François Villon in English Poetry: Translation and Influence by Claire Pascolini-Campbell (review)

This nicely presented book explores responses to François Villon from a sequence of British and North American poets, focusing on translations but also on imitations and adaptations of his work specifically by five key Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Modernist poets of the century from the 1860s until the 1960s: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and Robert Lowell. This is, in the first instance, a history of Villon translation: the five poets are linked by friendship and influence, by dialogue and by what amounts to collaboration. Claire Pascolini-Campbell sees this century, and these particular poets, as seminal in establishing a canonical Villon, and a canon of his poems, largely his lyric pieces, for the modern anglophone world. She points out rightly, for instance, that the poet’s Lais are systematically ignored, whereas there are multiple translations of certain of the lyrics, especially, say, segments of Testament such as the ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’, and certain of the pièces lyriques, the ‘Ballade des pendus’, for instance. This is, of course, not new: plenty of critics have focused on, and analysed, individual instances of this remarkable flowering, as well as on the ‘modern’ Villon. But Pascolini-Campbell makes a distinction, though not an entirely watertight one, between her own work and the great majority of these studies which, she says, address the phenomenon from the point of view of cultural reception; her focus, she says, will be the ‘multiple layers of poetic relations’ which are discernible in the analysis of ‘the manner in which individual poets have reacted to Villon’ (p. 3). An introductory chapter, Chapter 1, analyses the growth of Villon’s legend from the Middle Ages to modernity when he becomes ‘the first modern poet’: it focuses on Villon’s own ‘artistry in creating so beguiling [.. .] a blend of realism and lyric type’ (p. 31). A second chapter turns to the first of Pascolini-Campbell’s poets, Swinburne, whom she sees as ‘discoverer of Villon’ (p. 32), and as a particular exponent of Villon’s thematic variety and musicality: her analysis of sound patterns is careful and subtle, although it would have been nice to see attention paid to the more modern analyses of sound in medieval poetry, such as that of Roger Pensom, for example. Chapter 3 turns to Rossetti, using postcolonial concepts of ‘strangeness’, particularly with respect to Rossetti’s translation practice. Chapter 4 addresses Pound, and especially his opera, Le Testament de Villon: it is a pleasure, this time, to see attention paid to a work so little known, and Pascolini-Campbell’s analysis is illuminating. Chapter 5 is devoted to the fragmentary translations/adaptations found in Bunting’s prison poems; again, this is a valuable example of close analysis. The final chapter focuses on Lowell’s Villon borrowings in his Imitations, and Pascolini-Campbell’s careful readings are revealing. This is a book of subtle analyses and precise syntheses, marred only, I fear, by a dispiriting carelessness: ‘Calvacanti’ (p. 98), ‘Catallus’ (p. 164), ‘server’ for ‘servir’ (p. 44), ‘n’en quell pays’ (p. 71), ‘môyen age’ (p. 89).