A selection of poetry by du Bellay and Ronsard
SELECTED POEMS JOACHIM DU BELLAY AND PIERRE DE RONSARD Translated by Anthony Mortimer 304pp. Oxford World’s Classics. Paperback, £8.99 (US $11.95).
THE 1520S IN FRANCE was a decade of poets. Pontus de Tyard, Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Rémy Belleau and Guillaume des Autels were all born between 1521 and 1529, with Étienne Jodelle and Jean-Antoine de Baïf following in 1532. Theirs would eventually become the loose association of authors known to one another as the “Brigade” and to posterity as the “Pléiade”, after the star cluster in the constellation Taurus. Oxford World’s Classics has marked these quincentenaries by bringing together the starriest of the group – Ronsard, whose 500th anniversary is celebrated this year, and du Bellay – in Anthony Mortimer’s excellent facing-page translation from the French. Following long periods of neglect in the English-speaking world, these awkward and rangy but supremely gifted writers deserve another chance to shine.
The early years of the Pléiade were dazzling, beginning with a landmark of the French Renaissance, the Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549). Du Bellay wrote this cultural manifesto not long after leaving the Collège de Coqueret in Paris, where he is thought to have studied Greek alongside Ronsard and Baïf. In it he sets out, counterintuitively one might think, to promote vernacular poetry by trashing nearly all existing French verse (fixed-form medieval rondeaux, ballades and virelais). Instead he urges poets to imitate Greco-Roman antiquity – or, if they prefer, Italian love poetry. New literary heroes (Pindar, Horace) would be revived, new genres essayed (odes, epics, tragedies and comedies, sonnets) and new French words coined with an antique stamp. In this way the French language would be ennobled and enriched, just as Latin was when Virgil imitated Homer. In the years that followed the rest of the Pléiade parcelled out du Bellay’s programme each according to his talent, accompanied by levels of image marketing that would make a modern boyband blush. Hence Tyard (the dreamy one) wrote neoplatonic love sonnets. Jodelle (the mad one) and Baïf (the scholar) patterned tragedies and comedies on stories from
Plutarch and Plautus. Belleau (the taciturn one) translated Anacreon and Sappho while adding “little inventions” of his own: odelets devoted to butterflies, cherries, coral and other mignardises.
Meanwhile du Bellay and Ronsard led in tandem from the front, each contriving in his own published personality a foil for the other’s. Ronsard styled himself the Orphic poet-seer. His cosmological Hymns, his projected national
