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Reviewed by:
  • Étienne de la Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin
  • Hervé Thomas Campangne
Marcel Tetel , ed. Étienne de la Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin. Actes du Colloque International, Duke University, 26–28 mars 1999; Colloques, congrès et conférences sur la Renaissance 30. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2004. 446 pp. index. tbls. €33. ISBN: 2–7453–0803–3.

The essays gathered in this fine proceedings volume will allow readers to rediscover the many faces of Etienne de La Boétie. Chiefly known for his Discourse of Voluntary Servitude and best remembered as Montaigne's close friend, the man who began a distinguished career at the Bordeaux parlement in 1554 is also the author of French and neo-Latin poetry, of translations, and of the Mémoire touchant l'Edit de janvier 1562. The various contributions gathered by Marcel Tetel nicely complement the essays and critical editions that have been published in recent years on the political philosopher (Annie-Marie Cocula's Etienne de la Boétie comes to mind, as well as Michel Magnien's 1997 bibliographical study).

The book is divided into five parts. The first contains three essays on La Boétie as translator. Michel Magnien reminds us that in the days of the debate that opposed advocates of translatio ad sensum to those of translatio ad verbum, the man who helped Arnoul Le Ferron prepare his edition of Plutarch's Erôtikos gave French readers precise and sound translations of Xenophon's Oeconomicus and other texts. Contrary to many of his contemporaries, La Boétie did not simply look at Latin versions of the Greek works he translated; however, his respect of the antiqua verba did not prevent him from creating works readable by erudite humanists and non-specialists alike. John O'Brien shows that La Boétie avoided many of the mistakes of his predecessors as he translated the Oeconomicus. His essay also contains a useful and comprehensive history of the various translations of Xenophon's text from Cicero to Tory, Volterrano, and Strebaeus. Alessandra Preda looks at the translator's rendering of canto 32 of the Orlando furioso. She underlines that La Boétie found expressions of passion rather than of epic poetry in Ariosto's text, and examines the important verse introduction in which he reflected upon the difficulties and merits of the translator's task. The essays in this first section give us the image of a philologist who successfully "illustrated" the French vernacular and envisioned translation as a vital link to classical culture.

Part 2 focuses on the poetry of La Boétie. Malcolm Quainton finds in the dispositio and elocutio of the Vers françois a structural, phonetic, and semantic coherence opposite to the lack of polish that Colletet and Sainte-Beuve saw in the twenty-five sonnets written in 1571–72. Françoise Charpentier reads the famous twenty-nine sonnets as a canzoniere in which the author reinvents the traditional [End Page 236] Petrarchian themes of love poetry. In spite of Montaigne's ambiguous judgment, Charpentier invites us to envision La Boétie's French poetry as a set of well-structured pieces that echoed the doctrines of the Pléiade. Perrine Galand-Hallyn's essay reexamines La Boétie's poemata in the light of the silves, a poetic genre that enjoyed great popularity in 1570s France. The author contends that as a heteroclite series of poems retracing an initiatic quest, the poemata have much in common with the spirit of Montaigne's Essays. Giovani Dotoli reminds us that La Boétie's voice is the Ursprung of Montaigne's book and depicts the various forms of the dialogue between the two friends that is staged in the Essays. Overall, the essays gathered in this section invite us to go beyond the traditional image of La Boétie as amateur poet in order to discover an author who successfully experimented with a wide array of poetic forms and was well informed on the poetic trends, themes, and debates of his time.

A series of essays follows that deal with the rhetoric and style of La Boétie's...

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