Ronsard as translator

If you are like me, when you see a footnote in an edition claiming that a poem is a translation of another one in another language, or an adaptation/response to one in the same language, you want more than the footnote – you want to see the original poem to appreciate the correspondences, the re-imaginings, the way in which the poet has adapted the original to make it a true poem in his own terms. That is what I have tried to do on various entries on this blog, providing the original text when I can rather than just (as in most editions) alerting you to the origin!

And by looking at these ‘originals’, the extent of Ronsard’s re-thinking, re-imagining is obvious: he never simply copies, he takes ideas and re-arranges them, re-uses them in original ways, or simply improves on them.

The ancients

Anacreon (582-485 BC)

One of the earliest Greek lyric poets. Ronsard spent the winter of 1544 studying him and other Greek poets with Jean Daurat (or Dorat) & Jean-Antoine de Baïf. In addition to Ronsard’s imitations in his own Odes, Remy Belleau produced an Anacreon translation in the mid-1550s.

Some of the Greek poems included in those early editions of Anacreon are now thought to be inauthentic, that is, to be imitations of Anacreon by other Greek poets; modern editors relegate them to the ‘Anacreonta’ or appendix to Anacreon.

Ronsard adapted many of Anacreon’s odes into his own. The following table sets out the correspondences where I have (so far) provided Anacreon’s originals as well; there are many others where I have not (yet?) taken the trouble to look at Anacreon’s original!

Ronsard
Ode 4:20
Ode 4:20

Anacreon
Ode 17 (=Anacreonta 4)
Ode 18 (=Anacreonta 5)

Theocritus (flourished around 270 BC)

The creator of pastoral poetry (bucolics, eclogues), he was probably Sicilian – born in Syracuse – a reminder that much ‘Greek’ poetry came from the colonies of ‘greater Greece’ around the Mediterranean. A direct influence therefore on Virgil’s Eclogues and all pastoral poetry since.

Ronsard
Le Voyage de Tours

Theocritus
Idyll 3

Meleager of Gadara (flourished c95 BC)

Meleager was one of the first anthologists, that is a compiler of poems by others. His ‘Garland’ or ‘Crown’ does not itself survive but became a core element of the Greek Anthology . It included 134 epigrams (short poems) of his own, as well as a selection of the works of 46 earlier lyric poets.

Meleager explained that his ‘garland’ was like a collection of ‘flowers’ selected and woven together; which is also what ‘anthology’ literally means – a ‘collection of flowers’.

Incidentally Gadara (near Tyre & Sidon, or near Nazareth depending on your historical reference points!) may be vaguely familiar as the home of the ‘Gadarene swine’ from the New Testament. (They are the ones into whom Jesus sends a horde of demons, the pigs then running off a cliff into the sea and drowning.) Unfortunately for the story – or at least the presence of Gadara in it – the sea of Galilee is about 10km from Gadara; though to be fair Matthew’s gospel actually says ‘in the region of Gadara’ …

Ronsard
Helen 2:33

Meleager
Epigram 8

Catullus (c84-54 BC)

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a late-Republican poet who took Hellenistic models of poetry and made them Roman. The content is personal rather than general, subjective and often explicit – so much so that only some of his poetry gets onto the syllabus! He influenced strongly the succeeding generations of love-poets in Rome, and although Horace and, even more, Ovid are more common models for renaissance love-poets, Catullus is where it began.

Ronsard
Chanson 2.61b

Catullus
poem 51

Vergil (70-19 BC)

Rome’s greatest poet, who re-invented Homer to create a Roman foundation myth in the Aeneid. Not prolific, his other works are the Georgics, an ‘epic’ about farming which draws on the other semi-mythical Greek originator, Hesiod; and the Eclogues (again based on Greek originals) which have been the source of endless Arcadian shepherd poetry ever since!

Ronsard
Amours 1.160

Vergil
Georgics 2.323-8

Martial (c40-c103 AD)

Martial is famous for his short – often very short – epigrammatic poetry. He’s often, but not always, rude, crude and offensive. Ronsard’s epigrams are less brash, more gentle.

Oddly, one of the examples here is an ode by Ronsard, not an epigram!

Ronsard
Ode 4:31
Helen 2:65

Martial
Epigrams 4.50
Epigrams 5.22

the Emperor Hadrian (76-138 AD)

It’s not often you’ll find an emperor writing poetry: Hadrian was a poet and author on top of his other skills. He wrote a lovely little farewell to life with an amusing twist in the tale, which Ronsard imitated so closely it is almost a line-for-line translation.

Ronsard
Dernier vers – To his soul

Hadrian
Farewell to life

The ‘moderns’

Petrarch (1304-74)

Any sonneteer has to look back to Petrarch, the greatest early exponent of the form and perhaps its creator. Like Ronsard, of course, Petrarch wrote hundreds of sonnets; and Ronsard’s – like those of the many Italian ‘petrarchists’ – are often reminiscent of Petrarchan originals without being real translations, borrowing & re-using ideas, phrases or structures. In fact, what is noticeable about Ronsard’s indirect use of or references to Italian sources is that he follows the petrarchists rather than Petrarch: as in modern times good parody often shows us the key features of the parodied more succinctly than studying the ‘original’, so the petrarchists summarised the many influences of Petrarch on Italian poetry, and are a sort of ‘short cut’ to the key Petrarchan ideals! (A more cynical presentation of the petrarchist influence is seen in Cécile Alduy – whom I found through Kate van Orden’s “Music Authorship & the Book” – who argues that with a ‘remarkable economy of means’ Ronsard’s circle re-cycled the same (old) metaphors, tropes and forms thus providing a large stock of poems suitable for reading in any order, or for dipping into …)

I have not often made the effort to show the Petrarchan ‘originals’; but here are some examples among the many.

Petrarch
Canzoniere 39
Canzoniere 61
Canzoniere 74
Canzoniere 134
Canzoniere 161
Canzoniere 192
Canzoniere 203
Canzoniere 261

Ronsard
Helen 2, 17
Amours 1, 112
Helen 2, 52
Amours 2, 53
Amours 1, 178
Helen 2, 3
Amours 2, 49
Amours 1, 63

Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)

The great epic poet of Orlando Furioso, a source of metaphors, operas and ideas for centuries, and also a source for Pléiade poets – du Bellay derived 10 poems in L’Olive from settings in the epic. But Ariosto also wrote shorter poems, madrigals and sonnets.

Ariosto
Sonnet 8

Ronsard
Amours 1, 173

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547)

One of the many humanists who wrote poetry and followed the ‘petrarchist’ tradition of sonneteering was the great scholar, humanist, politician and Cardinal(!) Pietro Bembo. Again, I’ve not chased down all references etc but here is a sample:

Bembo
Sonnet 7
Sonnet 9
Sonnet 38
Sonnet 39
Sonnet 44

Ronsard
Amours 1, 168
Amours 1, 208
Amours 1, 203
Amours 1, 151
Amours 1, 161

Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (1496-??)

Another sixteenth-century ‘petrarchist’ steeped in the Greek and Latin of the ancients, and in Petrarch’s style. He published his ‘exposition’ on Petrarch’s Canzoniere in 1533, which was perhaps the most successful as well as the best 16th-century commentary, with 8 editions up to 1850. (He appears not to be related to the famous composer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa.) His poems were collected in Rime e versi in lode dell’illustriss .… donna Giovanna Castriota Carafa in 1585, though it is not clear if he was alive or dead at the time. Ronsard probably knew them from Rime diverse di molti eccellentiss. autori nuovamente raccolte (1546), which is the source I’ve used for those of his poems rendered by Ronsard in French:

Ronsard
Amours 1, 176
Amours 1, 178

Gesualdo
Rime diverse Sonnet 5
Rime diverse Sonnet 6

Marullus (1458-1500)

Michael Tarchaniota Marullus was a favourite Neo-Latin poet of the late 15th century – so, he was writing 75 years or so before Ronsard and had acquired a sort of classic status. Today, sadly, he is nearly forgotten. Not quite forgotten, fortunately: there are digital copies of the 1509 edition of his Epigrammata et Hymni on Google books or at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek; a modern edition and translation by Charles Fantazzi (mostly) available on Google books; and texts in TXT and DOC (as well as PDF) from at the excellent Carmina Latina site.

Ronsard translated – or, more often, re-imagined – a number of poems by Marullus in Amours 2, and apart from a few songs at the beginning, the chansons represent a ‘run’ of such translations dotted through the book. The poems come from the Epigrammata, and just as a later generation would be inspired mostly by Ronsard’s first book of Amours (this is where most of the musical settings come from, for instance) so Ronsard was inspired mostly by the freshness of Marullus’s first book of Epigrams.

Here is a set of links that show the Marullus Epigrams corresponding to Ronsard chansons in the Amours de Marie: or the Ronsard chansons corresponding to the Marullus epigram. In each case the Latin epigram & its translation appear with the entry for the corresponding chanson.