François Villon’s four ballads

Abstract

The fact that the existing Russian translations of the four famous ballads by the French 15th-c. poet François Villon are plagued by tentativeness and inaccuracy calls for a new translation, based on consistent preservation of the original’s imagery and meaning in each and every line. The texts of the ballads, their rendering from the language of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance into contemporary French, and materials on the poet’s biography and possible autobiographical allusions in the selected ballads come from the latest French editions of F. Villon’s complete works prepared by renowned experts such as Claude Thiry (1991) and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (2014 and 2020). The translations are accompanied by the proposed article, which, together with the commentary to the ballads, makes use of research undertaken by foreign scholars over the past decades. The author also examines the compelling hypotheses put forward by the German scholar of Romance studies Gert Pinkernell (1937–2017). To sum up, Russian-speaking scholars and readers are offered a new annotated philological translation of four ballads by F. Villon.