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- Title
Testimony, Theory, Testament: On Translating François Villon.
- Authors
CLEMENS, JUSTIN
- Abstract
François Villon is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of all French poets -- and not only by the French. Since the nineteenth century, his "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" -- one of the most perfect jewels from Villon's masterpiece Le Grand Testament -- has become the basis for a sequence of spectacular English translations by an extraordinary variety of eminent writers and critics, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andrew Lang, Tom Scott and Robert Lowell, among many others. Yet, despite this intense literary attention, there remains something peculiar, enigmatic, about this poem, attested to by many major commentators: everybody enjoys it, is even captivated by it, but nobody wants to know anything more about it. This state of affairs is all the more surprising given that the Testament as a whole has proven rich fodder for the most erudite philological investigations. This article examines this odd state-of-affairs as exemplary of a kind of state-of-emergency for translation. It argues that the reception history of "unknowing enjoyment" fostered by the poem is already inscribed in -- "preprogrammed" by? -- the structure of the poem itself, and that a careful interpretation of the poem's deployment of proper names is able to articulate something essential about the relations of enjoyment, not-knowing, language and death that are at the heart of the translation of poetry more generally.
- Subjects
VILLON, Francois, b. 1431; FRENCH poets; FRENCH authors; BALLAD of Dead Ladies, The (Poem : Villon); POETRY (Literary form); FRENCH literature
- Publication
AALITRA Review, 2013, Issue 6, p5
- ISSN
1838-1294
- Publication type
Article