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Remy Belleau

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from La Première Journée de la Bergerie

Sonnet

While you with learned, kind and lovely hand
Pluck nimbly at the stems of fragrant flowers
In fields enamelled with a thousand colours
By the sacred work of the immortal band:

Take care that Love, veiled in the bright attire
Of some fresh flower, doesn’t air his ardour
And, rather than appease your heart’s disorder,
Compound it with a well-aimed shaft of fire.

Guileless Europa, gathering blooms like you,
Was overcome by Love, Persephone too –
One a king’s daughter and the other a goddess.

All it would take is a quick breath of breeze
On a red coal to give rise to a blaze
Of which you would no longer be the mistress.

Remy Belleau (1528-1577) was a member of the group of seven poets known as the Pléiade, of whom Ronsard and Du Bellay are the best known. Ronsard called Belleau ‘the painter of nature’, but the pastoral landscape of his La Bergerie is also, in the classical tradition, a background to reflections on love.

Etienne Jodelle (1532-1573), another member of the Pléiade, is best known as a dramatist whose work is a forerunner of the French classical theatre, but he also wrote several volumes of lyrical poetry (Amours, Sonnets, Odes).

Geoffrey Brock has had poems published in New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review and Southern Review. In 1996 he won the Ezra Pound Translation Prize, and in 1998 he was awarded the Raiziss/ de Palchi Translation Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. His translations of poems by Pavese appeared in MPT 11.

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Page(s) 121

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