Traduire Lucrèce: pour une histoire de la réception française du 'De rerum natura' (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) by Philippe Chométy et Michèle Rosellini (review)

This rich and rewarding study provides an essential analysis of the reception — via translations, versions, and imitations — of Lucretius's work of philosophical poetry. The book is divided into three sections, the first offering a contextual Introduction by Philippe Chométy and Michèle Rosellini to the reception of his work in early modern France; the second made up of essays by a range of contributors; and the third an anthology of translations of the Hymn to Venus that opens his poem, by Joachim Du Bellay, Michel de Marolles, Antoinette Deshoulières, Nicolas La Grange, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, and Marie-Joseph Chénier, to name but a few, which forms a precursor to an envisioned larger anthology (see p. 8). The reception of Lucretius in France has received far less attention than that of other Latin poets; and the authors distinguish their study from the principal two critical works — Simone Fraisse's L'Influence de Lucrèce en France au seizième siècle (Paris: Nizet, 1962) and Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (New York: Norton, 2011) — primarily by focusing on a diverse range of translations. The Introduction traces the tensions that define Lucretius's early modern reception: namely, the difficulty of making his ideas compatible with Catholic doctrine, his generic hybridity, and the linguistic challenge he posed for translators. The changing responses to Lucretius's text are mapped more widely onto reactions to Epicureanism, and are marked by the heterodox implications of this philosophy. At certain moments, his translations became a tool for 'l'expression de la libre pensée' (p. 61) — for instance, for the early seventeenth-century libertins; for Protestants after 1685, thanks to the translation by Des Coutures (Paris: Guillain, 1685); this is also evident in the materialist translation of his verse by M. L. G (La Grange) (Paris: Bleuet, 1768). His work was attacked by the Catholic church, notably in Melchior de Polignac's unfinished L'Anti-Lucrèce, composed during the first forty years of the eighteenth century. This reception is juxtaposed with the process of 'classicisation' (p. 56) undergone by this poem, epitomized by the 1680 ad Usum Delphini edition; the De rerum natura had also been assimilated into a wide literary community, and made acceptable to a Christian reader by the translation of Marolles (Paris: Toussant Quinet, 1650), which receives excellent analysis in the chapter by Florence de Caigny. A fascinating discussion of the lost translation attributed to Molière and the influence of English, Italian, and German translations on the eighteenth-century French reception of Lucretius makes this Introduction particularly stimulating. In the second section, close attention is paid to the lexical challenges posed by Lucretius's poem (Bénédicte Delignon; José Kany-Turpin) and by one of its translations, the 'imitation en galimatias', by Deshoulières (Philippe Chométy). Other chapters consider his influence on Montaigne (Fanny Rouet), the Theophrastus redivivus (Nicole Gengoux), and La Fontaine (Yves Le Pestipon), while others pay heed to the ideological or literary challenges posed by translations of his work in specific contexts (Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, Jean-Pascal Boulet, and Frédéric Tinguely). This is a detailed and essential study that seems certain to inspire interest in the reception of Lucretius in French culture.