Le Livre du Voir Dit (Le Dit veridique) (review)

Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit (Le Dit véridique).Edited and translated by Paul Imbs. Revised and coordinated, with an introduction, by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet. Index of proper names and glossary by Noël Musso. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999 (Lettres Gothiques). 832 pages.

It is a pleasure to herald the recent publication of Paul Imbs' critical edition of the Voir Dit, perhaps the greatest work of the French fourteenth century and certainly one of the masterpieces of the vernacular literature of the European Middle Ages. The edition, which Imbs did not live to see published, appears now in the distinguished Lettres Gothiques series, introduced and fully revised by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet. The paperback volume thus constitutes the sole critical edition of Guillaume de Machaut's most famous work, which was first published in the willfully "non-scientific" and "non-philological" form given to it by Paulin Paris in his 1875 edition, ¹ and which has since appeared, in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's diplomatic edition of one manuscript (BN fr 1584, fols. 221-306), in Middle French and English in the Garland Library of Medieval Literature. ² As such, the "Livre de Poche" under consideration here represents the very work that, according to Ernst Hoepffner's original and unrealised plan for the publication of Machaut's works, was to have appeared as the fourth volume of his Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut. ³ It offers the reader a faithful edition of the text of a good fourteenth-century manuscript (BN fr 22545), lightly corrected when necessary, and accompanied by footnotes that signal variants found in the other principal manuscripts of the work. The text of the Dit appears here with an excellent translation into modern French, an exhaustive index of proper names, and an extensive glossary.

What is the Voir Dit? A "true poem" according to its title (Le Dit véridique is the title the work bears in modern French), Guillaume's work tells the story of the love between an aging poet and a young lady. The poet narrates the stages of their amorous relation, which begins and ends in the exchange of missives: their first acquaintance, through the mediation of a messenger, the announcement of their love, the poet's receipt of a reproduction (ymage) of the lady, their meeting and union, their parting, the lover's subsequent estrangement, and the final promise of their future reunion. At each stage, not only the poet's account, but also letters and lyric compositions by the poet and his lady bear witness to the tale. The love told by the work as a whole is revealed through a collection of texts; and the story of the composition of the collection--the Voir Dit itself--thus coincides entirely with the story of the love it registers. "More than the tale of a love," Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet notes in her indispensable study, "Un Engin si soutil": Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture au XIVe siècle, "the Voir Dit proves the story of the writing of a book." ⁴ "The poet insists upon this point: the Voir Dit is nothing other than the story [le récit] of its own writing." ⁵ In their letters and their lyric compositions, the poet and his lover speak of a single project: "making a book," "faire vostre livre," as poet says to his lady (Letter XXVI, i and j, pp. 426 and 428), and "faire nostre livre," as the lady answers (Letter XXVI, d, p. 434). As long as their love lasts, the book, in the terms of the text, thus "makes itself" (se fait) (Letter XXVII, f, p. 450): it constitutes itself through the composition of "balades, / Rondiaus, motés, et virelais, / Complaintes et amoureus lais" (vv. 146-148, p. 48), recalled and recited by the voice of the narrator.

The text of the Voir Dit, in this way, represents a montage of three irreducible literary forms, each of which...