Elegiarum libri tres

The second of the five volumes of the complete works of Johannes Secundus in Roland Guillot's edition is dedicated to the three books of Elegies, originally included in the 1541 Utrecht edition of the Dutchman's poetic works which his brothers, Grudius and Marius, saw through the press. In some ways, Guillot's edition of the Elegies is more successful than his edition of the Basia. Without the weight of the latter's Nachleben to burden him, he treats this collection in a more balanced way, and the introduction offers a generally informative view of the collection. After considering the importance of the elegy in Renaissance Latin works, the editor goes on to analyze the arrangement of the individual poems in the collection, assess Secundus's elegiac style and the sources which he drew on, and finish with a word on his humor.

As in the first volume, the Latin text is accompanied by a largely accurate French translation, though once again greater care could have been taken when reproducing the Latin. Just to give a few examples from the opening poems, quam appears as "quem" in Elegy 1.1, line 4, stringentem as "strigentem" (Elegy 1.2, line 33), and in Elegy 1.4 we find "repto" instead of reperto in line 3, and the long s has been reproduced as an f in line 7 ("fit" instead of sit), even though the text has been translated as if it were sit ("Mais que cette loi s'applique aussi à toi"). Clearly, this kind of carelessness militates against this text's ever being considered seriously as an authoritative one. It also suffers, as in the first volume, from having been set out with little regard to elegance: blank pages again abound, and far greater care could have been taken over the typographical layout.

Nevertheless, the notes which accompany the text are for the most part helpful, providing useful background details about how the elegies relate to the poet's life and on the identity of the various people mentioned by the poet, as well as offering a host of possible sources for individual expressions, perhaps at times a little indiscriminately. On the other hand, there is no real comment on aspects of versification, such as the unusual spondaic fifth foot in Elegy 1.2.81, "Quid juvat Assyriis in odoribus elanguentem," and despite the generally full references to modern critical sources, there is one surprising omission, the first volume of Les Cahiers de l'humanisme (printed in 2000), entirely devoted to Secundus and in which the editor himself has an article. A number of the papers in this collection, including those of Michel Jourde and Perrine Galand Hallyn, might have been cited in the notes with profit. As in the first volume, the index fails to give page numbers, and the "Errata du Tome I," covering as they do errors on only five pages of that edition, are far from complete.

Once again, then, this is very much a curate's egg of an edition, and at 84 euros is far from being a bargain.