Strategies of Unification in Joachim Du Bellay's Translations for Louis Le Roy

Louis Le Roy was a humanist from Normandy, a historian, and a translator whose contribution to the knowledge of the classics in Renaissance France consisted of his translations directly from Greek into French. Joachim Du Bellay was a poet from Anjou who signed the manifesto of a young literary group determined to reform French language and literature, and the author of numerous poems. While the relationship between the two men is not very clear (some claim that there had been a bad quarrel between them sometime during the year 1558),¹ what is certain is that in that same year, they collaborated on the same project, the collective nature of which seems to have influenced literary practices used to produce the work. The work in question is Le Roy's translation of Plato's Symposium published in 1558. In his introduction, Le Roy admits that the translation of the text itself is in fact a pretext for three books of commentary, which accompany the philosophical speeches and which consist for the most part of quotations from a large number of ancient and contemporary authors, mostly poets.² In order to facilitate understanding of the quotations, the humanist uses French versions for those verses that have been translated and published. As for the remaining excerpts, he entrusts the task of translating them to his friend Du Bellay.

To a modern reader, the choice of the translator may not be obvious; the disapproval of translations of poetry expressed by Du Bellay in the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse is too well known. Slightly less known may be the fact that in addition to his celebrated poetic production, Du Bellay was an accomplished translator himself, and already by 1552 lifted the restrictions of 1549 in the preface to his translation of Book IV of the Aeneid, claiming that he changed his mind regarding this once suspicious activity.³ The French versions that he produced for the Symposium are highly esteemed by Le Roy, who praises their fidelity to the originals as well as their poetic quality, and promises to insert them into the text of the commentary in the next edition, while in this first one, they only appear in an annex. Le Roy explains this intention by his desire to avoid the diversity of languages. ⁴ The revised edition never sees the light of day. Nevertheless, the inclination to decrease diversity is already manifest in Du Bellay's own approach to translations, which shows attempts to unify all the different voices that Le Roy calls upon in his commentary. It is the strategic use of repetition that becomes his tool to make all the authors literally say the same thing in order to construct a more unified support for Le Roy's arguments. At the same time, the translator preserves the impression of diversity created by the variety of illustrious names and seemingly subordinates his own—very well known—poetic voice to his authors by producing translations whose vocabulary is visibly similar to that of the originals. In order to keep this impression, Du Bellay pretends to play the role of an anonymous translator who faithfully reproduces the lexicon and the syntax of the sources. Yet, the fact that this is not really his status, for Le Roy names and praises him, allows the author of the Regrets to emphasize, through the confrontation of the two positions, his own value as a poet.

In itself, the remarkable presence of repetition in Du Bellay's translated verses is anything but surprising. As Le Roy states in his introduction, he uses the Symposium as a springboard, a concentration of basic themes to trigger discussions on topics that Plato touched upon in his work. Thus, the commentary is organized in clusters of quotations around one subject which the commentator sees as central in a speech, or a portion of a speech. Therefore, on the one hand, it is only natural that he chose from different sources lines that say similar things. On the other hand, these authors rarely express themselves...