The Confined Lines of Marot’s Mignonne

In 1537, Jeanne d’Albret de Navarre, aged eight, fell ill and had to stay in bed, possibly in some form of quarantine. We know this because one of the most celebrated poets of the French Renaissance, Clément Marot, wrote her a get well soon note in verse. It’s a short poem, and at first glance even a rather simple one. But its compact size also makes it a definite challenge to translate. And nearly 500 years later, it still has the power to resonate with our experience of the modern world.


Marot first joined the court of Jeanne’s mother, Marguerite of Navarre, sometime around 1519. He was there until 1527, when he became a valet de chambre to Marguerite’s brother, the King of France, François I. But Marot remained in close contact with Marguerite and her family until he was forced into exile near the end of his life in 1542. When young Jeanne fell ill, it seems only natural that the poet wanted to wish her well. It’s also probable that doing so wouldn’t have hurt his prospects for future employment.

Despite containing a few archaisms, the poem that Marot wrote to poor Jeanne is surprisingly clear to readers of modern French. It’s made up of 14 rhyming couplets, whose lines are just three syllables long. This helps make the poem feel a bit like a nursery rhyme, perhaps fitting given its intended recipient. The first line of the poem is also repeated as the last line, ensuring that the opening and closing couplets share the same rhyme. Here it is in Marot’s French:

A portrait of Clément Marot.
A 16th-century portrait thought to be of Clément Marot. © International Museum of the Reformation, Geneva

A une Damoyselle malade

Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour ;
Le sejour
C’est prison.
Guerison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Vostre porte
Et qu’on sorte
Vistement,
Car Clement
Le vous mande.
   Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures ;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
   Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.

What initially reads like a simple poem written hastily for a child turns out to have some fairly tight formal constraints. Ignoring the first and last lines, all of the poem’s units of sense are also out of step with the rhyming couplets. This means that each unit of sense spans two different rhyming couplets. These semantic units are almost all separated in the poem by punctuation marks, but on one occasion they are separated by a conjunction.

Curiously, in the first half of the poem, Marot addresses Jeanne using the formal personal pronoun, vous, while in the second half he switches to the informal pronoun, tu. Why he did this, we don’t know. As a princess, Jeanne was easily Marot’s social ‘superior’ and could normally expect to be addressed using the formal vous. But he was clearly on friendly terms with a girl who was much younger than himself, which would have made the use of the informal tu more likely. Aside from being a neat formal trick, changing pronouns might simply have made certain lines easier to write. In many cases, using the formal vous in French adds an extra syllable to the verb being conjugated.

The cover of Le Bon Ton de Marot by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot

I first became aware of Marot’s poem a few years ago, when I chanced upon a copy of Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter. At its heart, the book is a wide-ranging inquiry into the nature of language and the art of translation. In it, Hofstadter asks some big questions: about the mental processes involved in language creation, whether translation can truly be a successful process, about when a translation becomes a new work in its own right, and whether machine learning can ever use language as well as a human being. He mixes this with autobiography, analysis, and plenty of wordplay. Published in 1997, much of the book now feels remarkably prescient in an age of Google Translate and ChatGPT.

Running through the book like a unifying thread is Marot’s poem, which Hofstadter uses to illustrate some of the many linguistic and translation problems he discusses. To do this, he presents the original poem in French along with 88 different translations into English. Many of these were made by himself. But others were made by colleagues, students, poets, professional translators, and even machine translation programs like Systran and Candide, the immediate predecessors of Google Translate. As might be expected, the results are wildly diverse. But Hofstadter also challenges readers of the book to produce their own translation of the poem to experience firsthand the things he is talking about. Naturally, it was a challenge I accepted.

I was firstly keen to preserve as many of the poem’s formal elements as possible, starting with the rhyming couplets and their short three syllable length. While stress is less of a feature in French poetry than it is in English, the main stress in every line of the original could be said to fall on the third syllable. Most of the lines also have some degree of secondary stress on the first syllable. To try and emulate this in English, the stress pattern for those three syllables really has to be stressed-unstressed-stressed, often notated in systems of scansion as / x /.

Something that a lot of the translations in Hofstadter’s book don’t address is the historical nature of the poem in French, written nearly 500 years ago. Many of them actually try to modernize the poem’s language, inadvertently transposing the setting to some sort of near past as a result. And, at least according to Hofstadter, that’s a valid strategy for translating the poem. However, I wanted to try and preserve something of the effect that Marot’s poem has on a modern French reader. To do this requires translating it into an English that at least might have been spoken in the 16th century.

I took as my model the English of William Shakespeare. While he wrote slightly later than Marot, there are plenty of resources available that document the language he used. One of the best is the Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by the German philologist, Alexander Schmidt, first published in 1875. This is a mine of information, that gives definitions of words as used by Shakespeare, examples of usage, and references to where in his work specific words are used. There is a free version available online, but I have a two-volume edition published by Dover.

Using a version of English that is historical would certainly let me address the problem posed by Marot’s use of both the vous and tu pronouns. In modern English, both of these would be translated by the pronoun ‘you’. But English in Shakespeare’s time still preserved this difference with two pronouns, the formal ‘you’ and informal ‘thou’. It would also obviously make it easier to try and reproduce some of the slightly archaic language present in Marot’s poem.

Cover of Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by Alexander Schmidt.
At last, a book that does what it says on the cover!

After spending a good deal more time than I initially expected, here is the translation I settled on along with Marot’s original:

A une Damoyselle malade

Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour ;
Le sejour
C’est prison.
Guerison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Vostre porte,
Et qu’on sorte
Vistement,
Car Clement
Le vous mande.
   Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures ;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
   Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.

To a Sick Damsel

My fair sweet,
I do greet
You this day;
Forced to stay
In this gaol,
Cease to ail
And be sound,
Then do bound
To your door,
Quickly for
To skip free,
Clement, he
Asks you this.
   Thou whose bliss
Is to taste,
Yet who waste
Sick abed,
Come be fed
On quince pie;
If thou lie
Too long ill
Fade thou will
Unto white
And from right
Plump will pine.
   God make thine
Health complete,
My fair sweet.

Some parts of the poem clearly present more of a challenge to translate than others. Because the first and last couplets share the same rhyme, for example, that rhyme needs to work for three different lines rather than two. I solved this problem in the second to last line with the adjective ‘complete’, which in Shakespeare’s time could still mean ‘perfect’.

There’s a certain degree of repetition contained in Lines 6 and 7 of the poem:

Guerison
Recouvrez,

The idea here is that Jeanne should recover her good health. I’ve tried to mimic this by using both a negative equivalent and a positive adjective:

Cease to ail
And be sound,

One of several meanings that the adjective ‘sound’ had in the 16th century was ‘healthy’. This is the meaning preserved in the modern English saying ‘safe and sound’.

The only place in my translation where the semantic content of the original is reversed comes in Lines 10 and 11:

Et qu’on sorte
Vistement,

becoming:

Quickly for
To skip free,

I’ve done this firstly because to my ear it sounds more natural in English, even if it means that the adverb now refers to the verb ‘bound’ in line 8. It also lets me use the ‘for to’ construction followed by an infinitive, used reasonably often by Shakespeare with a meaning of ‘in order to’.

I think my biggest departure from the original comes in Line 19, where Marot urges Jeanne to eat confitures. Here I couldn’t make any direct equivalent work. The typical modern translation, ‘jam’ only came into English in the 18thcentury. ‘Marmalade’ was known in Shakespeare’s time, but I couldn’t find an appropriate rhyme to complete the couplet. Its pronunciation would also have to be wrenched to stress the final syllable. I reasoned that Marot was probably more interested in a word that would rhyme with the next line than with what type of comfort food Jeanne should be eating. I take as my authority for ‘quince pie’ a short line in Romeo and Juliet:

NURSE. They call for dates and quinces in the pastry.

The ‘pastry’ here being the room in which pies and pastries were made rather than the dish itself.

With an almost total absence of metaphor or figurative language, the real difficulty in translating Marot’s poem lies in its formal characteristics. The poem’s very short rhyming couplets, for example, leave little room for manoeuvre. As a result, there’s almost nowhere that you can avoid translating all of the sense in one line, knowing that you can express it elsewhere. And because the semantic content of the poem is out of step with the rhyming couplets, you feel strangely like you’re always taking two steps forward and one step back. Possibly my only regret was not being able to reproduce Marot’s use of just one word for three of the poem’s lines. This was a touch of poetic bravado that multi-syllable words in English seemed unwilling to follow.

I’m a compulsive buyer of books. So when I first came across Hofstadter’s book, I bought it and simply put it on one of several piles to be read at some time in the future. It wasn’t until the world was in the midst of a pandemic and successive lockdowns that I finally picked it up to read it. I was already a good way through when it occurred to me that, in the poem’s short telegram-style lines addressed to someone who was ill, possibly in quarantine, Marot might easily be texting a friend who was self-isolating with COVID; just checking in, wishing them all the best, hoping to see them again soon. Sometimes we’re not so removed from the past as we think.

Interview with Piet Nieuwland

Piet Nieuwland is a New Zealand poet currently living in Maungakaramea, Northland. His poetry has appeared in a wide number of publications, both in New Zealand and internationally, and he is the author of 17 chapbooks and broadsheets. This interview is drawn from an exchange of questions and answers by email between 22 February and 6 March, 2017.

Aaron Robertson (AR): When did you know that poetry was something that you wanted to do?

Piet Nieuwland (PN): I was always very keen on reading and writing and recall a first poem written at primary school about architecture, being intrigued by the design plans for our new house.  At high school, J.K. Baxter featured and poets like A.R.D Fairburn, Allen Curnow, Sam Hunt and Hone Tuwhare were popular.  I read all of them, and got right into Vincent O’Sullivan’s Anthology of New Zealand Poetry as well as playing around with writing myself.

A picture of Piet Nieuwland.
Piet Nieuwland

Once I’d completed university and started working in Kaikohe, I had the freedom to read more widely, novels, history, and poetry.  A bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s poems and a film about Dylan Thomas with his intense live readings really got me going.  There was a small theatre in Kaikohe that held jazz and poetry evenings and where I first read my poems live – a real adrenaline buzz.

AR: Were both your parents from the Netherlands? Did you speak Dutch at home? Was that linguistic environment in any way an influence on your poetry?

PN: My father is from the Netherlands and my mother is from Taranaki.  Dad spoke Dutch, mostly on the phone to his friends.  We went to Dutch club cultural events and had visits from Grandmother Oma, and Uncle Albert who spoke Dutch and English.  Auntie Sjoukje gave me my first Maori/English dictionary.  I learnt French at school for a year, German for three years and have attended Spanish classes.  Dad studied Japanese at Waikato University and became a fluent speaker. So I experienced other languages from an early age. A year travelling in Asia and Europe as a young man reinforced my understanding there are many other ways of saying things and many other ways of seeing.

The mermaids at Lang’s Beach
Slip and dive into the high tide
Speaking Swedish in pink multicultual Maori
Singing black Californian, polka dot Dutch
Laughing French coffee accents and hints of Chinese Spice
Scarlet English blondes and Indian ebony golds
In a breeze as warm as Bream Bay waves
Through tangled pohutukawa shade
The summer altar of beach ritual and display
Inclines in to shelly sand recline
Scent of salt, soft sweet spot of sun on the back
Sunglass peering sunscreen spreading all over
The islands just over the horizon
Curves curve away just enough to
Sea foam hiss and turquazure blues

– Coves, Piet Nieuwland

AR:  Imagery of New Zealand’s natural world is a central element of your poetry, and you spent a good number of years working for the Department of Conservation. Was your time spent at DOC an influence on your poetry, or the other way round?

PN: My work at the Department of Conservation involved gathering large amounts of usually scientific information on land the Department administered.  To this were added contributions from iwi and submissions from a wide range of community organisations.  I then distilled and synthesised all this into management strategies, plans and policies.  So the language that occupied my days was of the natural world and human relationships with it.  The processes of writing strategies and poetry are not that dissimilar.

AR: I would characterize much of your poetry as being sonically dense. You certainly seem to take pleasure purely in the sound of particular combinations of words. Do these sonic elements tend to dictate the direction a poem takes, or does something else generally serve as a starting point?

PN: The starting point, or intention of my poetry is frequently the sense of a place, or a relationship to a place with a person, often someone I’m very close to.  The poem develops in steps, piece by piece, and the sound arrives instinctually I think.  I listened to a lot of classical piano music from an early age as my parents played duets together. The music occupies me. Having said that, the sound of the poem as you read it on the page is often quite different to the sound as heard in live performance.

The harbour Whangapae // waiting for the inside of paua // the fertile
organ, shallow feeding grounds of tamure porae moki and flounder,
sifting and stalking through the epidermal fringe of mangrove, the
border of luxuriant detritus grey popping and bubbling with the crawl
and waddle of crustaceans and molluscs, all warm, the trophic mattress
stretches and breathes, the heat opening mitotic pathways, continuums
of spirals and networks vibrating.

– from Down the Glide, Piet Nieuwland

AR: Your live delivery of your poems has a hypnotic, incantatory quality. How important do you think it is for poetry to move off the page and be delivered orally? Do you have any conscious models for poetic performance?

PN: Yes I love to read poetry live.  It adds dimensions that cannot be conveyed on the page no matter how cleverly it is arranged or laid out.  The rhythm, emphasis and accent adopted in live performance all contribute to the overall sensation and energy of the poem.  I write for poems to be read aloud.  I don’t improvise, as some performance poets do, preferring to keep pretty much to the script, with a group of related poems, followed or preceded by something quite different.

AR: Can you tell me the story behind your immortalization in the covered walkway between Whangarei’s Forum North carpark and Bank St? How did you get chosen to face off against Hone Tuwhare?

PN: A friend of mine at work gave me a newspaper article requesting submissions of poetry for a mural.  I sent some in and my ‘Life in the Chromium Archipelago’ was chosen, along with the poem ‘Rain’ by Hone Tuwhare.  I don’t know what the process was any more than that.  It felt like an honour, an acknowledgment and recognition of several decades of writing and performing to be chosen.  The artist did say that he enjoyed the contrasting styles, the direct simplicity of Tuwhare compared with the complexity and enthusiastic life of Nieuwland!

Beyond the loggia
Flotillas of entangled eigenvectors
Cross the high cumulo-nimbus plateau
Over horizons of tecomanthe and roses
Clematis and scrambling hoya
Tapestries of folded chlorophylls
Distant trains call to the marketplace overflowing
Evening falls in your hair
The gleaming cumuli restless
The fiafia night sky is a black moon yellow star
Nourished with honey, apricots and almonds
Radiata raging in the hollow sou’wester
Where we belonged to death
Yet our blood was alive
With the laughter of the wind

– Beyond the Loggia, Piet Nieuwland

AR: For the last 3 years you’ve co-edited Fast Fibres with Martin Porter, an annual collection of poetry from Northland, or of poets with links to Northland. Are there some identifiable characteristics of poetry from Northland, or of the poets themselves?

PN: Northland poets do like to write about their environment, but they do also reflect their cultures and countries of origin.  There is a wide diversity of styles.  Poets who no longer live here seem happy to draw upon their connections and experiences of Northland and the images it generates for them.  This is also probably true for poets of any region including the university cities who seem to dominate the poetry publishing scene.  I hesitate to make any further generalisations about characteristics of Northland poetry or the poets other than to say Northland has a high proportion of very good poets.

AR: Who are some of the poets that you enjoy reading, and why?

PN: I enjoy poetry translated into English especially that originating in Spanish and Portugese.  Some favourites are Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Caesar Vallejo, Vincente Huidobro and Garcia Lorca.  Those are the well-known ones. Why?, well because there is a mythology that comes alive in these poets and the poetry, one that draws upon a wide net of human experience and expression.  The richness of the language and imagery is captivating and inspiring.  Ezra Pound I also enjoy very much, like his Cantos, and their echoing and reflection through multiple histories. I find the literatures of many different cultures fascinating, as each has a unique way of seeing and saying.  It makes me feel more closely connected to the diverse people of the planet, not just the more dominant groups and their values.