Joachim Du Bellay and Charles Baudelaire “Heureux Qui, Comme Ulysse” and “Le Voyage” It was hard to press the ‘Send’ button on this email. The essay itself is about the struggle between bourgeois values and other things. We all know that good intellectuals should be in rebellion against bourgeois values, yet this essay takes those values seriously and even acknowledges the hold they have on us. And further, to some extent it commends the grip of the bourgeois on our consciousness. I find it difficult to send a retrograde, even anti-intellectual essay, but I do so because I believe there is honesty in addressing even those things that are held in disrepute among intellectuals. This essay is in some ways about a conflict that at one time or another engulfs almost all of us, even if we would prefer not to acknowledge the conflict between our comfort in what we know and our desire to voyage, as Newton did (the line is from Wordsworth) “through strange seas of thought, alone.” It does not take for granted that we can know which side of that conflict should prevail. But where does the ‘other’ side of that conflict come from? The voyage has always been a part of stories and folklore, everywhere. The quest to examine or re- examine our values has, in our culture, its origins in Socrates. But our attachment to incessantly going beyond, as a way of life, of being? This essay will propose it comes from the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire? A poet shaping a whole culture? Well, yes. What follows is mostly an evaluation of Joachim du Bellay’s “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse,” although as it goes on it considers a poem that is perhaps its polar opposite, a very long (but never fear, we will look at only part of it) poem by Charles Baudelaire called “Le Voyage.” Here is du Bellay’s poem: Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage, Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison, Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison, Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge ! Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage ? Plus me plaît le séjour qu'ont bâti mes aïeux, Que des palais Romains le front audacieux, Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l'ardoise fine : Plus mon Loire gaulois, que le Tibre latin, Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin, Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur angevine. Here is a reasonably literal English translation: Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has made a glorious voyage, Or like Jason who won the Golden Fleece, And then returned, full of wisdom of the world, To live amongst his parents for the remainder of his life. When will I see again, alas, the smoke rise From chimneys in my small village, and in what season Will I see again the small plot around my poor old house Which to me is an entire province, and even more? More it pleases me, this place my forefathers built Than Roman palaces with their gorgeous facades; More than carved hard marble, the simple slate of home. More my Gallic Loire than the illustrious Roman Tiber, More my small hill than the Palatine Mount, And more than sea-salted air the sweetness I breathed in Anjou. I am not satisfied by any of the translations into English of this poem by Joachim du Bellay, so I have provided it in the original French, and then a ‘prosy’ translation of mine that is close to the original. I’ll discuss this decision of mine to examine such a literal translation later in this essay. To approach this poem, I want to consider the early years of my own intellectual life. Please indulge me. When I was a freshman in college, taking a survey course in French, I fell in love with du Bellay’s poem. I think it had much to do with the struggle of my first years in college. A smart Jewish teenager from the suburbs, good in school but socially more than a bit naïve, I left home to go to the very conservative, traditional – which meant upper- class, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and also preppy – Hamilton College. It seems quaint to me now to point out that as I left home and entered a wider world, one of the great struggles of my life was with the question of bourgeois culture. I had to cope at Hamilton with a dominant WASP culture which enshrined prep-school standards of what masculinity should entail. (That preppy WASP culture looked down on bourgeois values as, well, bourgeois.) I had to cope with my own legacy of the Holocaust: my parents and my grandparents were refugees from Hitler, and I grew up in a largely refugee community. At the time, the Civil Rights movement was beginning: what, as the son of people who had been outcast and demeaned and destroyed, should I do in the face of an American prejudice which appeared as large and deep as Nazi anti-Semitism, but directed against black people rather than Jews? To me all these cohered into the question of being bourgeois, to acknowledging certain of my parents’ middle-class values as shaping my life. I spent a great deal of time and mental energy consumed with the question of bourgeois values and what they meant for me. What does it mean to prize comfort, security and safety over the pursuit of other (for me often ‘nobler’) values? What does it mean to go the way so many others go, rather than live an isolated life on the margins of what is acceptable? I was consumed by these questions about ‘being bourgeois’ or rebelling against the values into which I felt I had been born. [My friend, the fine scholar Dennis Mahoney, has pointed out to me that a translation of a ‘bourgeois’ into German would render it as a ‘Burger.’ Still, the same values, enumerated below, of comfort, but also a connotation of ‘citizen,’ as ‘citizen of a town (Burg)’. To be bourgeois, then, might also mean to have the interests of citizenship at heart…. An interesting thought, as I look back on my youthful concerns.] Underlying these questions were deeper ones: Should one see oneself as the vanguard of society, or as a member of the bourgeois world? Did acceptance of middle-class values mean somehow that one accepted segregation and societal prejudice? Most improbably, did rejection of middle-class values come all-to- easily to the son of parents who had fled dictatorship and destruction in order to raise a family and live with a modicum of security and happiness? As I wrestled with these questions, I came upon du Bellay’s great poem. There was more in it than I knew even as it spoke to my inner dialogues and arguments so cogently. But that is how it is with great poems: they speak deeply to us, more deeply than we recognize. That is one reason we need poems: As William Carlos Williams wrote, trenchantly, in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower:” It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. His contemporary Robinson Jeffers wrote that “pained thoughts found/The honey of peace in old poems.” This poem before us is an old poem. Old. Du Bellay lived in the sixteenth century and published this poem in 1558. He wrote the poem while he was a secretary to a French Cardinal posted in Rome. To du Bellay, the posting to the papal court was a form of exile. The poem appears to express his longing for a return to France. ‘Appears,’ because poems are made of words, and the words in them create a fiction. “I believe in nothing but the heart’s holiness and the truth of the imagination,” Keats wrote magnificently in a letter. “Only the imagination is real,” Williams declared a century and a half later. And Williams’ friend Wallace Stevens wrote, The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. The poem is always a fiction, even when it says what is true: perhaps especially when it says what is true. So, yes, this poem longs for a return to the poet’s home. But it says more than that. Let’s start with basic considerations. The poem is a sonnet. It is written primarily in alexandrines, the French ‘standard’ line of twelve syllables. (France, not being an inflected language like English, is not hospitable to counting stresses, so the French count syllables. We in English tend to count both: iambic pentameter denotes a line of five stresses and ten syllables.) As a sonnet, it has an octet (its first eight lines) and an answering sestet of six lines. The two stanzas of the octet rhyme ABBA (the same rhymes govern both) while the sestet rhymes CCD D’D’D, where D’ indicates a slant rhyme. There are repetitions which bind the lines together: ‘reverrai-je,’ when ‘will I see?’ appears twice in the second stanza. Four of the six lines of the sestet begin with “plus,” ‘more,’ while the final line uses “plus” as its second term, following an ‘and.’ If I were to go on, examining all the words of the French original, we would find aural connections and echoes throughout.