A MEDLEVAL POET.*

TASTE fluctuates, and what is right to-day is wrong to-morrow; the old love is thrown aside for the new, and we leave the new again for the old. Villon's poetic reputation is a case in point. After having been counted a barbarian, and allowed to lie un- read in the dusty obscurity of book-shelves by the poets and critics of two centuries, he was suddenly restored by the romanticists, in the literary movement of 1830, to the high posi- tion he presumably held when he wrote ballades iu competition with Charles d'Orleans. It never rains but it pours, and of late years his reputation has extended to England ; we, in turn, have been afflicted with the Villon craze, and translations of his poems and articles dealing with his private life have been sup- plied without number. Mr. D. G. Rossetti was first in the field, and his beautiful rendering of Villon's two best-known poems —" The Ballade of the Ladies of Old Time," and " The Ballade Villon, made at his mother's request "—doubtlessly encouraged other poets to search for new gems amid the works of the old poet. Mr. Swinburne included in the second series of Songs and Ballads some half-dozen or more translations of "The Women of Paris," " Les Regrets de la Belle Haulmiere," &c., and this about exhausted what there was of good ore in the mine ; the rest is mere dross. Mr. Payne now comes forward with a translation of Villon's entire works, and an interesting and picturesque biography of the poet's life. Although the• materials are scanty, Mr. Payne has cleverly fitted the different scraps together, and produced a complete outline, if not a com- plete picture, of this curious man, who combined the different trades of poet, housebreaker, pander, highway robber, and. assassin. Scanty as are the facts illustrative of his career, they suffice to show him pursuing every nefarious occupation which it is possible to find in the annals of crime.

Poets are not always good men, but none have approached Villon in profligacy, few surpassed him in the ostentation of super- stitious piety. Religion is often used as a cloak to be worn on certain occasions, and then thrown aside till the next ; but with Villon, it was a garment that never left him. Before committing murder, he would deplore his sin in pious and earnest words, and while praying for forgiveness in church, he would cast furtive glances at the doors and windows as he walked out, calculating the chances of a successful robbery. The Northern mind cannot readily grasp this essentially Southern condition of blind belief. The idea of a man robbing a church, and then spending his evening in prayer or composing poems, is not easily realised. Yet Villon's life was made up of such inconceivable paradoxes. A biography of this undeniably strange man may have been wanting, but we hardly think that a complete translation of his poems was in any way required. What was worth doing, has been already done, and is accessible to all. The greater and lesser " Testament " are, for the most part, incomprehensible jargon, sometimes on account of the imperfect way Villon's verse has come down, sometimes because the poems, being essentially personal ones, are full of allusions to his friends and events occurring in their immediate circle. Villon indulged in a a free use of the slang of his time, which is, of course, now far more unintelligible even than the wildest typography of a country printing-house. It is amusing to watch Mr. Payne struggling with the impossible, and the courage he displays, going ahead, filling up gap after gap, striving to make sense out of nonsense, is truly wonderful.

As it is impossible to criticise the translation of an incom- prehensible text, we turn to see what Mr. Payne has done with what is perfectly clear to anybody acquainted with French. It is a curious fact, that in the eight or nine poems that really constitute " L'CEuvre de Villon " there are comparatively few words not used in the French of to-day, whereas in the "Testa- ment" and inferior poems one finds oneself soon lost in a maze of conjecture. The commentators explain thoroughly what needs no explanation ; but when an obscure passage occurs, they are either silent, or contradict each other mercilessly. The

• Poems of Master Vitton, of Paris. By John Payne. London: Beeves and Turner.

Ballade of the Ladies of Old Time," were it not for two or three words, at the most, might have been written yesterday. It has for burden the celebrated verse, "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antin," beautifully rendered by Mr. Rossetti, " But where are the snows of yester year ?" Never before or since did a poet find a phrase to render, as this does, the mystery and sorrow of life. This phrase is the phrase above all others that has fixed itself in the modern poetic mind, and it is impossible not to notice that much of the poetry of our day is little more than an amplification of this divine verse. Not to render this ballad satisfactorily, is not to translate Villon. So we turn to Mr. Payne's version :-

" Tell me where, in what land of shade, Hides fair Flora of Rome, and where Are Thais and Archipiade,

Cousins-german in beauty rare ? And Echo, more than mortal fair, That, when one calls by river-flow Or marish, answers out of the air, But what has become of last year's snow ?

Where did the learned Heloisa vade, For whose sake Abelard did not spare, (Such dole for love was on him laid), Manhood to lose and a cowl to wear And where is the Queen that willed whilere That Baridan tied in a sack should go Floating down Seine from the turret-stair ? But what has become of last year's snow ?

Blanche, too, the lily-white queen, that made Sweet music as if she a siren were ; Broad-foot Bertha ; and Joan the maid, The good Lorrainer, the English bare Captive to Rouen, and burned her there; Beatrix, Eremburge, Alys, lo!

Where are they, virgin, debonair?

But what has become of last year's snow ?

Exvoi.

Prince, you may question how they fare, This week or liefer this year, I trow ; Still shall this burden the answer bear,— But what has become of last year's snow?"

Were Villon's poem like, or anything like, this, we venture to say it would not have lived an hour in any one's memory. We do not think, even as an original poem, any magazine would print it, so wretched is the verse, if it be verse at all.

" Hides fair Flora of Rome, and where," represents the simple and graceful line,- " Est Flora, la belle Romaine ?"

And then, the still more beautiful line,—

" Qui fat as cousine germaine,"

a line which no one who could hear the music of French metre could read without re-reading, is rendered by the doggrel,—

" Cousins-german in beauty rare."

But in the last line a point of badness is reached before which criticism halts :-

" Where are they, virgin, debonair ?

But what has become of last year's snow ?"

This is supposed to represent,- " Oil sont ils, vierge, souveraine, Mais oil sont les neiges d'antin ?"

We print the original and translation side by side, to show how hideous and how beautiful poems may be, even when the meaning is somewhat similar in both cases. The substitution of the " debonair " for " souveraine" is simply grotesque.

In Villon's lighter pieces, Mr. Payne is seen to no better ad- vantage. In the " Ballade of the Women of Paris," the burden, n'est bon bec que de Paris," is rendered, " The girls of Paris bear the bell." Not only is this alisurdly weak and totally un- like Villon in spirit, but it shows that the translator is not aware that "bon bec " is a common colloquial expression of the present day. " Quel jolie bec !" " Donne-moi un becco !" are the words one hears spoken to-day, and should, therefore, have been rendered exactly, and not by a feeble paraphrase. A mother says it to her child, a husband to his wife. It is an expression full of delightful familiarity, it links the French of Villon to that of De Musset, it shows how little the spirit of the people has changed. In the same way, Mr. Payne makes a gross mistake when he translates "nu comme un ver," "naked as a snake ;" in the first place, because naked as a snake is not a true image, whereas "naked as a worm" conveys the most distinct and perfect idea of nakedness possible to conceive. Moreover, " nn comme nn ver," like " it n'est bon bec que de Paris," is the ordinary phrase of to-day, and it is curious to note how a verse will preserve a simile or colloquialism through the vicissitudes of centuries.

In the two first lines of the epigram Villon made when con- demned to be hanged, Mr. Payne egregiously fails to understand his author :— ".Te suis Francois, dont ce me poise :

Ne de Paris, en pres de Ponthoise."

The wit, be it good or bad, consists in defining Paris as being near Ponthoise, instead of Ponthoise near Paris. If the joke be taken from an epigram, we ask what is left?

With the ballade that Villon wrote at his mother's.request,

Mr. Payne has done better. The exquisite verse, "Dame dn ciel, regente terriene,"

is fairly translated by,—

"Lady of heaven, regent of the earth."

The next line passes muster, but in the third there is a woeful break-down :- " Receive me, thy poor Christian, spite my dearth," is very poor and scraggy, when compared to the stately sim- plicity of,—

"Recevez-moi, votre humble Chrestienne."

In the second stanza, we find the verses,-

" Assoilzie me, that I may have no teen, Maid that without breach of virginity

Did'st bear our Lord that in the Host is seen. In this belief, I will to live and die,"

doing duty for these beautiful verses,-

" Preservez-moi, que je ne face cease ; Vierge, pourtant me vouillies impartir

Le sacrament qu'on célèbre a la Nesse, En cette foy, je veux vivre et mourir."

The only answer to be made to such translation is, that if it cannot be done otherwise, it should be let alone, for it is as unlike Villon as can be well imagined. Mr. Rossetti, who attempted the same ballade, did some strong English verse, beautiful in its way, but he did not render the immense Miltonic music of the original, and the high atmosphere of faith which sustains it.

Expression, if not everything in an epic, is certainly almost everything in songs, ballades, rondels, rondos, &c. The grace of a phrase, the cleverness of a rhyme, are the life and soul of these lighter forms of verse. For example, it is impossible to read the couplet taken from the ballade to his mother, of the

" Paradis painct od sont harpes et luz,

Et un enfer au dammer sent heath's,"

without pausing to admire the ingenuity of the rhyme (" luz," the plural of "lutes," rhyming with " boulluz "). All such beauties must be lost, no matter how good the translation; there- fore we take it that all rhythmical versions of lyrics must be bad, that is to say, utterly unlike the original. Mr. Swin- burne's translations of Villon as verse are much more powerful than Mr. Payne's, but they are equally unlike Villon. What can be more preposterous than to put into Villon's mouth the phrase, "a splendid kissing mouth " ? It makes the medimval poems read like those of a contemporary versifier, with the plague-spot of plagiarism upon them. To have written such a line, Villon would have had to have read Mr. Swinburne.