French literature from the beginning - let's get back to our sheep!

The foundation of French literature, as with English literature, lies in the 16th and 17th centuries.  French literature is perhaps even more narrow.  There is a twenty year period in the 17th century – well, I will return to that.

The origins of vernacular French literature go back to the 11th century, with some saint’s lives about which I know little and heroic epics like The Song of Roland and many other chansons de geste.  I say that as if I have the slightest idea what is in any of the chansons de geste besides Roland.  I do not.

The great, still entertaining, Arthurian poems of Chrétien de Troyes are from the late 12th century.

All of this is in Old French and, as I understand it,  is more or less unreadable for most French readers.  Looking at the text of La Chanson de Roland, I would say that Old French is nowhere as far from modern French as Old English is from modern English, but it is not nearly as close as Chaucer’s Middle English is to my English.  Somewhere in between.  Maybe like the Middle English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I can read Chaucer, but I can’t read that.

French readers, and certainly French students, read these works in modern prose translations.  The prose versions of the medievalist Joseph Bédier, for example Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900), have become classics in their own right.  I should read that someday.

I have no idea what French schools do with medieval not-quite-French literature, like the poems of courtly love cooked up by the Occitan troubadours, the poems that would migrate into Italy and eventually return to France in the 16th century.

I also have little idea when French literature becomes modern, becomes reasonably readable.  Differences of spelling aside, are writers of the early 15th century like Christine de Pisan and Froissart accessible?  They must be.  I am examining Villon’s Testament (1461), the or anyways a French text, in Galway Kinnell’s The Poems of François Villon (1965), a masterpiece of translation, and it looks readable, goosed by Kinnell’s version, certainly:

Icy se clost le testament
Et finist du pauvre Villon
Venez a son enterrement
Quant vous orrez le carillon
Vestus rouge com vermillon
Car en amours mourut martir
Ce jura il sur son couillon
Quant de ce monde voult partir.  (ll. 1996-2003, p. 152)

Heck, it’s spelled all screwy but it’s practically English.  This is Kinnell:

Here ends and finishes
The testament of poor Villon
Come to his burial
When you hear the bell ringing
Dressed in red vermillion
For he dies a martyr to love
This he swore on his testicle
As he made his way out of this world.

Yes, that’s Villon.  Half of what I am doing here is thinking about what I should read in French, what I can read.  I should read Villon’s Testament; with Kinnell’s help, I can.

Myself, I have read exactly one pre-17th century French book, The Farce of Monsieur Pathelin (1457), an anonymous popular play.  The title character is a con man and a lawyer.  I am currently reading Johannes Fried’s The Middle Ages (2009, tr. Peter Lewis), an intellectual history of the thousand-year period named in the title.  One long chapter is on “The Triumph of Jurisprudence,” about the 13th century innovation of law and lawyers that began in the papal and imperial courts and spread everywhere.  A couple of hundred years later, the lawyers have diffused among the peasantry and there are hit comedies making fun of them.

The play climaxes with a scene where the lawyer represents a shepherd in court.  Their strategy is to pretend that the shepherd has gone nuts and thinks he is a sheep, so that he responds to every question with bleating.  In good hands, this scene must be a scream.  The play is performed to this day, and this scene is the reason.  It contains one line that has become a commonplace: “Revenons à nos moutons [Let’s get back to our sheep],” which I am pretty sure I myself heard in an ordinary conversation, although with my comprehension, who knows.

All right, on to the 16th century.

And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again - D. G. Rossetti translates

Mostly with older poets I ought to stick with some kind of Selected Poems.  That is what I used to do.  I began to feel, though, like I was missing something important about the context, about the books as such, so I have been reading more poetry books in their original form, or something like it.  All of the poems in order, at least, although I have come to appreciate the scanned copies of the  original books, stray thumbs and all.  Most of what I read recently were original texts.  In only one case was this a mistake, a waste of time.  That case was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti, even if his final 1881 book was second-rate by his own standards.

Rossetti is a funny case, though, because a Selected Poems is almost moot for him.  He wrote two perfect books, if you have any taste for his verse, the 1870 Poems and the books of translated Italian verse that I think of as Dante and His Circle (1874 – there is an 1861 version titled The Early Italian Poets).  I assume any Selected edition is mostly just going to choose from these two books, perhaps just from Poems, the home of “The Blessed Damozel” and “The Woodspurge” and the best “House of Life” sonnets.

And the Villon translations.  I do not have much of a taste for Rossetti’s painting, so I selfishly wish that he had sacrificed a few to create more translations. 

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
    Where are they gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,-
  But where are the snows of yester-year?  (from “The Ballad of Dead Ladies”)

The Dante book, which includes the strange prose-poetry hybrid The New Life (1295) along with numerous poems written by Dante and others – many written to Dante by others – now seems to me like one of the greatest Victorian translations, alongside Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat and perhaps Longfellow’s Manrique.  Rossetti had a knack for capturing the voice of the pre-Raphaelite poet:

And I wrote this sonnet:-

I felt a spirit of love begin to stir
    Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;
    And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain
(That I scarce knew him for his joyful cheer),
Saying, “Be now indeed my worshipper!”
    And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again
    Then, while it was his pleasure to remain,
I chanced to look the way he had drawn near…

And then there is some stuff about Beatrice, of course, but what I like here is the naturalness with which Rossetti understands the allegorical figure.  Rossetti has the properly archaic imagination to envision Dante and Love wandering around Florence, looking at girls, looking for one in particular.

I think one of Rossetti’s tricks is that he has studied and absorbed poets like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the ones who brought the Italian sonnet into English in the early 16th century, so even if it is a two hundred year anachronism they feel right, not as fancied up as Shakespeare, but not antique, either.

I don’t know how he did it.

What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap - Swinburne reins it in a little.

Aside from hundreds of pages of letters, Swinburne was always writing.  As usual, I have my Yale University Press Major Poems and Selected Prose handy, with all of the heavy editing that involves.  Swinburne’s 1876 book Songs of Two Nations, all political poems, is reduced to a single sonnet, “Locusta”:

This haggard harlot grey of face and green
With the old hand’s cunning mixes her new priest
The cup she mixed her Nero, stirred and spiced.

“Spiced” rhymes with “Christ.”  A note tells me Swinburne is celebrating the death of Napoleon III.  If the rest of the political poems are this colorful, I am mistaken not to seek them out, even if I will have no idea about the subjects of the poems.  “The loose lewd limbs, the reeling hingeless hips” and so on.

My collection does better with the 1878 Poems and Ballads, Second Series which contains a number of masterpieces, including Swinburne’s 1868 elegy on the death of Charles Baudelaire, “Ave atque Vale.”  No special pleading needed for that one, nor for “A Forsaken Garden,” the ultra-Romantic blend of two of Swinburne’s favorite themes, flowers and the sea.  The abandoned garden is atop a sea-cliff:

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,”
  Did he whisper? “look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossom wither,
  And men that love lightly may die – but we?”
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
  And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes had lightened,
  Love was dead.  (ll. 41-8)

Other stanzas are even better, but this one has the foam-flowers.  Swinburne often fills his poems with lovingly chosen multi-syllable Latinate words, achieving sublime and ridiculous effects, but there is little of that in “A Forsaken Garden”:

Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
  Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
  Death lies dead.  (ll. 77-80)

The poem is practically a Lovecraft story.

I’ll skip “The Complaint of Lisa,” a double sestina with an additional internal rhyme structure, insane that Swinburne actually pulls it off, and jump to his translations of François Villon, the two I have in this collection.  The rest I need to track down.  “In the early 1860s ACS and Rossetti planned to collaborate on translating all of Villon, a project  that never came to fruition” (p. 484) – a volume I will seek out when I am admitted to the Library of Lost Books.

“The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge” was excluded from Poems and Ballads and “The Complaint of the Fair Armouress” trimmed because of offenses to Victorian sensibilities – “but two lines too literal in their photography of the female human form divine for reproduction by a modern English camera” (Letters, Feb. 8, 1877) – as the maid examines her aged body and cries for the loss of her old love:

“And he died thirty year agone,
  I am old now, no sweet thing to see;
By God, though, when I think thereon,
  And of that good glad time, woe’s me,
  And stare upon my changed body
Stark naked, that has been so sweet,
  Lean, wizen, like a small dry tree,
I am nigh mad with the pain of it.”  (ll. 3-40)

But as Fat Madge asks in her poem:

What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap,
  Ought you to take me for a beast or fool?  (ll. 1-2)

So Villon, too; so asks Swinburne.