Despite this distinction, du Bellay’s idea of imitation entails some translation: continuing his remarks about borrowing words from other authors, he writes, “it is no vice, but greatly praiseworthy, to borrow from a foreign language ideas and words and to claim them as one’s own.” Even if it is primarily the ideas or the overall quality of a text that is the target of imitation, some words will necessarily be involved, as grafts to a newly written text, words translated from the model texts in Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish. Imitation would involve taking parts of texts, rearranging them, and placing them in a new context—because of this freedom to move elements around, the law of translation would not apply, and the author of the new text would make choices suitable to her or his own local, present-day situation and thus create a highly effective literary work. Rather than being constrained by the stiffness of diction of the translated phrases, the author could strategically place them so as to challenge and complicate the established conventions of the language in which he or she is writing—in very much the sense du Bellay understands the term, such a practice would be an enrichment of this language.
In the brief conclusion of the Deffence, du Bellay suggests just such a use of parts of the literary works of Rome. One passage metaphorically links French imperial expansion to the imitation of works that poets will do in order to glorify France: “Up then, Frenchmen! March courageously on that proud Roman city and from her captured spoils (as you have done more than once) adorn your temples and altars.” This affirmation seems to contradict du Bellay’s characterization of the translation of poetry as sacrilege, especially in the case of literary works, relics, that are removed from their original location and put to use in the temples of the “religion” of a foreign invader. But what makes this practice different from the sacrilege to which du Bellay refers earlier is that it involves a use of relics in a new version of the old “religion” that in fact does it honor by equaling it, rather than offering the inferior work of translation. This practice achieves such an effect by dismantling the relics—cutting them up for grafts, or cannibalizing them—rather than making empty, falsely pious gestures of preserving the relics intact. The new “religion,” the new literature, and the new nation will take the place of the old, in keeping with the cyclical notion of history that du Bellay at times affirms, in which one civilization arises in the wake of another’s fall. Under such circumstances, imitation is a process of taking parts of another literature—which, again, may also be a modern one, from a nation in competition with France for imperial primacy—and incorporating them into one’s own as the basic part of the latter’s enrichment.
This understanding of imitation is in keeping with du Bellay’s own process of composing the Deffence: he borrows quite heavily from an Italian text of his time, Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lengue (Dialogue on languages), first published in Venice in 1542 and well known among French humanists. Du Bellay’s borrowings from Speroni are so great that they prompted Pierre Villey, the early-twentieth-century scholar who first signaled their extent, to characterize the Deffence as a work completely devoid of originality. This judgment of the Deffence was more or less the consensus among critics for most of the twentieth century, although interest in the text as the manifesto of the Pléiade remained high. For the past several decades, scholars have contested this view, seeing in the Deffence an example, even a model, of the very practice of imitation that du Bellay prescribes for poets. Since the Deffence is ostensibly a treatise, not a work of poetry, it might not be obvious that this is what du Bellay is doing. However, the language of the text is quite poetic: it is made up of elaborate, flourishing sentences, heavily marked by rhetorical figures, including many exclamations in the midst of a more coolly persuasive argument. Indeed, Aneau takes him to task for an overuse of metaphors, mixed ones to boot, in a text better suited to “propriety,” proper or literal usage—that is, a treatise. But another of du Bellay’s innovations in Renaissance France, his challenge to poets, is to bring poetic writing to prose texts, as he does here.
Instead of simply repeating what Speroni’s text says, du Bellay strategically borrows passages and redirects their meaning and context in response to his own time and place. The Dialogo delle lengue is, in fact, a dialogue, and the six interlocutors say many different things, disagree with each other, and misunderstand each other—no one position emerges as the dominant one. Du Bellay takes parts of the speeches of several of the interlocutors and arranges them into an argument. For example, one of the speakers, Pietro Bembo (based on the historical figure of the same name), argues against the insistence of another, Lazaro Bonamico (also the name of a historical figure), that modern languages will never equal Greek and Latin. Bembo claims that in the Tuscan dialect of Italian, two centuries earlier Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio wrote works equaling those of antiquity; however, he also grants that sixteenth-century Italian is weak but may see a revitalization with the growing interest in Tuscan. Unlike du Bellay, he does not stress the contemporary language as the one in which a rebirth of literature will take place but rather looks back to fourteenth-century Tuscan; and this language, rather than Greek and Latin, will offer a model for the present day. So it is less a question of taking works in Greek or Latin as models to imitate than of regarding them as setting a high standard. Although he borrows and translates lengthy passages from the Dialogo, du Bellay grafts them to his text in order to yield a new argument.
It is striking that he effectively announces the French literary Renaissance by borrowing so heavily from an Italian text—as though he were devouring it, merging this text with his own. That is, his declaration of a renewed language and literature in French incorporates something foreign as both a source of strength and an obstacle to overcome. He is demonstrating the process of producing the French Renaissance on the basis of foreign elements, the very thing he advocates. Although in his poetic practice he diverges at times considerably from his own prescriptions, in relation to his major Italian source, Petrarch, he adheres closely to this idea of imitation. Moreover, the imitation of Petrarch is at the heart of the French literary Renaissance by way of the prescriptive dominance of the sonnet form: although Marot wrote the first sonnets in French, beginning with du Bellay’s Olive the Petrarchan sonnet became central to French poetry, not only for the other members of the Pléiade, but also for Louise Labé, who begins her 1555 sequence of sonnets affirming women’s equality in erotic relationships with a poem in Italian, unmistakably invoking Petrarch. For centuries the sonnet remained the French poetic form of choice. A brief consideration of du Bellay’s most distinct imitation of Petrarch, the sonnet sequence Songe (Dream), will demonstrate the avenues by which the French literary Renaissance built itself on an Italian forebear. (It is ironic that Petrarch learned the sonnet form from the poetry in Provençal that he read while in southern France, where his father, a lawyer, worked for the exiled papacy in Avignon—so the sonnet comes from a “lesser” Romance language of medieval France, one whose existence du Bellay nowhere acknowledges.)
Among his last writings, Songe is an appendix to his sonnet collection Les antiquitez de Rome (The Antiquities of Rome), which du Bellay published alongside Les regrets (The Regrets), the other sequence he wrote while in Rome working as secretary to his relative Cardinal Jean du Bellay, the French ambassador to the Vatican. The title page of Antiquitez characterizes it as “a general description of her [Rome’s] greatness,” adding that it is also, antithetically, “a lamentation on her ruin.” And to make clear the link between the two very different sequences in the book, the text says, “with a Dream or Vision on the same subject.” The lamentation of Antiquitez focuses on the grand monuments of ancient Rome, which du Bellay presents as conspicuously absent, even unnamed: “these old palaces, these old arches … and these old walls,” he writes in sonnet 3, repeating the word “old” in order to underscore the ubiquity of signs of age. He thus recognizes the two meanings of the word “antiquity,” venerability and decrepitude.
What is most distinct about ancient Rome, celebrated in its heyday as well as in sixteenth-century tourist literature as the Eternal City, is that it fell into ruin—so its eternal status could only ever have been a fiction, and it is subject to the same decay as everything else. Remaining among the ruins is the poetry of Rome, which speaks from the city’s ruined tombs. In keeping with the notion of imitation from the Deffence, du Bellay’s speaker observes the ruin of Rome and its poetry as part of his own composition. The lamentation has an ironic dimension, since the clearing away of Rome that the sonnets of the Antiquitez both note and enact allows space for the rise of the French poetry that du Bellay is exemplifying. He builds the new poetic monuments on the ruins of the old.
Songe is quite different because it does describe some of the monuments of Rome, but fantastically, as though in a dream or vision, as the title indicates. Besides the full title, parts of the sequence very clearly rework a text by Petrarch, the Canzone delle visioni (Song of Visions), poem 323 of the Canzoniere, the Italian poet’s most widely read collection, through which the sonnet was known in Renaissance France. The Canzone delle visioni was widely known in France in Marot’s translation from the early 1530s, Le chant des visions de Petrarque (Petrarch’s Song of Visions). Petrarch’s original is not a sonnet or sequence of sonnets, but rather a series of six twelve-line stanzas followed by a tercet; Marot’s is the same, except that the final short stanza is a quatrain. Du Bellay’s Songe, however, is a series of fifteen sonnets—in selecting this form, he further acknowledges Petrarch as a source. The six visions of Petrarch are of ruin and decay, beauty brought down by a destructive force: they have long been understood to constitute an allegory of the emptiness of earthly beauty. The images are of a wild animal that devours a noble creature; a ship decked out with gold, ivory, and ebony that sinks in a sudden storm; a laurel tree struck by lightning; a fountain swallowed up by an earthquake; a phoenix that meets its final death upon discovering the laurel and the fountain; a lady (Petrarch describes the woman about whom he writes many of the poems in the Canzoniere, Laura) killed by a snakebite. The concluding tercet is the poet’s declaration of the desire for death as the only relief from the loss of worldly beauty.
Of Petrarch’s visions, du Bellay borrows the earthquake, which topples a huge crystal monument (sonnet 2); the tree, which becomes an oak, is destroyed by barbarians (sonnet 5); the phoenix, which becomes an eagle that goes down in flames, but is then reborn from the ashes, like a phoenix (sonnet 7); the fountain, whose stream is muddied by a troop of fauns (sonnet 12); and the ship, which also goes down in a storm, but which resurfaces (sonnet 13). Du Bellay explicitly acknowledges Petrarch by saying that this new ship is “richer” than the one that appeared to “the sad Florentine.” He also tacitly acknowledges Marot’s translation of the Canzone delle visioni by reproducing a line from it: he describes the ship and its cargo as “the great wealth, second to none.” Although the French phrase, “La grand’ richesse à nulle autre seconde,” is a straightforward translation of the Italian, “l’alte richezze a null’altre seconde,” there are several reasons to believe that the repetition is not coincidental. In sixteenth-century France, poetry was such a serious pursuit that poets tended to be quite familiar with the noted works; also, du Bellay places this ten-syllable line in one of his sonnets of this meter, reproducing Marot’s, instead of tailoring it to one of the poems in alexandrine, or twelve-syllable, verse with which he alternates the former in both Antiquitez and Songe. So in this sonnet he also borrows from Marot, showing just how translation may be used as part of imitation. In the other poems of Songe, du Bellay offers a series of calamitous images of ancient Rome, most of which he takes from the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the destruction of Babylon/Rome during the Last Judgment. However, rather than coming to the finality of the End Time, each vision of Rome is followed by another in which Rome rises, only to fall. And in sonnets 7 and 13, there is, unlike in Petrarch’s Canzone delle visioni, a rebirth. That is, du Bellay presents Rome as part of the cycles of rising and falling civilizations—since in his poetic theory he proposes Rome as a model, Rome may, in his poetry, stand in for subsequent empires. The result of the process, though, is that, in the wake of Rome’s ruin, he writes his sonnets, monuments to the French literary Renaissance. He does so by borrowing from the visions of creation and destruction in the work of Petrarch, a much more recent model of civilization and literature in Italy—so from the passing of the older poetry, there is revitalization.
Du Bellay thoroughly recognizes an international and multilingual literature that France must face in its efforts to attain foremost status in the linked realms of politics and literature. Looking back to antiquity as a model has the dual effect of acknowledging the international community of humanist scholars and writers who regarded the legacy of Greece and Rome as the greatest source of learning, and of contributing to the establishment of standards according to which the western European political and intellectual centers could compete with each other. Du Bellay does not hide his interest in the rivalries among these political and cultural powers, since he also advocates borrowing from the poetry of Spain and Italy. In both these countries, the Petrarchan sonnet thrived in the sixteenth century, and it was soon to do so in England as well. Particular to du Bellay’s poetics is its proclamation of the multilingual and international orientation of the renewal of French poetry. Although the major writers of the Italian Renaissance drew heavily on antiquity and also borrowed from the poetry of other countries, the idea of a direct confrontation with and appropriation of other contemporary literatures did not find formulation as such. In England, the situation was a bit different, mainly because of the interest among humanists, chiefly those connected to Richard Mulcaster, the headmaster of the Merchant Taylors’ School in London, who introduced his pupils to the Pléiade and the Deffence. The most distinguished of them, Edmund Spenser, translated du Bellay at the age of sixteen for inclusion in a Protestant tract, Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings, and later published revised versions of this work in Complaints, a collection that appeared in the wake of the success of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. The other poems in Complaints, as well as parts of The Faerie Queene, are strongly marked by du Bellay’s ideas and language. Among readers of Spenser’s du Bellay was Shakespeare, who borrowed phrases from this work for Sonnets; some of Shakespeare’s plays also show clear signs of his readings of sixteenth-century French prose writers François Rabelais and Michel de Montaigne. But these French sources tend to be somewhat hidden in the work of Spenser and Shakespeare; neither they nor any other English Renaissance writer made a public declaration of the importance of borrowing from other languages and literatures comparable to du Bellay’s. This insistence is what makes the Deffence a unique work of poetics in the European Renaissance.
NOTES
1. He wrote I.D.B.A., for Joachim du Bellay, Angevin: in sixteenth-century typography, there was no distinction between the letters “I” and “J,” in English or French; an “Angevin” is someone from the French region of Anjou.
2. In its strict sense, the word “Gaul” designates a member of the ancient tribes that populated France before and during Roman times. Du Bellay uses it, as did many in the Renaissance, as a synonym for the French.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Quotations from du Bellay’s writings are from Joachim du Bellay: “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language” (bilingual edition), ed. and trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). The recent French edition of choice is du Bellay, La deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001). The latter volume also includes the complete text of Barthelémy Aneau’s Quintil horatien (299–361) as well as Claude Gruget’s 1551 French translation of Speroni’s Dialogo delle lengue (193–279), along with the original Italian of the l
atter in facing-text format. Quotations from Petrarch’s Canzone delle visioni are from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (bilingual edition), trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 502–5. Clément Marot’s translation of the Canzone delle visioni, “Chant des visions de Petrarque,” may be found in Marot, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1996), vol. 1, 347–49.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 19