perhaps even enact some much-desired

social reform.

1776: Economic reforms by Louis XVI’s minister Turgot are well received by the people but

attacked by the aristocracy, and thus largely fail. The United States declares its

independence from Britain, with France joining the war in 1778. The French people see

themselves as champions of liberty, but the war is costly.

1779: Death of the Abbé de Lattaignant.

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1789: Revolution breaks out in France against a background of unpopular taxes and shortages of

bread. The king is cautiously reform-minded, even after the fall of the Bastille.

1790: Reforms continue, but the nobility attempt to organize a counter-revolution. Louis XVI

writes to the king of Prussia to request assistance. Political clubs begin to be organized by

those who support further reform in the radical direction, and those who support a more

modest policy.

1791: The king and his family attempt to secretly leave the country, as many nobles have already

done. The king is suspended, a Republic declared, and a new constitution written.

1792: As the radical party under Maximillian Robespierre gains control of revolutionary politics,

the king is tried for treason, condemned to death, and guillotined.

1793: “The Terror” begins, in which thousands are executed on the slightest suspicion of

counter-revolutionary sympathy. Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist who did much to stoke the

flames of the Terror, is killed by a young woman named Charlotte Corday, who brazenly

stabbed him in his home knowing full well that it would lead to her own arrest and

execution. André Chénier writes a poem in celebration of her bravery.

1794: Chénier is imprisoned in March and executed in July. He is one of the last victims of the

Terror, going to the guillotine a few days before the ruling convention turns on

Robespierre and has him executed, ending the violence.

1799: With France having been ruled by a series of unstable and transient governmental bodies,

but having seen great military success throughout Europe, general Napoleon Bonaparte

takes effective control of the country as one of three ruling “consuls.”

1802: Birth of Victor Hugo. Napoleon changes the constitution to declare himself First Consul

for life.

Armstrong 221

1804: Napoleon crowns himself Emperor, effectively ending any pretense to revolutionary

government in France.

1808: Birth of Gérard de Nerval.

1811: Birth of Théophile Gautier.

1814: With the monarchies of Europe united against Napoleon’s France, the emperor is forced

into exile on the Italian isle of Elba. Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, takes the throne

as a constitutional monarch.

1815: Napoleon returns from exile and attempts to restore the Empire. The king flees, and for

just over a hundred days Napoleon again rules France before his defeat at Waterloo and

his final exile to St. Helena. Louis XVIII regains the throne.

1818: Birth of Charles Leconte de Lisle.

1819: First major publication of Chénier’s poetry.

1821: Birth of Charles Baudelaire.

1824: Louis XVIII dies and the crown passes to his brother. The new king, Charles X, pursues a

more conservative agenda than his predecessor, eventually challenging the constitutional

restrictions on royal power put in place under Louis XVIII.

1827: France begins a military campaign in Algeria and eventually takes it from the Ottomans.

The literary world is swept up in an “Orientalist” craze, typified by Hugo’s Orientales.

1830: A revolution breaks out against Charles X, who is forced into exile and replaced as king by

Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, descendant of the usurping minister of Louis XV. His reign is

known as the “July Monarchy” and is characterized by an attempt to carefully reconcile

the heritage of the Revolution with royalist bourgeoise stability.

1830-1835: Nerval publishes his Odelettes.

Armstrong 222

1840: Publication of Hugo’s Les Rayons et les Ombres.

1842: Birth of Stéphane Mallarmé.

1844: Birth of Paul Verlaine.

1848: Revolutions erupt across Europe. In France Louis-Philippe is forced to abdicate in

February and a second Republic is declared. The new government’s liberalizing policies

soon tend towards socialist experiments such as guaranteed work for the unemployed in

National Workshops. In December Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, is

elected president on a conservative and Catholic platform.

1851: Nearing the end of the one term allowed a president under the constitution, Louis-

Napoleon suspends the legislature and arrests large numbers of his opponents. He

declares his mandate to be extended by ten years. Hugo, a staunch critic of Louis-

Napoleon, goes into exile fearing for his safety.

1851-1870: Hugo in exile on the islands of Jersey and Guernsey.

1852: Louis-Napoleon declares a Second Empire and crowns himself Napoleon III. Leconte de

Lisle’s Poèmes antiques are published.

1854: Birth of Arthur Rimbaud.

1855: Suicide of Gérard de Nerval.

1856: Hugo publishes Les Contemplations.

1857: First edition of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal is published and censored.

1862: Publication of Leconte de Lisle’s Poèsies barbares.

1866: Baudelaire publishes the Épaves, including poems originally censored from Les Fleurs du

Mal; Verlaine publishes his Poèmes saturniens; first series of Le Parnasse contemporain

appears.

Armstrong 223

1867: Death of Charles Baudelaire.

1870: Rimbaud twice runs away from home and begins his major creative period. Prussia is the

ascendant military power in Europe. To counter its threat and stir up patriotism at home,

Imperial France declares war on Prussia, but is soon overwhelmed by the superior

organization and technology of the German armies. With Napoleon III captured and Paris

under siege, a new Republic is proclaimed and continues the war. Victor Hugo returns to

France.

1871: Paris surrenders in January, and the German Empire is proclaimed at Versailles. As part of

the treaty ending the war, Germany gains the French territories of Alsace and Lorraine,

setting the stage for the First World War. The residents of the capital, however, battered

by the winter-long siege and feeling betrayed by the new Assembly, revolt against the

Republican government sitting at Versailles. Paris establishes itself as a radical

revolutionary Commune between March and May, but the uprising is brutally suppressed

by the troops of the Third Republic.

1872: Death of Théophile Gautier.

1873: Rimbaud gives up poetry.

1885: Death of Victor Hugo. Hugely popular, the author had by the end of his life gained such a

reputation for fighting for the underprivileged that his funeral procession was carefully

planned by the government to pass through only the most socially conservative areas of

Paris. Like the body of General Lamarque in his novel Les Misérables, the authorities

feared that Hugo’s own body might prove to be a symbol with the power to provoke

revolution.

1891: Death of Arthur Rimbaud.

Armstrong 224

1894: Death of Leconte de Lisle.

1896: Death of Paul Verlaine.

1897: The public learn of the case of Captain Dreyfus, accused of transmitting secrets to the

Germans. The political left, including much of the literary world, see the Dreyfus affair

as an act of anti-Jewish fearmongering. Author Émile Zola publishes a famous defense of

Dreyfus the next year. He is eventually pardoned and restored to his rank, but the affair

exposes social tensions as France enters the new century.

1898: Death of Stéphane Mallarmé

1900: The Universal Exhibition in Paris celebrates the technological advances of the nineteenth

century, and looks with great optimism towards those of the century ahead.

Armstrong 225

Acknowledgements

Vivat academia! Vivant professores!

—Traditional students’ song

Firstly, I must extend my thanks to my family, since of course everything started with them. Though my parents, grandparents, and sister have at times been puzzled by my singular devotion to old French poems, they have offered nothing but the firmest support to me.

Next, I would like to acknowledge my excellent teachers throughout the years. Stephanie

Kight and John Barrington of Athens Middle School stirred my early interest in English literature and language, while Kim Niemeyer gave me my introduction to French at the same time. Nicole

Read and Melissa Myers make the French Department of Athens High School the hidden gem that it is, and I owe especially much to Mme. Read. I started my studies of French a year late, and it was Mme. Read who gave me the chance to audit the upper-level French class that I otherwise would have missed, and in which I began my foray into translation.

At Ohio University, Herta Rodina provided me with some much-needed guidance as a freshman, helping me to become a French major in my second semester. Dr. Rodina also served as my primary mentor for the first half of this project, until her retirement. My nineteenth- century translations owe much to her guidance and feedback. Lois Vines—a veritable font of knowledge in her field—gave me an incomparable opportunity in helping me switch into the

HTC French program, and as the director of my program has done much to guide me in my studies. Chris Coski has been my steadfast thesis advisor, and took up where Dr. Rodina left off.

My pre-nineteenth-century translations are all the richer for Dr. Coski’s insights and suggestions.

Armstrong 226

Dominique Duvert taught me a great deal about the discipline of translation itself, and in particular provided excellent feedback on my translation of Tristesse d’Olympio. Though not directly involved in the project, I would also like to mention Brigitte Moretti-Coski and Betsy

Partyka of the OU Department of Modern Languages—I’ll never forget Dr. Partyka’s dramatic, costumed reading of Le Cabinet du Philosophe. William Owens deserves recognition for introducing me to Latin. Likewise, Harriet Martin introduced me to Italian, and provided a thorough and much-appreciated commentary on my preliminary draft. My professors in the

Department of Modern Languages have given me an education that is so much more than the sum of its parts, and I’m endlessly grateful for the way each one of them has gone beyond the quotidian requirements of the job to teach, mentor, and encourage me. It is a small department, but the devotion and talent of its faculty make it the finest setting I can imagine for personal and academic growth. I hate to make a political statement in this context. However, I have to say that the direct and existential threat to my professors’ jobs—to the department as I know it—which policy currents at Ohio University at present pose, is unacceptable and profoundly sad. Future students in the OU DML are unlikely to have anything like the opportunities I’ve had.

Beyond the strictly academic realm, I want to acknowledge Laurel Bayless, my invaluable literary companion and another reader of my draft. Adèle Buisset has been a much- appreciated friend throughout my time in OU French, and her daughter Charlie has enlivened many a class this last year. The project to hand-bind this thesis would not have been possible without Don Adleta, Professor Emeritus in the College of Fine Arts. Finally, I should like to mention the Honors Tutorial College here at OU, which generously helped to fund the printing and binding of my thesis. No doubt there are important people I have neglected to mention, and

Armstrong 227 for this I apologize. Any mistakes in this thesis are of course my own fault, and do not reflect upon the excellent people mentioned above.

Armstrong 228

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