Remora

Our readers are francophiles to a manjack, right? Or if they aren't, what are they doing reading a weblog named for Derrida's famous invective? Well, messieurs et mesdames, you must go to Eric Ormsby's piece on Louis Simpson's Villon translations in the New Criterion. The first couple of paragraphs try to hard to make the case that Villon was, supremely, the poet of farewell -- although there is, certainly, something to that notion, Ormsby is warming to his subject, and isn't quite there yet. We are being tickled with rhetoric, here. Still, it is a useful idea. One is reminded of that Mandelstam verse, "I have studied the science of farewells", in Tristia -- 'farewells' we prefer to goodbys, and surely to parting, as in this translation of Mandelstam's most famous poem in Archipelago:




I have studied the science of parting
In the bareheaded laments of night.

Oxen chew, the waiting drags on

As the vigil stretches the night�s last hour.

I honored the ritual of the crowing night

When I took up the traveler�s heavy grief.

I saw in a woman�s distant eyes

Tears mingling with the muses� song.


Villon, who knew to the intake of smelly breath the stable sounds of chewing oxen, was not burdened with Mandelstam's history. His farewells do not ring out with our knowledge of the slaughtered past and to come. They are, rather, the goodbys launched by men about to be hung for bawdry, theft, murder -- all the ways of the riotous reprobate. Villon, of course, can be made into a sentimental roustabout -- in the same way Rabelais becomes Rabelaisian, an excuse for Victorian scatology. Orwell pointed out how all too embarrassing the term Rabelaisian is in some essay. Ormsby avoids that image in his review, pulling up, instead, those features in Villon that re-emerge in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud, in Celine -- that omni-directional rage, with its curious intervals of complete self-lessness. Here's a beautiful passage on Villon's women:

"Villon clearly loved women, for whom he had a surprisingly subtle and sympathetic regard; they are certainly the dominant figures in his testamentary poetry: not only his own mother or the Virgin Mary, but also the various lovers he alternately excoriates, cajoles, and caresses. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly the long lament usually known as �La Belle Heaulmi�re,� or �The Beautiful Helmet Maker,� after its protagonist. Villon�s poem is an extended illustration, if one were needed, of Baudelaire�s line four-hundred years later that �c�est un dur m�tier d��tre belle femme� (�It�s hard work being a bombshell�). An old woman, la Belle Heaulmi�re, catalogues her charms as they once were and as they are now; like Villon, she grasps herself only in the backward glance. The poem is remarkable in that its compassion is tacit and arises from the unflinching scrutiny of a woman�s body in decline. Unlike other compositions of the time, it is not prompted by malicious delight or the kind of Tartuffian schadenfreude that seems to have motivated so many medieval denunciations of the female form. Instead, pity and terror are aroused.


Pretty shoulders, long and slender
Arms; beautiful hands and wrists,
That my fate seemed to intend for
Heated tourneys in the lists
Of passion � small, tilting breasts,
Rounded thighs, wide loins, and then
The vulva in its little nest
In the middle of the garden.

Horribly, these have now become:

Wrinkled forehead and gray hair,
Sunken eyebrows, and the eyes
Whose laughter drove men to despair,
Clouding � again to itemize.
The nose that was a perfect size,
Hooked. Two hairy ears hang down.
You�d have to look hard to realize
This death�s-head is a face you�ve known.

Ah, as Limited Inc plummets through middle age like Lucifer thrown out of the American heaven of perpetual adolescence, the death's head is rapidly becoming his own inexcusable, unmitigated face. We must go out and read some Villon today.