I came to Malherbe (still my favourite French poet) via Basil Bunting, who writes with typical brevity and unforgettable élan of his virtues as well as his vices:
And where had these drum-bangers and trumpeters [he is referring to Shakespeare and Marlowe!] mislaid Wyat’s lute? Had they no ear for Dowland? Whenever a bit of loud-mouthed slapdash from the Elizabethan stage comes my way I remember Shakespeare was a contemporary of Malherbe, a man who never forgot music for a moment and who, for all his determination to eat more toads than the next fellow, ate 'em with such a clean melody and so little mumbo-jumbo that he stands inspection still without any allowances for period etc.
I’ve been thinking when worries let me about how and where I got whatever I know and feel about poetry, and the more I think the bigger Malherbe’s part in it seems. [. . .] Malherbe produced all I afterwards found in Ez’s [Ezra Pound’s] writing except what I’d already got from Horace.
Bunting has a personal canon of poets who were influential upon him, and it is noticeable that his collected poems includes translations or versions of almost all of them (including Horace, Villon, Hafez, Manuchehri and Ferdosi) — apart, that is, from Malherbe.
It seems that even such a consummate translator and ‘versioner’ of other poets as Bunting found Malherbe rebarbative. In my vastly smaller way, I have also repeatedly tried and failed to produce anything satisfactory beyond a line or two. This is odd because — as Bunting himself indicates — Malherbe’s style is nothing if not straightforward (‘with such a clean melody and so little mumbo-jumbo’). Here’s the start of one of the very greatest of Malherbe’s major odes, addressed to his patron Bellegarde in around 1608:
À la fin c’est trop de silenceEn si beau sujet de parler:Le mérite qu’on veut celerSouffre une injuste violence:Bellegarde unique supportOù mes voeux ont trouvé leur port,Que tarde ma paresse ingrate,Que déjà ton bruit nonpareilAux bords du Tage, et de l’Euphrate,N’a vu l’un et l’autre Soleil?
In a piece about the impossibility of producing a good translation, it is painful to have to demonstrate the point at length with more-or-less literal stop-gaps, so I apologise for all the translations in this post.2 If you have any French at all, I encourage you to at least read the verse aloud. All the same, this means something like:
It is time at last to end my silenceHaving so fine a subject on which to speak:The merit that we mean to concealSuffers violence beyond justice:Bellegarde, the only supportIn which my wishes have found their harbour,How can my ungrateful sloth be so slowThat your unmatched fame has not alreadyBy the Tagus and the EuphratesSeen the sun on both those banks?
Malherbe is so much more than the sum of his parts. His poetry is so perfectly beautiful and (for me) quite unbearably moving even though, as Bunting indicates, the occasions of his verse are highly conventional: Malherbe praises powerful men, thanks them (as here) for patronage, urges them to war and celebrates their victories; he describes the beauty and virtue of distinguished women; he offers consolation on deaths, and celebrates marriages. He addresses exactly those occasions you would expect a court poet to address, and we find in his verse almost nothing recognisably ‘personal’.
Here he commemorates the princess Marie de Bourbon, who died aged only 12 days old in 1610:
N’égalons point cette petite,Aux déesses que nous réciteL’histoire des siècles passés.Tout cela n’est qu’une chimère:Il faut dire pour dire assez,Elle est belle comme sa mère.Let not this small one stand compareWith those divinities whom historyCentury on century brings to bear.All of that is but a dream.It is enough to say: in herHer mother’s beauty can be seen.
His patriotism is quite often ferocious. Here he urges the king to put down a rebellion:
Fais choir en sacrifice au démon de la FranceLes fronts trop élevés de ces âmes d’enfer:Et n’épargne contre eux pour notre délivranceNi le feu ni le fer.Make the proud brows of those souls of hellFall as a sacrifice to the spirit of France:And for our deliverance against them spareNot the iron, nor the fire.
We find a few surprises, especially in the various ‘fragments’ scattered in his collected verse. Here is a rather rare — and apparently incomplete — piece of satire, which seems to be aimed retrospectively at the minions of Henri III, self-indulgently imagining the wars of religion as the Crusades and carelessly rousing the horror of civil war:4
Les peuples pipés de leur mine,Les voyant ainsi renfermer,Jugeaient qu’ils parlaient de s’armerPour conquérir la PalestineEt borner de Tyr à CalisL’Empire de la fleur de lis;Et toutefois leur entrepriseÉtait le parfum d’un collet,Le point coupé d’une chemise,Et la figure d’un ballet.De leur mollesse léthargique,Le discord sortant des enfers,Des maux que nous avons souffertsNous ourdit la toile tragique;La justice n’eut plus de poids;L’impunité chassa les lois;Et le taon des guerres civilesPiqua les âmes des méchants,Qui firent avoir à nos villesLa face déserte des champs.Deceived by their expressions,Seeing them so withdrawn,They thought they must be talkingOf conquering Palestine —Of spreading the French ensignFrom Calais to Lebanon;
But all the time their plansExtended only so farAs a perfumed collar,The sharp cut of a shirt,Or a new step at the dance.From such courtly gracesHell itself emerged:From the sorrows we have enduredDiscord for us woveA tragic tapestry;Justice bore no more weight;Impunity put law to flight;And the goad of civil warSpurred on those wicked soulsWho made our towns endureThe waste of all their fields.
What is it that makes a plain style sometimes — in its most perfect form — the most untranslatable of all? I think it is something to do with there being absolutely no space to hide: Malherbe, even more than Virgil or Ben Jonson, confines himself to quite a narrow range of words, the ‘purity of diction’ so well described by Donald Davie.5 Although always alert to their full range of meaning and the wealth of their history, both literary and linguistic, these authors make a point of using ‘normal’ words (for their time and genre): they don’t create drama or effect partly by word choice. This is a very difficult thing to write about well as a critic, because it means pinpointing something that’s not there. It’s much easier to start with examples of elaborate or unusual diction, and indeed when I wrote about Virgil ‘as a poet’ for the recently revised Cambridge Companion to Virgil, that’s where I began: with the exceptions to this rule, the moments where Virgil makes moving use of unexpected words such as the markedly prosaic and unpoetic words bufo (usually translated as ‘toad’, though it may in fact mean ‘field-mouse’) and curculio (‘weevil’) at Georgics 1.184-6 or — conversely — the concentration of Greek words in the ‘catalogue of nymphs’ in Georgics 4, when Aristaeus summons his mother Cyrene.
The ‘purity’ of Malherbe’s diction creates a real challenge for any translator who is trying to produce not just an acceptable prose crib, but an actual poem. If you are translating a more extravagant sort of verse, replete with “effects” — whether those are striking alliteration, or audacious rhymes, or disrupted metres, or a cluster of unusual words — it is unlikely that you can reproduce those particular effects at exactly the same point in your version of the poem, but you can, perhaps, introduce marked alliteration in an adjacent line, choose an unusual word yourself, or even mix things up. You might find that the surprise of a metrical disruption in the original can be suggested by a surprising choice of word in the new version. Poetry like Malherbe’s which so consummately resists these kinds of “effects” leaves the translator very little room for manoeuvre.
Though never obscure, Malherbe is often remarkably concise: many passages which seem straightforward as you read them in French are surprisingly hard to put even into the most prosaic kind of translation, and expand rapidly in the attempt. And as Bunting indicates, his verse is above all melodious. Translation founders in the face of such a combination.
Perhaps the best way to convey the power of a poet like Malherbe is not so much by failed attempts at translation, but by searching for parallels: for examples of verse in our own language, or other languages familiar to us which achieve something comparable. For those who read Latin, I think of the extraordinarily beautiful passage near the beginning of Book 7 in the Aeneid, perhaps the most calm and blessed moment in that whole poem, as Aeneas finally enters the mouth of the Tiber.6 In English, I think Ben Jonson, though he pulled it off much less often than Malherbe, has some passages which stand deservedly alongside him, including his ‘Queen and huntress’, a song from Cynthia’s Revels (c. 1600). The poem is addressed to Cynthia — that is Diana, the moon — and, by implication, also the aged Queen Elizabeth herself:
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,Now the sun is laid to sleep,Seated in thy silver chairState in wonted manner keep:Hesperus entreats thy light,Goddess excellently bright.Earth, let not thy envious shadeDare itself to interpose;Cynthia's shining orb was madeHeaven to clear when day did close:Bless us then with wished sight,Goddess excellently bright.Lay thy bow of pearl apartAnd thy crystal-shining quiver;Give unto the flying hartSpace to breathe, how short soever:Thou that mak'st a day of night,Goddess excellently bright.
Lines 1-10 (first stanza) of Malherbe’s long ode ‘À Monseigneur le Duc de Bellegarde, Grand Écuyer de France’, dating from around 1608.
English translations of Malherbe, even for student purposes, seem very few and far between, so the translations in this post are all my own rough efforts. If anyone knows of any good ones, do let me know.
Lines 5-8 of ‘Pour le roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois, et chasser les Anglais, qui en leur faveur étaient descendus en l’île de Ré’, dating from 1628.
I’m grateful to my husband, David, who helped me understand the probable historical context of this poem, apparently written retrospectively under Henri IV.
Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952; reissued 1992).
Aeneid 7.25-36. In Latin here. Dryden picks out this passage for its expressive beauty in the introduction to his version, but I won’t quote his translation of it here because, at least for a modern reader, I think it obscures rather than reveals the quality of the original. In fact, I know of no convincing translation of this passage. Mandelbaum’s disciplined 1971 version, though almost entirely without poetic interest of its own, at least does not actively work against the original.