French Poems Research Articles

Algerian Women’s Būqālah Poetry: Oral Literature, Cultural Politics, and Anti-Colonial Resistance

Būqālah refers both to a ceramic pitcher as well as to poems ritually embedded in the traditional, favorite, divinatory pastime associated with women city dwellers of specific Algerian towns such as Blida, Cherchell, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. This essay considers the shift from orality to a written archive of French and Algerian collections of būqālah poems by focusing on analyses of Algerian Arabic oral literature as an expression of feminine cultural protest and resistance to the domination of language policies under French colonialism. What are the ways in which an intimate ritual—one linked to orality, the divinatory, women’s poesis, and the Algerian Arabic dialect—begins to carry political meanings during the War of Independence and in post-1962 independent Algeria? Contributing to the circulation and creation of new meanings, forms, and venues for būqālah poetry are Algerian radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings, and the publication of the 1962 French poem “Boqala” by Djamila Amrane.

Ciaran Carson’s The Alexandrine Plan and Two Versions of a Fantasy

This article considers the relation between the versions of sonnets by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé that make up Ciaran Carson’s collection The Alexandrine Plan (1998) and the French poems from which they stem. I explore aspects of Carson’s adaptive practice, including personification, sound patterning, and the use of domestication and foreignization. The latter part of the article performs a comparative close reading of Carson’s version of Rimbaud’s ‘Ma bohème’ with a virtuoso version of the poem by Patrick McGuinness. The poets’ engagement with their source texts is attentive to their technical and stylistic accomplishments whilst also being playful and creative. The nineteenth-century text is seen as a catalyst, a partner in a creative exchange that reminds us in new ways of the riches of long-familiar poems.

Introduction:

Introduction:

Valéry's Graveyard: “Le cimetière marin,” Translated, Described, and Peopled

Valéry's Graveyard: “Le cimetière marin,” Translated, Described, and Peopled

Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages

This is the final part of a three-part essay on fuzziness in medieval literary language. Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 3 considers what Geertz might mean by describing text as a “dangerously unfocused term,” through discussing how bilingualism is negotiated in poetry. Three areas of vagueness are explored: the linguistic boundaries in a bilingual poem, the definition of a poem in the trilingual culture of insular medieval writing, and the relationship between literary and ordinary language. Examples are taken from a fifteenth-century bilingual carol, an early fourteenth-century trilingual poem, a bilingual sermon, a passage of love-writing discovered in the midst of a fifteenth-century legal roll, and finally a pair of French poems about the death of the English commander, Thomas Montagu, fourth earl of Salisbury, at the English siege of Orléans in 1428, contrasted with some English translations of poems by Charles d'Orléans. The essay argues that blurriness in medieval bilingualism gives us a fresh way of approaching primary questions about poetry and the literary.

THE TYPOLOGY AND ORIGIN OF ACCENTUAL VERSE

THE TYPOLOGY AND ORIGIN OF ACCENTUAL VERSE

The Trombone in the Renaissance: A History in Pictures and Documents by Stewart Carter (review)

Reviewed by: The Trombone in the Renaissance: A History in Pictures and Documents by Stewart Carter David M. Guion The Trombone in the Renaissance: A History in Pictures and Documents. By Stewart Carter. (Bucina: The Historic Brass Society Series, no. 8.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2012[xiv, 492 p. ISBN 9781576472064. $82.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 744] The trombone is a very old instrument, but historical interest in it is fairly recent. The earliest attempts to describe its history show much more imagination than scholarship. The process of debunking myths and studying documents began in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth century, only one book in the English language was entirely devoted to the history of the trombone. The Trombone in the Renaissance by Stewart Carter is the third one so far this century. Others will surely follow, and their authors will be greatly indebted to Carter’s scholarship. Documentary hints of what might have been something like a trombone occur by the end of the fourteenth century. In fact, one of the earliest documents Carter presents, a French poem from ca. 1304–07, simply uses sacqueboute, a word that would become the French word for trombone more than a century later. Unfortunately, the documents do not become much less ambiguous or more informative until long after the trombone indisputably existed, by whatever name it was called. The publication of Sebastian Virdung’s Musica getutscht in 1511 probably marks the first time an author mentioned the trombone with the intention of informing readers about musical instruments, and it was another hundred years before anyone wrote a really good book on the subject. Most of the earliest documents, even if it is fairly clear that they actually mention the trombone, exist as financial documents, descriptions of special events where music was part of a larger spectacle, or are otherwise about something else entirely besides music. Hardly any of them have much precise information to tell us about the instrument, the people who played it, or even, broadly speaking, what music was performed for particular occasions. Pictures, sculptures, and other artworks are more helpful, but not without ambiguities of their own. For one thing, they cannot indicate motion. Did an instrument that looks something like a trombone actually have a moving slide? Do odd-looking details tell us about various experimental forms instruments took? Or do they simply show that the artist was not especially good at drawing, or perhaps distorted shapes for artistic reasons we cannot know? No trombone or obvious piece of a trombone survives that was made before 1551. Barely a dozen survive that were made before 1600. Even these have less value as evidence than would first appear. All of them have since undergone repair, and it is impossible to be certain of their design and characteristics when they were new. Carter set a difficult task for himself in attempting to make sense of a mass of ambiguous and fragmented information written in several languages, scattered over several centuries from all parts of Europe, plus Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Fortunately, over the past couple of centuries, many scholars have dug through various archives and published extracts as they relate to music. Carter had access to many original documents or photocopies of them, but he also took advantage of the secondary literature. The book is divided into two parts, one for documents written up to 1499 and the other for the sixteenth century. Each part is subdivided geographically. That is an unfortunate choice, because it means starting the story of the trombone in five different countries, and then having to skip several chapters to continue each one. France and the Low Countries make a single chapter in part 1, but each gets its own in part 2. Each document, artwork, or instrument receives a unique number, beginning with the number of the chapter. Virdung’s book is 11–11, for example. The system makes cross-referencing easy. Carter presents many of the documents in their original languages in an appendix, where they are identified with the same numbers. Carter’s coverage of earlier documents and artworks strives to be...

Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

Gifts from Utopia: The Travels of Toru Dutt's Poetry

Born in Calcutta in 1856 and dying only twenty-one years later of tuberculosis, the young Bengali writer Toru Dutt wrote novels and poems in English and French, translated French poetry into English, and toward the end of her life revisited Bengali myths and tales from the Ramayana in her poetry. Her multilingual poems and translations have traditionally been interpreted as seeking to dissolve or fragment cultural differences. This essay instead argues for Dutt seeking to consolidate difference, reconceived as possibility: by distributing her poems to friends in England and receiving gifts of poems in return, Dutt sought to create a transnational friendship economy involving the material exchange of poetic texts. She then theorises this exchange in the work itself, arguing in novels, poems and inexact translations for regarding the resistant materiality of poetry and language both as imperfect tools that can nonetheless be utilised to forge community and understanding – however utopian, however fragile and temporary – across seemingly incommensurable cultural differences, perhaps even across the inequities of imperial history.

Medieval Autographies: The 'I' of the Text by A. C. Spearing (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Autographies: The 'I' of the Text by A. C. Spearing Alana Bennett Spearing, A. C. , Medieval Autographies: The 'I' of the Text (Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies), Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2012; paperback; pp. 360; R.R.P. US$32.00; ISBN 9780268017828. A. C. Spearing's latest book continues the work begun in Textual Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 2005) on characterisation and narration in medieval literature. 'Autography' is - according to Spearing - a super-genre that centres on a written, rhetorical first person. Unlike the tendency of modern scholarship to assume a division between hidden authorial meaning and explicit narrative content, autography entails the convergence of author, narrator, and written expression. Also central is Spearing's premise that speech in autography creates an illusion of orality but is really grounded in written rhetoric often inseparable from the physical existence of the text. Autography has the tendency to be about writing and this reliance on textual [End Page 232] deixis - in Spearing's words - 'liberates discourse by distancing it from the communicative I/you context in which the spoken word originates' (p. 10). The first and second chapters serve as an introduction to the concepts of autography and an exposition on the implications of the united author/ narrator. The second chapter then discusses first-person prologues and the dit - a style of French poem characterised by the illusion of speech in a form dependent on writing. Chapter 3 continues the discussion of Geoffrey Chaucer's prologues, with a particularly enjoyable examination of the Wife of Bath and her textualised existence. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer revels in 'textual deixis' (p. 68) and in undermining the illusion of orality by continued reference to the tales' textuality and material existence as words on a page. The fourth chapter is a somewhat generic excursus about why the autography super-genre was so appealing for English and French authors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Despite the digression, this chapter reminds us, importantly, that medieval poets were creators and inventors who enjoyed textual freedoms and experimentation. Chapters 5 and 6 focus onThomas Hoccleve, beginning with the preamble and prologue to The Regement of Princes, then focusing on his Series. Hoccleve's autography teeters on the brink of autobiography: the persona specifically names himself, we can document traces of the 'real' Hoccleve, and the poems constantly negotiate the idea of the self, shifting between introspection and opinions of. Yet, for Spearing, the rhetoric surrounding the Hoccleve-persona obscures the 'real' Hoccleve, and 'it is enough for the poem to produce effects of proximality and experientiality' (p. 145). The final chapter introduces the Legendys of Hooly Wummen, an all-female hagiography by Osbern Bokenham, a fifteenth-century Augustinian friar and poet of the Chaucerian tradition who has received little critical attention. The Bokenham painted by Spearing is a lively storyteller who, through his first-person narration, relishes the entertainment value of his vitae. Medieval Autographies is sensitive, wide-ranging, and engaging. Spearing aims to attract a wider audience: quotes are translated and each text is carefully summarised and contextualised. However, inexperienced readers would be advised to equip themselves with a good encyclopaedia to cope with the jargon and name-dropping inescapable in such a theory-heavy subject. The structure is logical, with texts increasing in complexity with regards to their author/narrator, foregrounding the beginnings of the shift from autography to autobiography, and the development of modern ideas of selfhood. Particularly valuable to this study is the discussion of the influence of dits on Chaucer and, in turn, Hoccleve and Bokenham. The dit provides the means by which a series of unconnected stories can be held together as a [End Page 233] cohesive narrative by a narrator and its influence perhaps contributed to the growth of first-person writing in fourteenth-century England. Although the discussion covers extensive ground, Spearing's analysis is limited in scope to 'homodiegetic' texts - that is, texts in which the narrator is also present as a character. This carefully skirts around the problematic areas of the generic narrators of romances and chronicles, and the transferable personas of medieval lyrics. The analysis also (to its detriment...

El carácter oral de 'Le Bâtard de Bouillon' (Orality in 'Le Bâtard de Bouillon')

This is an analysis of oral elements in the anonymous French medieval epic poem 'Le Bâtard de Bouillon' (14th century), a work belonging to the Second Cycle of the Crusades. The method of analysis is based on Jean Rychner's theory of formulaic orality as expounded in 'La Chanson de Geste'.

A Tripartite Model for Determining Narratorial Subjectivity in Medieval Romance: The Composite Subject in Partonope of Blois

This essay suggests that the narratorial "I" in medieval romance is a signifying transaction continually being constructed by being opposed to a series of linguistic, social, and psychological "you's," including the audience (real and implied), characters within the romance, narrators in other medieval romances, and even the author. It proposes a tripartite model that accommodates the art of medieval romance composition as well as more modern notions of subjectivity, especially the theorizing of French linguist Émile Benveniste on the linguistic construction of the subject. Such a paradigm suggests that narratorial interventions should be construed as the sites of concurrent multi-directional readings. Specifically, interventions should be read in terms of one another or sequentially, as interpolations that must be contextualized, and inter- and extratextually. When this model is applied to the fifteenth-century Middle English romance Partonope of Blois, a freely adapted version of an Old French poem, inconsistencies and contradictions among the various narrative interventions are found. The only way to resolve these inconsistencies is to stop conceiving of the narrator-subject constructed within different interventions as the same entity. Because the narrator-subject is constructed by external factors and because these external elements are themselves constantly being added, deleted, or modified, the "I" of each intervention has meaning only within the specific intervention in which it is being pronounced. Consequently, the narrator-subject is discontinuous and constructed exclusively within interventions; what we conceive of as a text's narrator is actually a composite of these different constructed sites.

Purity and Perversion: Renée Vivien’s Ophelia Poetry

This article will discuss the way Ophelia’s end is portrayed by the fin de siecle poet Renee Vivien's two French poems “La Chanson d’Ophelie” and “A la perverse Ophelie”. It will examine how, between the first and the second poem, Vivien’s Ophelia shifts from an image of purity and purification of sins by water, as suggested by some previous French poets rewriting the heroine’s death such as Rimbaud, to an icon of perversion who embodies the ambiguities and the demonic aspects of the decadent female figure. First translating Gertrude’s lyricism towards the heroine’s end and imitating the Bard, then challenging his authorship and reshaping a poetical feminine space where men are excluded, Vivien seems to place her poetry and her Ophelia in an agonistic position with respect to the English canon. The poetic imaginary of Ophelia’s drowning in deathly waters blends with other literary references as it is regenerates in another cultural context.

Rilke, Roses, and the Inner Life

In addition to being one of the most famous and beloved German poets of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote a large body of poems in French near the end of his life. Susanne Petermann took on the daunting job of improving the only existing translation into English of these poems. They provide an interesting and, in some ways, more accessible doorway into Rilke's oeuvre. Translating Rilke has proven challenging and personally transformative.

Rainer Maria Rilke, poète français, à l'écoute de Paul Valéry

A comparison between three poems from Valéry’s Charmes with several examples from Rilke’s French poems Vergers shows structural and thematic similarities, but also the specific use of close analogies in the sonorities whose syllabic inversion becomes central for the composition of poems which, in other senses, are very different from each other.

Wait and See: The Ignorant Fairies of Marie de France and Ferzan Ozpetek

This essay is about things that are hard to see. It is, moreover, concerned with what it might mean to wait for them, to take time to see them; what it might mean, conversely, to take time to appear; and how taking time, in this sense, might also be to give time. What I wish to ask--or, perhaps, more precisely, to show--in these pages is how criticism might also suspend itself aesthetically, how it might not just linger in presence of its objects but offer itself to lingering, languorous gaze. What might it mean, critically and poetically, to wait and see? What might such waiting look like? (1) This is a question of critical poetics, but it is also, I wager, a question of critical erotics, of how we might take and give time for libidinal pull of those bodies into whose orbits we are drawn. These are often--in a story that goes back at least as far as Erich Auerbach's Istanbul library--bodies we find close to us, bodies we haven't precisely asked for or sought out, no matter how much retrospective rationalization we may bring, in course of our engagements with them, to their appearing. They are often radically contingent bodies, bodies that have brushed against us in a bookshop or a library, at a party, or in street. To linger with these bodies as they appear to us, to wait and see, might also be to acknowledge that critical poetics often goes to great lengths to forget, or to rush past, basic moment of contiguity and juxtaposition in which it is fundamentally grounded. The figure I'll be using for these difficult-to-discern, contiguous bodies--and for critical process they may invite and initiate--is one designed to make us look twice, or to look more slowly. It is, in other words, a little mawkish, a little fey. A critical poetics of lingering, of aesthetic and erotic attentiveness, might need something as evanescent and sentimental, as strange and sublime, as fairies. And these are not just any fairies; they are ignorant ones. The texts I juxtapose here--texts that touched me, around same time, and summoned me to linger in that simultaneity--are explicitly about fairies and how they resist knowledge, how their appearance defers and frustrates cognitive appropriation even as it solicits erotic response. Ferzan Ozpetek's Ignorant Fairies [Le fate ignoranti, Italy, 2001] is a recent Italian film that depicts discovery by a widow of her dead husband's gay lover; Marie de France's Lanval is a twelfth-century Old French poem in which a knight's sudden luck in love is contingent on his ability to keep his (female) fairy lover a secret. These engagements with erotic disclosure--their secrets are, like all secrets, designed to be disclosed--have in common only a commitment to appearing of beloved bodies and to mode of this appearing: slow, solicitous, and saturated with expectation. This patience and what it implies for knowledge may also, to paraphrase Martin Seel, be what characterizes aesthetic experience as such. By trying to see fairies, and learning to wait for them, to let them be in their repleteness, (2) it may become possible to understand, in a way that finally eludes determination, debt out knowledge of phenomena owes to what escapes knowing in narrow sense. Aesthetic attentiveness--here, specifically attentiveness to appearing of indeterminately sexed, desired bodies--would thus accompany and unsettle determination, while nonetheless never entirely giving it up. Or rather, while abandoning epistemological determination only in strictest sense, that is, by making perceptible latter's constitutive abandon, extent to which knowledge too gives itself and, seen in a certain way, from a certain angle, loses itself in a play of appearances. The fairies with which this essay is concerned will not, in other words, have abdicated knowledge for something entirely outside epistemology. Their ignorance is, instead, ignorance of what appears and of those to whom it appears as appearing, in what Gillian Rose calls the sensation and envelope of visible and invisible beauty. …

From Lyric to Epic and Back: Joachim Du Bellay's Epic Regrets

It had been the dream of the sixteenth-century Pléiade poets to glorify their country and literature by composing a “long French poem,” a term that designated a genre resembling epic but that also included romance. In the 1550s, not only Pierre de Ronsard, who had received an official commission to write the Franciade, but also Joachim Du Bellay were exploring epic as a change from love poetry. Having formally renounced Petrarchist lyric, Du Bellay drew on his experience in the French diplomatic service in Rome to compose his most famous sonnet collection, the Regrets. Although a servant of the monarchy, Du Bellay contests monarchical authority and Ronsardian poetics through a particular reading of Homer: his self-portrayal contrasts with prudent Odysseus, whom Du Bellay's teachers had proposed as a model to the French king and whom the poet claimed ironically to surpass in a pointless epic adventure. At the same time, Du Bellay taunts Ronsard for being a poet in favor with the French court and thus one whose own aventure was an official success. Du Bellay's agon with Ronsard carves out, in effect, areas of empire-undermining and empire-glorifying epic.

Lamothe-Cadillac: sa jeunesse en France by Beverly Matherne

piece: solitude; creation and history (where they collide, they truly leave victims); the role of music (can it be squashed by a totalitarian régime?). Discovering somewhat more of the protagonist’s personality, the reader learns she has a failed marriage behind her, due in part to her insouciance. She tries too hard to please; she is pathologically anorexic; she talks far too much. She repeats ad nauseam many expressions, and it is less than clear whether she is the pianist’s muse, or simply an annoyance, and whether there is another woman, imagined or not, who is really the pianist’s inspiration. When a novel’s back page blurb uses a lengthy quote from the novel followed by an incomprehensible summary sentence, odds are the book is problematic. Lefebvre, to add to the confusion created by her monumentally long sentences, creates her own vocabulary (“violonistiques,” “tennistiques,” anticapitalistique”); throws about literary and musical celebrities such as Mann, Brecht, Proust, Flaubert, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner; adds a pinch of the erudite with “humérus,” “radius,” and “cubitus;” repeats “bonheur collectif,” “la désinvolture,” and “éducation” much too often; mentions products only a select few would have knowledge of such as “Dim ups”, and shows off a musical vocabulary again limited to the few with “scherzo,” “sol bémol,” and “triolet.” This, coupled with the German expressions as well as the English ones, makes this reader wonder if the author was more interested in impressing than in writing impressive literature. It is recommended that she pursue her scholarly articles and leave the path of fiction. Millburn H.S., N.J. emerita Davida Brautman MATHERNE, BEVERLY. Lamothe-Cadillac: sa jeunesse en France (Suite de poèmes en prose en français et en anglais) / Lamothe-Cadillac: His Early Life in France (Written in linked prose poems in French and English). Shreveport, LA: Tintamarre, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9820558-2-3. Pp. 120. $13.50. In 2001, amidst a wave of landmark anniversaries of the French presence in the Western Hemisphere, Louisiana-born poet Beverly Matherne traveled to southwestern France to conduct field research coinciding with the tercentennial of the founding of Detroit by Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac. Matherne’s interest in the life of this adventurer and colonial official led to this bilingual collection of prose poems. Under the apparent simplicity of a biographical portrait lies, in crisp, polished vignettes, the psychosocial germ of the French colonial project in North America. Matherne’s writings have often borne witness to the rawness of childhood experience, drawing powerfully from her own memories of growing up in a rural Cajun community near New Orleans. A resident of northern Michigan, where she teaches creative writing, Matherne would seem to signal a departure with Lamothe-Cadillac, other than geographic affiliation and her commitment to American Francophonie. However, as in earlier works, the problem of memory, both personal and cultural, haunts Matherne’s poetic imagination . Popular recollection typically resurrects figures from colonial history as either intrepid explorers or ruthless glory-seekers. The career of Lamothe-Cadillac embodies both myths. Born Antoine Laumet in 1658 to a Gascon bourgeois family, he clearly sought opportunity in New France. From trapper and trader in Acadie, he became fort commander at Michillimakinac, established Fort Détroit, and Reviews 203 eventually served as governor of Louisiana. In a less flattering light, LamotheCadillac was criticized for his dealings with indigenous peoples, imprisoned for illegal trafficking in 1704, and removed from his position in Louisiana because of personal conflicts. The forty prose poems comprising Lamothe-Cadillac delve into a period less fettered by historical record. Each text, presented in French and English on facing pages, depicts a scene from the protagonist’s youth. These episodes cover his birth and boyhood in the village of Saint-Nicolas, schooling, family activities, religious celebrations, coming-of-age passions, and the beginnings of his military career before his journey to Acadie. Matherne’s recreation of seventeenth-century French life recalls the sumptuous precision of Baroque realism. This verisimilitude reflects her research in France, be it through descriptions of food, clothing (as in Antoine’s admiration of a noble’s “feutre à larges bords garnis de plumes d...

Reborn as René: The Interplay of Self and Language in a Selection of Rilke’s Late French and German Poems

Reborn as René: The Interplay of Self and Language in a Selection of Rilke’s Late French and German Poems

English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (review)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.This monograph presents its readers with an examination of the relationships between men and women as portrayed in a series of French poems that were translated and published in Early Modern England. The book comprises six chapters and three appendices where the author presents her transcriptions of several of the major works examined. Indeed the transcriptions, at least according to the preface, represent one of the major purposes of the work: that of increasing the accessibility of Early Modern printed works. Although one might question the utility of replicating sources already accessible to many scholars through online databases the author's argument that these challenging works achieve greater readability through the book's presentation is on solid ground when the combined challenges of Early Modern type settings, language, style and the cost of online access are considered.In addition to its role in transmitting Early Modern texts the book seeks to offer a new interpretation of early English print culture. By examining some of the earliest works printed in English and by identifying them as translations from late medieval French manuscript poetry this study builds on the work of