The Prophecies

by Nostradamus

  Patrice Guinard has recently published a detailed study of the Prophecies’ successive editions: “Historique des éditions des Prophéties de Nostradamus (1555–1615),” Revue française d’histoire du livre 129 (2009): 7–142. The best guide to French-language publications by and about Nostradamus (up to 1989) is Robert Benazra, Répertoire chronologique nostradamique: 1545–1989 (Paris: La Grande Conjonction, 1990). There are useful complements in Michel Chomarat with Jean-Paul Laroche, Bibliographie Nostradamus: XVIe-XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Baden-Baden and Bouxwiller: V. Koerner, 1989); Chomarat, Supplément à la Bibliographie lyonnaise des Nostradamus (Lyon: Centre Culturel de Buenc, 1976); and Chomarat, “Nouvelles recherches sur les ‘Prophéties’ de Michel Nostradamus,” Revue française d’histoire du livre, new ser., 48, 22 (1979): 123–31. For earlier bibliographies, see De Rg., “De quelques ouvrages contenant des prédictions,” Le bibliophile belge 5 (1848): 91–113; and Graf Carl v. Klinckowstroem, “Die ältesten Ausgaben der ‘Prophéties’ des Nostradamus: Ein Beitrag zur Nostradamus-Bibliographie,” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde (March 1913): 361–72.

  Scholarship on Nostradamus’s Prophecies is relatively sparse (especially in English). The standard biography is Edgar Leroy, Nostradamus: Ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre, new ed. (Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 1993 [1972]). See also Peter Lemesurier, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Ian Wilson, Nostradamus: The Man behind the Prophecies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Elmar Gruber, Nostradamus: Sein Leben, sein Werk und die wahre Bedeutung seiner Prophezeiungen (Bern: Scherz, 2003); and Richard Smoley, The Essential Nostradamus: Literal Translation, Historical Commentary, and Biography, 2nd ed. (New York: J. P. Tarcher, 2010). Patrice Guinard’s online Corpus Nostradamus provides a trove of well-documented articles (http://cura.free.fr). Scholars have recently sought to place Nostradamus and his Prophecies in their cultural world. On Nostradamus as a Renaissance humanist with a historical bent, see Michel Chomarat, Jean Dupèbe, and Gilles Polizzi, Nostradamus ou Le savoir transmis (Lyon: Michel Chomarat, 1997); and Roger Prévost, Nostradamus, le mythe et la réalité: Un historien au temps des astrologues (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999). Jean Céard situates Nostradamus in the sixteenth-century culture of wonder in his La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au XVIe siècle, en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977). Pierre Brind’Amour provides a fascinating portrait of Nostradamus as an astrologer in his Nostradamus astrophile: Les astres et l’astrologie dans la vie et l’oeuvre de Nostradamus (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1993). On the sources and ramifications of Nostradamus’s predictions, see Chantal Liaroutzos, “Les prophéties de Nostradamus: Suivez la Guide,” Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance 12, 23 (December 1986): 35–40; Claude-Gilbert Dubois, “L’invention prédictive dans les ‘Prophéties’ de Nostradamus,” in Richard Caron et al., eds., Ésotérisme, gnoses et imaginaire symbolique: Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2001), 547–57; and Dubois, “Un imaginaire de la catastrophe: Nostradamus, témoin du présent et visionnaire du futur,” Eidôlon 58 (2001): 69–81.

  Other scholars take the Prophecies’ title seriously and view Nostradamus as first and foremost a prophet. See Olivier Pot, “Prophétie et mélancolie: La querelle entre Ronsard et les Protestants (1562–1565),” Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier 15: Protestants et prophéties au XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’ENS, 1998), 189–229; as well as Pierre Béhar, Les langues occultes de la Renaissance: Essai sur la crise intellectuelle de l’Europe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Desjonquères, 1996), ch. 5. Denis Crouzet places Nostradamus within a surge of astrological prophecy, increasingly focused on the Last Judgment and the struggle against Satan, in his Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610), 2 vols. (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 1990). More recently, Crouzet has presented Nostradamus’s predictions as a hermeneutics that took form in dialogue with evangelical currents. See his Nostradamus: Une médecine des âmes à la Renaissance (Paris: Payot, 2011).

  Still other scholars insist that Nostradamus was fundamentally a poet. François Crouzet first made the argument in his Nostradamus, poète français (Paris: Julliard, 1973). Yvonne Bellenger added stones to this edifice in “Nostradamus prophète ou poète?” in M. T. Jones-Davies, ed., Devins et charlatans au temps de la Renaissance (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1979), 83–100; and “Sur la poétique de Nostradamus,” in François Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand, eds., Poétique et narration: Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1993), 177–90. More recently, the Swedish scholar Anna Carlstedt has depicted Nostradamus as a melancholy poet in her “La poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus: Langue, style et genre des Centuries” (PhD dissertation, University of Stockholm, 2005); and “Nostradamus mélancolique: Un poète déguisé en prophète?” Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 22, 2 (2004): 41–55. For a close analysis of Nostradamus’s poetic language, see David Shepheard, “Pour une poétique du genre oraculaire: À propos de Nostradamus,” Revue de littérature comparée 60 (January–March 1986): 59–65.

  The reception of the Prophecies over the centuries is a vast topic, which some of the works above broach intermittently. On Nostradamus’s detractors, see Olivier Millet, “Feux croisés sur Nostradamus aux XVIe siècle,” Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier 4: Divination et controverse religieuse en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’ENS, 1987), 103–21. Studies of Nostradamus’s posterity since the Renaissance began with François Buget, “Études sur Nostradamus,” a series of nine articles in the Bulletin du bibliophile et du bibliothécaire (1857–63). One should also consult Hervé Drévillon, Lire et écrire l’avenir: L’astrologie dans la France du Grand Siècle, 1610–1715 (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 1996); Drévillon and Pierre Lagrange, Nostradamus: L’éternel retour (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 2003); Jean-Paul Laroche, Prophéties pour temps de crise: Interprétations de Nostradamus au fil des siècles (Lyon: Michel Chomarat, 2003); Yvonne Bellenger, “Nostradamus au fil du temps,” in Fiona McIntosh-Varjabédian and Véronique Gély, eds., La postérité de la Renaissance (Lille: Université Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille 3, 2007), 115–27; and Stéphane Gerson, Nostradamus: How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012). On the Prophecies’ translations, consult Martine Bracops, ed., Nostradamus traducteur traduit: Actes du colloque international tenu à Bruxelles le 14 décembre 1999 (Brussels: Editions du Hazard, 2000).

  Finally, regarding Tristan Tzara’s discovery of the Prophecies during World War I and Bennett Cerf’s use of the book during World War II, see Gordon Browning, “Tristan Tzara: La grande complainte de mon obscurité,” Europe 555–56 (1975): 202–13; transcript of a CBS radio interview with Bennett Cerf, 16 January 1943, in “Of Men and Books,” Northwestern University on the Air 2, 16 (1943): 4; and Gordon B. Neavill, “Publishing in Wartime: The Modern Library Series During the Second World War,” Library Trends 55 (Winter 2007): 583–96.

  STÉPHANE GERSON

  Translator’s Introduction

  The Poetics of Futurity

  When I was initially approached about undertaking a fresh translation of Nostradamus’s complete Prophecies—or the Centuries, as they are also known—I had never read a single line of his work. Even for someone who considered himself relatively well versed in the canon of sixteenth-century French poetry, Nostradamus was simply off the map—a name vaguely associated with the heavy breathers of apocalypse, dotty maiden aunts, late-night viewers of the History Channel, or those consumers of astrology columns whose mass delusions Theodor Adorno had, during a visit to Los Angeles in 1953, so trenchantly exposed in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. But as I made my way into the project (thanks in part to the encouragement of my colleague Stéphane Gerson), I discovered in Nostradamus a compelling poet, perhaps not one of the magnitude of his French contemporaries Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Pierre de Ronsard, or Joachim du Bellay, but a genuine poet no
netheless, certainly deserving of inclusion, in his own homespun and wayward fashion, within that larger visionary company defined by the vatic tradition of Virgil, Dante, D’Aubigné, Du Bartas, Milton, and Blake.

  As a versifier, Nostradamus exhibits a formal range that is slight indeed, especially if compared to the exuberant strophic and prosodic experiments of the poets of the Pléiade. With the exception of a few spurious late six-line sixains, the entirety of his published poetic corpus is composed of rhymed (abab) decasyllabic quatrains—a popular vehicle in the French sixteenth century for matters as various as biblical psalms, Calvinist hymns, humanist adages, courtly epigrams, and moral instruction for the young. Nostradamus’s Prophecies, the first installment of which was issued in 1555, were designed to add up to one thousand such quatrains in all, subdivided into ten books (or Centuries) of a hundred quatrains each. Fifty-eight quatrains are missing from the work’s seventh Century—no doubt because of the editorial vagaries involved in the serial composition and publication of an endeavor of this scope; as a result, when the complete edition of the Prophecies appeared posthumously in 1568, its 942 quatrains fell somewhat short of the millenary originally envisaged. The nearest contemporary equivalent to this arithmetic permutation of identical poetic modules is Scève’s 1544 Délie, composed of 449 decasyllabic dizains of ten lines each. In both cases, the reiterative hammering home of a single poetic chord, each time the same, each time warped into a slightly different overtone, produces what John Ashbery (speaking of Scève) has termed “a fruitful monotony, ideal for repetitions with minimal variations”—either a hallmark of modernist composition by field or grid, or a symptom of that black and brooding melancholia from whose anatomy Renaissance humanism never quite manages to escape.

  Although they have been more or less continuously in print in French for nearly five hundred years—bibliographers count some two hundred different editions—the Prophecies were in fact not the work that catapulted Nostradamus into European celebrity: the belated translation of the complete True Prophecies into English by Theophilus de Garencières in 1672 is proof that his magnum opus did not really take off until the seventeenth century. Instead, during his lifetime, his meteoric rise to fame was fueled by the almanacs he published on a yearly basis from 1550 until his death in 1566. Also known as his Présages or Prognostications, these ephemeral chapbooks benefited from the success of that vast body of predictive astrological literature that, with the spread of printing, already had become so bloated that it was ripe for parodic puncture in Rabelais’s satirical Pantagrueline Prognostication for the Year 1533. Nostradamus’s almanacs observed the standard conventions of the genre, featuring as they did calendars, ephemerides, lists of movable feasts, and weather forecasts, as well as increasingly alarmist prose vaticinations that provided monthly auguries of the latest news of the world, as espied from the prophetic vantage point of his provincial hometown of Salon de Craux in southern France. By the end of his life, the steady sales of his almanacs, together with his far-flung network of wealthy (and sometimes royal) clients seeking private horoscopic advice, had made Michel de Nostredame a prosperous man.

  Scholars have ventured several explanations for the extraordinary “Nostradamus effect” that generated countless imitations, plagiarisms, and translations of his Présages during the late Renaissance. Some point to the deep eschatological anxiety that held Europe in its grip during this period of fierce religious and political strife; others invoke the environmental, epidemiological, and economic disasters that beset the plague- and famine-ridden continent during the severe climate changes of what has been called its Little Ice Age. Cultural historians in turn underscore the swift expansion of a reading public hungry for titles in the vernacular and the concomitant explosion of the book trade, especially in places like Lyon—where Nostradamus’s publishers savvily merchandised him as a brand name, issuing additional volumes of his pharmaceutical recipes and paraphrases from Galen to buttress his reputation as a “Doctor of Medicine” (which was how he appeared on the title page of all his almanacs). But the characteristic innovation that set his chapbooks off from those of his competitors was (starting with his Prognostication nouvelle of 1555) the introduction of portentous quatrains keyed to the various months of the year. By fusing science with prophecy, astrology with vernacular poetry, Nostradamus had hit upon a winning formula.

  Here is what these calendar poems sounded like in English in a cheap eight-page Almanacke for the Yeare of Oure Lorde God, 1559, Composed by Mayster Mychael Nostradamus, Doctour of Phisike:

  February

  Grayne, corruption, pestilentiall ayre, locustes.

  Sodayn fall, newes, newes shall rise,

  Captives yroned, swift, high, lowe, heavy,

  By his bones, evil which wold not be to the King.

  August

  The earthen potte found, the citie tributory,

  Fields divided, newe begylynges,

  The Spaniard hurt, hunger, warly pestilence

  Obstinate mockery, confusedness, evyl, ravying.

  As a trained apothecary and herbalist, Nostradamus tended (like his fellow student at the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier, François Rabelais) to organize his universe into lists—hence, in the above quatrains, the agrammatical declension of nouns and modifiers, elliptically spliced together by commas and featuring virtually no verbs to govern logical sequence. Though they might initially strike one as sixteenth-century Dada, these crude English translations—without rhyme or apparent meter—nonetheless manage to register the basic architectonics of Nostradamus’s verse, whose decasyllables are invariably cut in two by a strong rhythmic and semantic break falling after the fourth syllable, creating a caesura that often has the force of a colon. Thus one might repunctuate (and modernize) a few of the above lines as follows :

  Sudden fall : news, news shall rise

  Fields divided : new beginnings

  Obstinate mockery : confusion, evil, raving

  To my ear at least, this rings uncannily like the kind of folksy sententiousness one finds in Ezra Pound’s translations from the archaic Chinese of The Confucian Odes—a model I have kept in view throughout my translation.

  But to the English ear of 1559, just in the process of discovering the mellifluous Petrarchan syntax of Wyatt and Surrey, this kind of choppy, paratactic verse not only sounded uncouth: it was deemed positively subversive. As one contemporary commentator remarked of the above almanac, “our craftye Nostradamus coulde wrappe hys prophesyes in such darke wryncles of obscuritye that no man could pyke out of them either sence or understandying certayn.” Like “the devyll at Delphos” who inspired the oracles of Apollo, these quatrains were “obscure, double, and suche as myght chance both waies.” Given the still-fragile condition of the English polity—the young, untested Elizabeth Tudor had just been made queen that same year after fraught contentions for the crown—Nostradamus’s “blinde enigmatical” ambiguities threatened to cause the populace so to “waver” that they would abandon the “heavenly fountayne of hope” for “the bottomlesse pytte of utter desperation.” Dismissed as arrant nonsense, yet at the same time feared because they invited their readers into a world teetering on an alarming surplus (or abyss) of meaning, Nostradamus’s almanacs spawned a slew of doomsday imitators in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare, writing a generation after the craze, unerringly captures all the rhetorical and astrological commonplaces of Nostradamian dread in Horatio’s speech at the outset of Hamlet, just before the appearance of the Ghost :

  As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,

  Disasters in the sun; and the moist star

  Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands

  Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

  And even the like precurse of feared events,

  As harbingers preceding still the fates

  And prologue to the omen coming on,

  Have heaven and earth together demonstrated

  Unto our climatures and countrymen
.

  The distant shade of Nostradamus can even be heard haunting the battlefields of Richard II:

  The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d

  And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven;

  The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,

  And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change…

  From age forty-seven onward, during the last sixteen years of his life, Michel de Nostredame churned out almanac after almanac, saturating the market while whispering fearful change. His Prophecies, by contrast, composed over a short span of four years (1554–58), define a notable parenthesis within his more commercial output. Far more ambitious in scope, more carefully designed and composed, they would seem to represent his attempt to legitimize his work in the eyes of educated readers while hoping to attract royal patronage of Henri II—although, curiously enough, precious few direct references to his magnum opus on the part of his contemporaries have survived. The first edition of the Prophecies of “M. Michel Nostradamus”—the more gentlemanly “Monsieur” having replaced the “Doctor of Medicine” of the almanacs—appeared in Lyon in May 1555, under the imprint of Macé Bonhomme. Handsomely printed, with a title-page woodcut of its full-bearded author seated at his table with open book and astrolabe as he looks out at the starry firmament beyond his window, it consisted of 354 quatrains, preceded by a preface addressed to his son César. A second Lyon edition, published by Antoine du Rosne in 1557, cumulatively expanded the number of Centuries to seven (though mysteriously cutting off halfway through the final section). A third edition, comprising the last three Centuries (eight through ten), was apparently brought out by Lyon publisher Jean de Tournes in 1558, though not a single copy of it has ever turned up. If this edition is indeed not apocryphal, it would provide proof that Nostradamus had with his huge new work-in-progress attracted the attention of the leading humanist circles of Lyon: Jean de Tournes was after all the highly respected publisher of Aesop, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Du Bellay, Labé, and Scève. After a rather inexplicable ten-year hiatus, the complete edition of the Prophecies (still missing fifty-eight quatrains, but including an epistle to [the late] king Henri II inserted as a preface to the final three Centuries) was issued by Benoist Rigaud in Lyon in 1568, two years after its author’s death. Some scholars have doubted the authenticity of the three hundred new quatrains included in this posthumous edition, suggesting possible editorial mischief on the part of Nostradamus’s faithful amanuensis, Jean-Aimé de Chavigny. Having closely pored over this final portion of the poem—the zaniest of the lot—all I can say is that its author’s idiosyncrasies of diction and syntax are palpable in every line.