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| Pierre de Ronsard's Cassandra, translated and edited with an introduction by Clive Lawrence, now available in paperback and on Kindle. |
January sees the release of a collection of key Renaissance poems of courtly love - Pierre de Ronsard's Cassandra. Translated and edited by Clive Lawrence, this is the first complete translation into English of one of the great sonnet sequences, and was the winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize at UEA.
Here we've posted a couple of extracts from Lawrence's introduction where he considers the identity of the heroine Cassandra, and de Ronsard's place as the most significant French poet of his time.
Cassandra Salviati
The Lady of these sonnets, Cassandre, has long been identified as a real, historical woman, Cassandra Salviati. The extent to which she is really the Cassandre of the Amours de Cassandre remains controversial. Against such an identification is the paucity of contemporary comment about it, and some suggestive counter-evidence in the poetry. Prior to the Amours de Cassandre Ronsard had written poems to a Cassandre who did not seem to share the characteristics of the Cassandre of the sonnets, being apparently an altogether easier-going object of affection than the Petrarchan ideal depicted in the Amours. The Cassandre of the Amours also seems at times to share the physical characteristics and the actions of more than one woman – for instance, the general depiction of her is of a blonde woman with brown eyes, but there are other references that raise questions even over such general details. Certain sonnets seem to be written about or to another woman and in or about a different relationship altogether. It may be, therefore, that even where real-life circumstances are used directly in the poems, those are attributed to ‘Cassandre’ as a generic name for the loved woman. Indeed, it was said by some of his contemporaries, including his first biographer Binet (who knew him personally towards the end of his life) that he fell in love more with the name ‘Cassandre’, full of tragic and epic connotations, than with the woman. The resonance of that name and all it brought with it certainly forms a major element of the poems, and its adoption may result more from conscious choice than convenient accident. Together, these factors lead to the suggestion by some critics that ‘Cassandre’ is a fiction lent a potent name from a woman met in passing, and that what Ronsard needed for Les Amours de Cassandre was not a real-life love affair to record so much as a locus upon which the various literary conventions he would use and subvert could concentre. ‘Cassandre’ is Cassandra Salviati in the same way that ‘Stella’ is Penelope Rich in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, for instance.Extract from Cassandra, 'Introduction' p. xv
Later Life
Ronsard’s status as the leading French poet of his time was acquired early and never seriously challenged in the French court circles where he established his base. ‘Prince of Poets, Poet of Princes’ was an epithet applied to him in his own lifetime, and reflects how close he remained to the French Crown through the entirety of his career, through all the evolutions and changes of a turbulent time. He wrote ‘official’ verses, although with a reservation of individualism, an irony, and an occasional eloquent silence, that speak to his independence of spirit, and he acquired and swapped benefices to build substantial possessions in and around his beloved Vendôme. One of these, the Priory of Saint-Cosme near Tours, where he died and was buried in 1585, still exists and can be visited.Extract from Cassandra, 'Introduction' p. xix
The final collected works, collected and collated with immense care by Ronsard throughout his career, mark him as one of the great Renaissance writers and one of the leading poets in French literature, vastly admired in his own time, and, although eclipsed and largely disregarded during the lengthy ‘classical’ phase of French literature, rediscovered and relaunched by critics of the nineteenth century such as Saint-Beuve. He was admired by even so fastidious a reader as Flaubert, who declared him in his correspondence to be greater than Virgil and the equal of Goethe. In modern times his reputation is secure, with numerous editions of his poetry available and a vast scholarly literature. He has been referred to as one of the ‘big three’ of French sixteenth-century literature, alongside Rabelais, whom he appears to have known and on whom he wrote a vigorous epitaph, and Montaigne, who refers to him with admiration.
I
Whoever wants to see how Love can tame
My soul, attack me, strut his victories,
And reignite a heart he means to freeze,
And how he makes a trophy of my shame;
Whoever wants to see rash youth in vain
Pursuit of what will cause it miseries,
Come read this book: watch me in this disease
Neither my Goddess nor my God will name.
And know that love has neither right nor reason,
Gently beguiles and royally imprisons,
Raises false hope and feeds us on fresh air;
And know the self-delusion of a fool
So far astray he lets a blind boy school
His steps, and a mere infant domineer.
Sonnet from Cassandra, p. 3
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