Rondeau

Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls details a dream vision in which Chaucer observes a group of birds, in a mock parliament, arguing over choosing mates for themselves on Valentine's Day. The birds conclude their assembly by singing a rondeau.¹ This short lyric, originating in Francophone Europe, traditionally ranges in length between just eight and seventeen lines. It opens with a one- to two-line refrain that is repeated in the middle of the work and again at the end to create the circular structure suggested by its name. Chaucer points to the overseas roots of this form by having his dreamer note that the lyric's music "imauked was in Fraunce" (394, line 677).² However, extant manuscripts of the Parliament of Fowls do not record anything that would actually resemble a French rondeau: three manuscripts omit the insertion entirely; three replace it with the popular French proverb "Qui bien aime a tarde oublie" [He who loves deeply is loath to forget], which also functions as a popular refrain in French lyric; and three do contain a short lyric text, but it does not actually feature the triple refrain structure.³ As an actual French rondeau, then, the birds' song is a manifest failure.

In its failure, though, the moment signifies in other ways. It gestures aspirationally to the prestige of French poetry from across the Channel. The choice to offer the rondeau as birdsong heightens the rumination on translation here: the birds sing in this French mode, even if the song is not being transmitted, so that this scribal confusion is mapped onto an interspecies communication breakdown. In the three manuscripts that replace the rondeau with the proverb, this moment of interlingual rupture is only further intensified. Eclipsing lyric form and stifling bird-song, the French proverb-cum-refrain invades the English text, offering jarring code-switching as a broken replacement for translation.

Chaucer's small untransmissible rondeau thus affords a wide-ranging meditation on Anglo-French literary exchange, translation loss, and translation failure, all revolving around the theme of Valentine's Day.⁴ One generation later these ideas, and the form for their expression, emerged in the poetry of the bilingual Anglo-French poet Charles d'Orléans. Charles d'Orléans composed two Valentine's Day ballades, one in French and one in English, during his long imprisonment in England from 1415–40, during which he learned English and composed a lengthy cycle of English poetry full of Chaucerian echoes.⁵ After his release back to France, when he returned to composing solely in French, he produced, among other things, a set of Valentine's Day rondeaux. Amplifying Chaucer's far-reaching discussion of translation, interlingual disjuncture, and the breakdown of communication, Charles's rondeaux showcase the profound cultural force of the humble short-form lyric in the later Middle Ages.

Charles's debt to Chaucer's treatment of Valentine's Day is especially apparent in Ballade 72, in which the speaker is woken up on Valentine's Day by the cries of birds choosing their mates. This moment is a clear allusion to the avian setting of the Parliament of Fowls: Charles's birds wish to "wrappe" their mates "in wingis softe" (FS 224, line 2467), while Chaucer's wrap wings around each other's necks (C 394, lines 670–71).⁶ The Chaucerian resonance is further strengthened by Charles's opening lines—"Whan fresshe Phebus, day of Seynt Valentine, / Had whirlid vp his golden chare aloft" (FS 224, lines 2455–56)—which echo the Squire's Tale's "Appollo whirleth up his char so hye" (C 177, line 671). In a further connection to Chaucer, Charles's birds sing in "ther latyne" (FS 224, line 2465), while again in the Squire's Tale, a falcon speaks in "ledene" (C 175, line 478), that is to say, in Latin.

Charles's and Chaucer's odd mutual detail that birds speak Latin itself goes back to a commonplace of troubadour poetry, found in work by poets such as Marcabru and Arnaut Daniel and later Chrétien de Troyes and Guido Cavalcanti.⁷ As...