James Helgeson (review)

Abstract

498 Reviews Selected Poems. By Pierre de Ronsard. Ed. and trans. by Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock. (Penguin Classics) London: Penguin. 2002. liv + 328 pp. ?9.99- ISBN 0-14-042424-5. Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock's welcome selection has the difficulttask of wedding two rather contradictory needs: to make the reader comfortable in an increasingly alien poetic culture, and to be succinct. This wedding is not an unequivocally happy one, but generally it is handled with fine critical tact and the volume is as praiseworthy forits achievement of accessibility without undue compromise as for the engaging diversity of its choices. The decision to draw on the 1584 edition without significant editorial interference is also to be applauded: merely to see this French is to be given a vivid sense of a poetic language still looking foritself,and still subject to the typographic and orthographic quirks and inconsistencies of both poets and printers. The original syntax alone has occasionally been departed from, and the translations have introduced some modifications in punctuation, forthe sake of clarity. All in all, the balance between an almost self-updating Ronsard and a Ronsard we must take some imaginative trouble to recover is well struck. The introduction provides useful insights into the contexts of courtly writing and ranges widely across those rhetorical and stylistic features which make up the peculiar textures of Ronsard's verse. It is true that the initial biographical agenda loses its momentum when we reach c. 1550, and the comments made on acoustic expressivity and versification are not, in their detail, entirely convincing, but the whole adds up to an instructive and richly animating prelude to the encounter with the poems. The ambitions ofthe 'plain prose' translations are in keeping with the generical and lexical variety of the selected source texts and, although complex, are pursued with remarkable success, allowing the reader, as in? tended, to keep close track of the unfolding French. Given the pressure on space, the notes are particularly well done, driven by pertinence to the textual matter in hand, but helpful in setting up thematic hares and in cross-referencing stylistic devices. The least successful parts of the enterprise are the appendices ('How to Read French Poetry', 'Glossary of Names and Places', 'Glossary of Literary Terms'). It is difficult to see why the second of these elements was not assimilated into the notes, and in all sections brevity sometimes leads to formulations which invite misunderstanding. But these flaws do not seriously detract from a lively and sharp-witted presentation. University of East Anglia Clive Scott Harmonie divine et subjectivite poetique chez Maurice Sceve. By James Helgeson. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 349) Geneva: Droz. 2001. 153 pp. ?57.15. ISBN 2-600-00486-6. James Helgeson's short book on the role of music in the work of Maurice Sceve of? fers a series of elegant and sophisticated analyses of Sceve's poetry illuminated by a discussion of the status of music, and of the theoretical discourses applied to it, in an? tiquity, the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Individual chapters address Sceve's response to the myth of Orpheus, which is seen as an ambivalent expression of both the instrumental power and the limitations of music (and poetry), the impact of the beloved as musician, and the importance of the notion of concordia discors, with special reference to the Platonic androgyne. A parallel between Sceve and that other notoriously 'difficult' poet, Stephane Mallarme, is also offered. Although Helgeson's insights are often interesting, the effectiveness of his thesis is diminished by lack of care in the transcription of primary sources and proof-reading (the reader may be surprised to find Jean Molinet confused with Jean Marot on p. 26). More seriously, perhaps, the teleological critical approach that makes of Sceve a foil for the later and MLR, 100.2, 2005 499 greater achievements of the Pleiade, which Helgeson decries in the work of scholars such as Francoise Joukovsky, is occasionally in evidence in his own remarks about Rhetoriqueur writers such as Molinet. In presenting the Rhetoriqueurs as concerned primarily with verbal acrobatics ('les artifices verbaux de la Grande Rhetorique' (p. 48)) and metrical...