Vol. 17 No. 8 · 20 April 1995
pages 16-18 | 4650 words
In the Châtelet
Jeremy Harding
- François Villon: Complete Poems edited by Barbara Sargent-Bauer
Toronto, 346 pp, £42.00, January 1995, ISBN 0 8020 2946 9
- Basil Bunting: Complete Poems edited by Richard Caddel
Oxford, 226 pp, £10.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 19 282282 9
‘Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?’ – Will you leave poor Villon here? – the poet asks in an appeal from Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where he was detained at the Bishop’s pleasure, probably in 1461. ‘Epistre a ses amis’ reads now, in the light of so much scholarship, translation, loose-clad homage and general ventriloquism on the part of a wide and posthumous circle of acquaintance from Swinburne to Lowell and beyond, like a request to be left in peace – Villon is something of a cottage industry and the generator has been whirring fairly constantly beside the mallow patch. But it’s the translators most of us have to thank for knowing him at all.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 10 · 25 May 1995
From Alan Wall
Jeremy Harding takes an unwarranted swipe at Peter Dale (LRB, 20 April), calling his versions of Villon ‘rather desperate’ – this is apparently because they rhyme. Believing Dale’s Villon to be the best one available to us in modern English, I thought I’d better check I hadn’t been mistaken. I couldn’t see any signs of desperation. What I did see were things like this (chosen almost at random):
Item to Ythier Marchant to whom
I left my sword not long before
I now bequeath ten lines of gloom
to which he must prepare a score
for lute and voice to mourn the more
his former girls: a De Profundis.
Their proper name I shall ignore
or he’d hate me for a month of Sundays.
To hold metre and rhyme-scheme from a verse original while producing something entirely fluent in one’s own language is hard enough, as anyone who’s done even the smallest amout of verse translation knows. To then manage something as clever and entertaining as the original by rhyming ‘De Profundis’ with ‘month of Sundays’ where Villon had ‘De profundis’ and ‘je ne dis’ is surely remarkable. One could call this ‘desperate’, I suppose. But then, one could have told Dante to let up on the terza rima.
Alan Wall
London SW18
Vol. 17 No. 11 · 8 June 1995
From W.S. Milne
Jeremy Harding thinks Peter Dale ‘always pushed for rhymes’ (LRB, 20 April) and whether or not this is the case (I think not), it would have helped if the typesetter of Harding’s review had felt a similar compulsion when compositing Basil Bunting’s line ‘that DEATH is written over all’ (and not, as they have done, printed ‘that DEATH is written all over’, making Bunting’s Villon sound like a contemporary of Status Quo’s!).
Incidentally, it is reported by Denis Goacher in the 1995 Durham University Journal special issue on Basil Bunting that Pound’s statement in Canto 74, ‘Bunting/doing six months after that war was over’, is incorrect. Goacher says: ‘You must remember that Basil was born on March the first and that the Armistice was not until 11 November 1918. He was born with the century, so he was called up soon after March the first 1918, refused to go, and was stuck in jail as a “conchie”. ’
W.S. Milne
London SW18
Jeremy Harding writes: The depressing misquotation from ‘Villon’ was my fault and not the typesetters’. To deprive Bunting of a rhyme is certainly no improvement. Denis Goacher speaks only of Bunting’s internment in Newcastle. He thinks the idea that Bunting was not released until after the Armistice was cooked up by Pound, ‘who always had to go one better’. But Peter Makin (Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse) gives Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester as other places of detention at that time and suggests that Bunting’s release was ‘less difficult’ because the war had ended. Victoria Forde’s account (Basil Bunting: A Life), like Goacher’s, has Bunting arrested ‘almost on his 18th birthday’, but she tells us he spent ‘eighteen months in jails’ and that he was ‘one of the last one or two to be released in late 1919’.
In Margaret Anne Doody’s review of the Edith Wharton biographies (LRB, 20 April), the names of two fictional detectives were confused: Arsène Lupin appeared instead of C. Auguste Dupin.
