Abstract
In the course of his 25-year captivity in England during the Hundred Years War, Charles duc d’Orléans produced two similar sequences of lyric poetry, purporting to be a reflection of his romantic life, his suffering after the death of his first love, and his eventual finding of a second love. One sequence is written in French, preserved in Charles’ autograph manuscript (Paris BN fr. 25458), and one in English (in London BL Harley 682). One assumes that the French poems were directed at Charles’ French, the English at his English public. But, since the now English-speaking upper class at this period usually knew French well, the impetus behind the English version cannot have been a need to make the inaccessible accessible. Attention to some highly interesting differences between Charles’ French and English poems, and also to his own words about his craft, provides a possible explanation of what that impetus might be.
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Notes
These are the main manuscripts; there are eleven others. See Champion (1923–1927), 1.viii–xxvi; Coldiron (2000, pp. 78–85). Charles left Harley 682 behind him in England. BN fr. 25458 he continued to work on for many years after his return to France. Arn (2008) believes he planned the French collection in the late 1430s and returned to France with a book in progress (p. 159).
Charles had a very considerable collection of Latin books, and did compose at least a few things in Latin: a couple of religious poems and some prayers (Ouy 2007, pp. 145–76). He may not have had the facility in Latin poetry that he had in English—Ouy (2000, 2007) notes that his long Canticum Amoris is no masterpiece (pp. 53, 153, resp.)—or he may have been too occupied to translate his poetry into Latin himself. Coldiron (2000) thinks he would have been responsible for the selection and arrangement of the material (pp. 112–44 at 120; on the Latin ms. see also pp. 191–200).
Crucial in the acceptance of Charles’ authorship was the edition by Steele and Day (1941, Notes 1946; Supplementary Bibliography in 1970 reissue). See Steele’s Introduction, pp. xi–xii, xix–xxv. On the authorship controversy post 1946, see, especially: contra Charles, Poirion (1958), Stemmler (1964), Calin (1994); pro Charles, Fox (1965), and Arn (1993).
Edward Halle, repeated by Holinshed. Quoted by Arn (1993, p. 223, n. 6).
The dismissive attitude of Continental scholars is critiqued by Hokenson and Munson (2007, pp. 55–56).
Arn (1994) believes that the English manuscript was laid out using the French as a model (p. 37). Meier (1981), speaking in general terms, takes it as “a practical fact that of two close versions, in languages of similar structure, the one with a fuller body all round is invariably derived from the one that is terser and tighter” (p. 372). This is a shrewd observation of a tendency which, nevertheless, should not be regarded as a litmus test. Crane (2003) thinks the more succinct French version came first, except in some poems where the English phrasing “work[s] better” (p. 170).
“My assumption has been that translation studies must work to link the social and the textual so as to advance….” Venuti summarises his evolving theories in the Introduction to Translation Changes Everything (2013, pp. 1–10, at 8). See also, and more fully, his seminal The Translator’s Invisibility, esp. Chap. 1 ([1995] 2008, pp. 1–34), and The Scandals of Translation (1998).
See Coldiron (2000, pp. 146–47). A central concern of her book is the challenge to traditional periodisation presented by Charles’ English sequence, which anticipates the interest in the ever-shifting interior life of the poet found in Wyatt and later Tudor poets.
Cf. Coldiron (2000): “… the poet is a different poet, the subjectivity a different subjectivity, in French and English…” (p. 6).
See also Spearing (2005, pp. 226–47). For a challenge to Spearing’s view of Charles, see Epstein (2003), who argues for a stable, highly conventional persona. The very notion of a unified poetic persona in Charles and other late medieval writers is challenged by Spearing, as is the making of “binary distinctions… between poet and persona or poet and lover” (2000, p. 124, n. 5); for a full discussion of the issue, see Spearing (1997).
Quoted in Caldiron (2000, p. 6). Santé’s essay, “Living in Tongues,” appeared in the New York Times in 1996. Similarly, in a seminar at the University of British Columbia in 1972, Eugène Vinaver remarked, “I do not have the same thoughts in English and in French.”
Few critics would now assume that Charles’ poetry is a reflection of his life in any simple way. In his 1984 “psychosemiotic” analysis of the French sequence, Cholakian distinguishes carefully between poet and persona, although he still assumes biographical reality—for example the death of Charles’ wife—to lie behind the poetry (p. 14). In a later essay, Cholakian speaks of the poems as “personal probings” (2000, p. 115). Similarly Classen, who also restricts himself to the French collection, and finds, not an unambiguous picture of Charles’ life, but nevertheless an autobiographical portrait of the poet, veiled behind the mask of allegory (1991, pp. 269–345, at 344–345).
“Genre” is a tricky term. I use it rather loosely as indicating a recognisable literary type, which may be narrow or wide, and may overlap with or include other genres. Arn (2008) explains that she uses the word “genre” for lyric (versus narrative) and treats the various verse forms as sub-categories of lyric, this in the context of Charles’ French collection, but without making a distinction from English, the language of a few poems in that manuscript (p. 64, n. 24). Modifying her position in “Two Manuscripts, One Mind” (2000), she argues in the later book, her study of the evolution of the French manuscript, that Charles was concerned with a broad distinction between longer poems (ballades, complaintes) and shorter ones (chansons, rondels, caroles) and did not arrange the poems by formes fixes; see Arn (2008, pp. 145–170), at 151.
His idiosyncratic uses are itemised in Steele and Day (1941, pp. xli–xliii).
“Charles of Orleans,” English Studies, 3, 222–235, at 235.
See Butterfield (2009): “… he parades his English as distinctive and self-generated: its very peculiarities work against the grain of the French” (p. 306). Butterfield does admit that his nonce uses may be attributable to our lack of a thorough knowledge of fifteenth-century English rather than to a cultivation of strangeness (pp. 216–219).
In Ballades 70, 72, 79, and more comprehensively 111, 113; see Coldiron (2000, pp. 56–60, 135–142, resp.).
In Ballades 111 and 113 and their French counterparts. See Crane (2003, pp. 171–176).
Charles’ second wife, Bonne, did die while he was a prisoner in England, “at some point between 1430 and 1435.” See the Chronology in Arn (1994, p. 25).
Coldiron (2001) argues that this playful idea, unique to the English version, can be related to contemporary developments in England, where an agricultural depression may have led to short-term arrangements like this (pp. 107–108).
Verse passages could also move between song and written text, changing function, form, and meaning with ease, as Boffey (1988) shows with regard to material associated with Charles and his circle (p. 140).
Numbered Complainte 1 by Champion (1.258–261), who groups the poems together by form.
Pygmalion is not mentioned in this poem, but in a different mood Ballade 90 (Arn 1994, pp. 343–344) introduces a comparison with “the gret kerver” who with divine assistance brought stone to life (lines 5508–5513), whereas the speaker is still trying to soften the stony heart of his living mistress.
She adduces good evidence for a readership in England equally at home in English and in French. See Coldiron (2000, pp. 22–23). Butterfield (2012) notes that, a little earlier, in booklists from aristocratic and royal houses in England in the late fourteenth century, French manuscripts outnumber English ninety to four (p. 211).
Cambridge, Trinity College, B.14.39, f. 47v, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 139, f. 157r. Both date from the thirteenth century. The texts in the two/three languages are printed in Silverstein (1971, pp. 20, 39–40, resp.).
Meier (1981) thinks it likely that Charles’ French style is “partly the result of his ambivalent standing on nonchaloir (…‘keeping cool’…),” while his English style adopts “the mood and mode of the courtly Chaucer” (p. 375).
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Klinck, A.L. Making a Difference: Bilingualism and Re-creation in Charles d’Orléans. Neophilologus 99, 685–696 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9437-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9437-5