In the 30th Year of His Age: Francois Villon, Rascal Poet [by David Lehman]

The original bad-boy poet roamed the countryside of fifteenth-century France. Francois Villon narrowly escaped the gallows; a vagabond and a thief, he cast his major poems in the form of satiric versions of a last will and testament. In "Le Petit Testament" (also known as "Le Lais") -- a title that appealed greatly to the Australian inventors of the great twentieth-century hoax poet Ern Malley -- Villon bequeaths his possessions, whether tangible, spiritual, or imaginary -- to the people and institutions that deserve them. The mood is one of irony, sometimes bitter, sometimes of the type known as gallows humor, but there is warmth of feeling and also compassion. To the Holy Trinity, Villon leaves his soul; to the earth, his body; to a Parisian named Denis, some stolen wine; to a madman, his glasses; to a lover, all the women he wants. At least two of Villon's shorter poems -- "Ballad of Hanged Men" and "I Am Francois, They Have Caught Me" -- were composed in 1462 while under sentence of death.

Here is a brief excerpt of "The Legacy" ("Le Lais") rendered by John Payne in 1878:

                                Item, this trust I do declare
                                                For three poor children named below:
                                Three little orphans lone and bare,
                                                That hungry and unshodden go
                                                And naked to all winds that blow;
                                That they may be provided for
                                                And sheltered from the rain and snow,
                                At least until this winter's o'er.

This stanza, sweet and sad, yields a completely different set of emotions when you consider that the three "orphans. . .named below" were three of the richest man then living in Paris.

At Bennington College one winter, Anne Winters and I suggested that a group of young poets write a poem ending with Villon's grand line, "And I die of thirst at the rim of the fountain."

Here's my stab at a famous Villon verse:

“In my own country I live in a foreign place
With strength of mind and purpose yet powerless,
A winner at any game I try, yet awash in loss.
At dawn I say goodbye to the night,
And in bed, I fear I'll fall from a great height."

Among translators the late Louis Simpson had a go at Villon's testamentary masterpieces in 2000. Earlier, Galway Kinnell edited a Signet book of bilingual selections. Robert Louis Stevenson's story "A Lodging for the Night" prepetuated some of the legends surrounding Villon, which have formed the basis of more than one Hollywood swashbuckler. Simon Loekle has an excellent blog post on Villon, which begins with these paragraphs.

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   Francois Villon disappeared from written record circa 1463 (aged 30), when he was banished from the city of Paris, after a dramatic reprieve from the gallows.

            Though Gutenberg's contraption was thumping clanking and squeaking in Germany, the first printing press did not set up operations in Paris until 1470; the earliest edition of Villon was published in 1489. That Villon's reputation survived for nearly 30 years after his disappearance, that it proved strong enough to support a half dozen published collections of his work over the XVI century is his true legacy. It was the literate and literary readership that preserved his words and brought them to the print shop, but he had a reputation among his contemporaries not only for his criminal activities: he was known for his poems. The First Respondents were listeners, in taverns and jail cells and fine chateaux.

The Legacy was written (I think quickly) in 1456 just before the poet fled Paris, and it is in part a farewell to his native city. The specific places and people underscore its satiric motive; if the topical humour falls flat after 500 years, the energetic bite of the verse still makes its mark. Over the next four years on the road, "The Legacy," it may reasonably be supposed, served as a kind of ticket or calling card, as it displays his skill in a long poem (a traditional ambition of poets). The satiric parody of the Last Will (popular since the days of the plague) spared Villon the demands of narrative (which, somehow, Villon does not seem temperamentally suited for). The format is obviously flexible, and if Villon presented it along the way, it is easy to imagine his touching up the text with local references. 

            That "The Legacy" is a work of hardboiled irony is palpable, though how the irony works through the poem is more difficult to grasp. Over the centuries, virtually all of the "heirs" have been identified, but we have lost the immediacy of the reference, and must bear in mind that Villon is engaged in presenting "the thing that is not." It is also clear that The Testament is unquestionably the masterpiece: the interludes of ballades and rondeaux enrich the poem, providing human details and warmth, and better exposing Villon's humours.The two poems cover much the same territory (behind or to the East of Notre Dame); some of the "heirs" in the first are "re-gifted" in the later. I cannot but think that the later work was a conscious revision of the first.

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Comments

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for this, David. I haven't thought about Villon in a very long time, and barely know his work, so this post will inspire me to delve in deeper. I love your "stab at a famous Villon verse." Francois's work seems to have held up exceedingly well.