"Everything is fucked up I'm dying of the pox"

 Theophile de Viau

In 1619, a collection of poems by different authors was published in Paris under the title: Parnasse satyrique. The star poet in the group was Théophile de Viau. The poem he published went like this:

Par le sieur Theophille

Philis tout est f…tu je meurs de la verolle

Elle exerce sur moi sa dernière rigueur :

Mon V. baisse la teste et n'a point de vigueur

un ulcére puant a gasté ma parole.

J'ai sué trante jours, j'ai vomi de la colle

Jamais de si grand maux n'eurent tant de longueur

L'esprit le plus constant fut mort à ma langueur,

Et mon afficlition n'a rien qui la console.

Mes amis plus secrets ne m'osent approcher,

Moi-même cet estat je ne m'ose toucher

Philis le mal me vient de vous avoir foutue.

Mon dieu je me repans d'avoir si mal vescu :

Et si vostre couroux a ce coup ne me tuë

Je ne fais vuex désormais de ne …tre qu'en cul.

The translation goes like this:

“Philis, everything is f..ed up; I’m dying of the pox

which has me strictly bound in the last throes;

My D..k hangs its head, is on the rocks

and a stinking sore spoils my attempts at prose.

For thirty days I’ve sweated, vomited up bowls

I’ve never seen a sickness last like this!

my exhaustion would have killed firmer souls

and my affliction brings me no consoling bliss.

My most secret friends dare not approach me.

I don’t even dare to touch myself in this stew –

And all this Philis, comes from ..cking you.

My god, I repent of having lived so badly!

And if your anger doesn’t kill me with this blast

I swear that now I’ll only ..ck in the ass.”

(Sorry for my distortions – wanted to see if I could find a few appropriate rhymes, though of course my rough draft scans like a hog in heat).

Théophile was one of the early freethinkers who are separated by a degree or two from Gassendi. He is also, famously, one of the regrets of French literature – what if the French baroque had been allowed to flower, much as the English Jacobin writers were? There is a view, first expressed I believe by the romantics, that the imposition of rules of literary bienseance emptied French poetry of what Theophile called the “natural”. And that old fight isn’t worth fighting.

More interesting is that Théophile was put on trial for this poem, and nearly had the same fate doled out to him as to the Protestant printer, Etienne Dolet - who is, or should be, to translators what the skull is to the contemplating monk – for Dolet, poor guy, trying to convey a bit of Plato in French, translated a line in the Apology Apres le mort tu ne seras plus rien de tout, instead of tu ne seras plus, and so – for that rien - was burned at the stake. That is one way to ensure literalism!

There’s an amusing gloss on the enterprising use of ellipses and acronyms in obscene poems in Joan E. DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity, who claims that the startling thing about Theophile’s poem was the ‘cul’ – a vite as a V. or a foutre as a …tre was, in a sense, a bow to the common dignity, but that ass, stuck at the very end of the poem, it was practically mooning the authorities. I love these discussions that are close readings of readings – the third life’s life. They are so Nabokovian. DeJean introduces the topic like this:

“These four-letter words, primary obscenities, stand out as the principle mark of this basdy poetry’s sexual transgressiveness. With one exception, cul (ass), which was to become key in Theophile’s case, they are never written out. Instead, in an act of self censorship that initially may have helped save the volumes from official prosecution, the words were abbreviated in various ways, and different types of punctuation were inserted to stand as a visual mark representing the suppressed content. This punctuation is the typographical equivalent of the fig leaves that began appearing in Renaissance engravings to veil male and female genitalia without fully hiding the contours.

The typographical fig leaves are, however, less efficient than their visual counterparts. A leaf painted on a representation of a human body means that the viewer, even though he or she obviously knows what presumably is there behyind the cover-up, is nevertheless denied the right to see the offending sexual characteristics. In the case of a text, however, a reader – and there is no reason to imagine that seventeenth century readers were any more conscious of these textual barriers than are their counterparts today – simply replaces the missing letters without a thought, so much so that he or she is immediately unaware that anything has been left out. This is truly the zero degree of censorship.