Bewildering Stories discusses...
Ronsard’s Quand vous serez bien vieille
with Lisa Davis
Ronsard’s Quand vous serez bien vieille appears in The Critics’ Corner of issue 177 (Dec. 12, 2005). The poem is accompanied by three translations and a critical appreciation.
Lisa Davis’s letter is included in this issue to fulfill belatedly a promise that it would appear when possible. Now, at a season’s end — spring in Canada, fall in Lisa’s Australia — it seems as good a time as any to acknowledge Lisa’s perceptive appreciation of two poets’ sense of carpe diem: Ronsard also addresses the topic memento mori and looks to the future, while Baudelaire is known for taking caution and inspiration from the present.
[Lisa Davis] Basking, indolent upon the sands of the Indian Ocean, burning bodily surfaces upon the liminal glory of COVID-free Western Australia, recontemplating Quand vous serez bien vielle (as found @bewilderingstories) some 40 years down the track from undergrad French, and I’m all but simultaneously revisited with Je te donne ces vers, afin que si mon nom and find myself reflecting that the sex-charged trope of immortality (name/reputation/poetic opus extending past bodily expiry) doesn’t change much over time (Hello Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’, Donne’s ‘Flea’ et cetera).
Its success depends on irony. But the weighting of irony depends on the sympathies of the reader.
Ronsard crouches amongst the myrtles, which he’d encourage us-the-readers to confound with laurels, advising (the much younger or simply more Idealist?) Hélène to indulge in pleasurable frolics whilst she may, thus to pre-pay, with her youthful body, her share of the literary eternity that Ronsard can provide.
Baudelaire, partisan of simultaneity, cowers in the eternal infernal present, rendered almost tolerable by protection afforded by his hard-mettled mineral mistress, echo chamber of his misery: he and she, art and Ideal, indissociable, reciprocally prolonging each the other, sans terminus ad quem. Fleshly indulgence has already provided him with its best/worst certainty. It’s the same story. Wryly funny or irredeemably disastrous. At any rate, Baudelaire writhes within a steady, familiar tradition.
[Don Webb] Thank you for the appreciation of our presentation of Ronsard’s famous sonnet. It is the only poem we have, I think, that is accompanied by multiple translations.
It is safe, I think, from the kind of snark that a reader leveled at my translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Dormeur du val. He cited another translation as “ïncomparable.” I knew of that translation. I consider it pretentious, which Rimbaud’s poem most certainly is not.
Is Ronsard trying to hustle Hélène? Indeed. Renaissance poets are noted for doing such things, especially since they have in mind the average life expectancy of their era, almost 500 years ago. Why would they do that? Because love and aging are commonplaces. Ronsard’s poem speaks to everyone at one time or another. And his ingenious linguistic music has kept it alive.
