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Dancing on ropes with fettered legs: the challenges and rewards of translating

livres d’artiste

Louise Rogers Lalaurie

French livres d’artiste of the early-to-mid twentieth century form a distinctive genre, pioneered

in the 1870s by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the painter Edouard Manet, and

subsequently developed by publishers including Ambroise Vollard, Kahnweiler, Tériade and

Albert Skira. The beautifully-crafted limited editions combine work by artists such as Pierre

Bonnard, Derain, Chagall, Picasso or Matisse, with texts by Verlaine, Rabelais, Apollinaire,

Longus, Ovid, Balzac, Joyce or Baudelaire. But despite their appetising pairings of artists and

writers, livres d’artiste remain little known in France and beyond – a fact often attributed to

their status as rare collector’s items. The challenge to conventional art history posed by their

integrated literary and visual ‘texts’ is often overlooked, as is – perhaps most importantly of all

outside France – the challenge of recreating that text in a ‘target’ language. The books’ frequent

use of poetry texts is central to this: verse lends itself to their decorative, imaginative page

layouts, and the interaction of text and pictures proceeds page by page, line by line, so that its

recreation in another language demands close, often versified translation – an approach long

unfashionable in the English-speaking world, where the results are often dismissed as

‘doggerel’.

As far back as Dryden, critics and commentators have derided attempts to replicate the verse

forms of other languages in English. Dryden’s preface to his own translation of Ovid compares

the exercise to ‘dancing on ropes with fettered legs’ (Dryden, 2004:39). In this context, a

reluctance to translate livres d’artiste is perhaps understandable: the translator is not only

dancing the tightrope with ankles bound, but wearing the straitjacket of the visual ‘setting’, too.

As I will show, however, the ‘close’ translation of livres d’artiste as integrated visual and literary

texts can both illuminate the detail and scope of their artists’ imaginative responses, and

contribute to the debate on the translation of poetry as verse. Taking examples from Henri

Matisse’s book Florilège des Amours de Ronsard (1948) – the artist’s own selection and

arrangement of love lyrics by the sixteenth-century court poet Pierre de Ronsard – I show how

the ‘constraint’ of Matisse’s setting provides constructive guidance through the labyrinth of

translation choices, with wider implications for the translation of integrated visual and textual

content in contemporary media.

Matisse’s livres d’artiste

I would advise you to think carefully about your Ronsard before committing yourself. Think hard about what your Mallarmé became, and what it demanded of you in spell-binding hard work […].

In a letter to Matisse, the artist’s literary adviser André Rouveyre hints at the intensity of his

friend’s engagement with the medium of the livre d’artiste (Finsen, 2001:76).

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The catalogue raisonné of Matisse’s ‘ouvrages illustrés’ (Duthuit, 1988) lists early illustrations

for literary anthologies on Paris, and the artist’s first book-length engagement with the work of

one author (Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, published by Albert Skira in 1932.) An illustrated

edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses was followed by an edition of poems by Tristan Tzara with six

drawings commissioned by the poet (1939). With the exception of the Mallarmé, however,

Matisse’s greatest livres d’artiste are the work of the dark years of World War II: Thèmes et

Variations (1943) includes a text by Aragon (‘Matisse-en-France’) and 158 full-page lithograph

drawings, followed by Henry de Montherlant’s Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos (1944); Visages with

poems by Pierre Reverdy (1946); letters by the Portugese nun Marianna Alcaforado (Lettres

Portguaises, 1946); two editions of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in 1946 and 1947, more

poems by Tristan Tzara and Jules Romains (1948); the Florilège des Amours de Ronsard (worked

on throughout the war and published in 1948), and poems by Charles d’Orléans (1950). Jazz

(1947) is unique in incorporating Matisse’s own text. His assistant and companion Lydia

Delektorskaya describes the genesis of this extraordinary body of work:

‘[…] it is precisely thanks to the constraints imposed on Matisse by his health, that most of his fine illustrated books came into being. […] Sometimes […] comfortably settled, he worked sitting up, at a broad, movable table placed across his bed. […] Outside his working hours […] Matisse had to fill his time by reading (and he read a great deal […] finally, he became gripped and impassioned by [his illustrated books]: the choice of texts, their illustration, the composition of the page layouts, revisited over and over again, the decoration of the page, the bewitching process of working and reworking to achieve, each time, as perfect an ensemble as possible.’ (Delektorskaya, 1986:16-19).

The books were the product of isolation in the ‘free’ Vichy zone of south-east France, and

profound introspection in sickness and troubled times. The Florilège illustrations abound in

references to Matisse’s earlier, much better-known paintings, but the books as a whole look

ahead to his late works, too. They form a pivotal meditation on the road travelled, and a dark

prelude to the joyous post-war triumph of the paper cut-outs and the Chapel of the Rosary in

Vence.

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Poetry and line drawing: intimate expressions

Gestural, spontaneous-seeming line drawings were Matisse’s medium of choice for the

expression of often deeply personal meanings in almost all of his wartime books (except Jazz).

Commenting on the publication of the Florilège, Matisse’s friend and chronicler Aragon

describes the artist’s close identification with ‘his’ writers: ‘Mallarmé, Baudelaire, the Portugese

Nun […] Over the course of eighteen years, renewing our very concept of the nature of

illustration, this great painter has, in his major books, always identified himself with an aspect

of his chosen text [as if] in his later years, Henri Matisse used some of his books as an

opportunity to tell his own life story.’ (Aragon 1998:613).

A reading of the Florilège’s interwoven words and pictures highlights Matisse’s and Ronsard’s

mutual ‘confession’ of sexual passion recollected in old age and infirmity, and their shared

nostalgia in wartime for ‘this eternal France.’ But the artist’s setting explores much else, too:

moral and physical exhaustion and renewed inspiration; erotic and cerebral, metaphysical love;

amorous and artistic rejection; ageing and death. The pictures reflect Ronsard’s changing

registers and moods, from courtly vocabulary and Antique references to direct, colloquial

speech; and from romantic, metaphysical comparisons to realist sexual intimacy and brutal

confrontations with death. Some pictures are carefully polished and astonishingly beautiful,

others far more crudely drawn and rougher in appearance.

Matisse follows Ronsard’s ‘serial monogamy’ (the mistresses of the Amours) but tells his own

story, too: the background to his controversial ‘retreat’ from the war (‘les misères de ce temps’, to

borrow a phrase from Ronsard) into a world populated by much younger women (his models),

while his estranged wife and daughter risk their lives for the Resistance. Matisse meditates on

his relationship to womankind as an artist and man, but the book also addresses the role of art

as an ark of enduring values in times of chaos and upheaval, the artist’s lifelong challenge to

conventional canons of aesthetic beauty, the lurking threat of death (his own, and that of the

women closest to him), and the prospect of immortality in art.

Translating Ronsard-with-Matisse

Many livres d’artiste feature texts in languages other than English, but while translation is

essential to bring them to a wider audience, the language barrier is often, curiously, overlooked.

Commentator and collector Walter Strachan, himself a distinguished translator of French

poetry, attributes the books’ marginalisation to their scarcity, cost and infrequent public

exhibition, but not explicitly to the need to understand the (mostly French) texts (Strachan,

1969). The Burlington Magazine notes that Matisse’s books ‘have not received their due

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attention’ for reasons which are ‘open to speculation’, suggesting ‘prejudice against an artist’s

involvement in the production of exclusive limited editions.’ (Watkins, 1988). Again, the

language barrier seems invisible. Some re-editions of livres d’artistes do incorporate

translations, but almost always as separate appendices, compromising our appreciation of the

precise interaction of words and pictures.1 The lack of ‘facsimile’ translations is partly due to

cost (as suggested by Strachan), and partly, as noted above, to the type of translation so often

required. Often, the books’ pictures or decorations respond to specific passages of poetry, or

individual words, imposing tight constraints if the translator is to recreate this integrated ‘text’

in another language. Dryden is just one of many to dismiss the ‘verbal copying’ that will often be

needed (Venuti, 2004:39). The translator of a livre d’artiste must indeed be confined to what he

calls ‘the compass of Numbers,’ even the ‘Slavery of Rhyme’ – a challenge many are reluctant to

accept. In practice, however, the context of the livre d’artiste can provide structured guidance

and clarification.

Looking at form, rhyme, structure, periodicity, metaphor, imagery and simile, and metre, this

article examines how Matisse’s visual setting of Ronsard in the Florilège influenced my own

translation of the poems, and how this relates to the wider debate on the translation of poetry,

drawing on comment and discussion from a leading forum for poetry translation into English:

the annual Times Stephen Spender Prize –

(http://www.stephenspender.org/spender_prize.html).

The Spender prize judges agree that a translated poem must work as poetry in its own right.

‘Often,’ writes Susan Bassnett (2011), ‘that means re-thinking the poem, deciding what can and

cannot be retained, perhaps changing the structure, reworking patterns of sound and rhythm,

sometimes substituting images for one that will have the desired effect.’ Quoting the translator

and translation studies specialist James S. Holmes, Prof. Bassnett notes that when approaching a

poem, each translator will establish their own ‘“hierarchy of correspondences”: a set of

priorities of what to keep and what to discard.’ Broadly, the Spender judges are in favour of

freely translated adaptations, wary of attempts to translate rhyme, and receptive to bold

updates of historic texts. ‘Close’ translation is often equated with ‘stodgy literalism’ (M. Wynn

Thomas, writing in 2008).

1 See for example Cinema Calendrier du Coeur Abstrait/ Maison (Cinema Calendar of the Abstract

Heart/Houses), Ann Arbor: Thomas Press, 1982 (trans. Mary Ann Caws, inserted as a fold-out panel) or Jazz / Henri Matisse, Munich/New York: Prestel, 2001 (trans Christopher Wynne, in an appendix at the back of the book).

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The discussions point to what the French translator and literary theorist Henri Meschonnic calls

sourciers et ciblistes (‘sourcerers and targetists’) in the practice of translation: a division he

resists (Meschonnic 1999:22).

We must react against the concept – as fallacious as it is widespread – that ranges the sourcerers against the targetists: the sourcerers squinting at the starting language, trying to trace it as closely as possible; the targetists staring straight ahead, realists as they are, to the end language, thinking to preserve only the essential, the meaning. The sourcerers, for their part, are concerned with form, [what the targetists see as] inessential. We see immediately that this distribution of roles is none other than the separating-out of the classic notion of the sign, namely the combination of a signifier which may be phonic or graphic (the form) and the signified, the meaning. What received wisdom and approved logic accept as the only reasonable attitude in fact determines a state of conceptual stasis, and a literary disaster.

Meschonnic argues instead that form and meaning are indissociable:

Translating under the rule of the sign leads to a schizophrenic act of translation […] The targetist is aiming at the wrong target […] forgetting that a thought impacts upon language and does something to it, and that this is what must be translated. In any language, there is only one source: what a text does; and only one target or aim, namely doing what it does in the other language. There’s realism for you. What the targetist takes for realism is his own brand of semiotics. A bad sign.

When it comes to translating Ronsard-with-Matisse – a new and distinct source text based on a

continuum of phonic and graphic signs, interacting at every level from broad narrative structure

to the placing of individual words – the translation cannot be ‘strikingly independent’ of the

original poem.

Ronsard’s poetry – rich in what are often perceived as linguistically- and culturally-specific

rhythms, metre, references and imagery – has been variously translated into English, in its

original metre, as literal prose, or as vernacular English iambic pentameters. But the translator

of Ronsard-with-Matisse cannot make such choices ‘in isolation.’ He or she must follow

Matisse’s own perceptive, pictorial response to the poetry on the page. Matisse has already

chosen ‘what to keep and what to discard’, and translator is in the happy position of ‘swimming

in his wake’ (the phrase Matisse himself uses to describe his approach to Ronsard, in a letter to

Rouveyre).

Form

The Penguin Classics edition of Ronsard’s Selected Poems (2002) provides prose translations

beneath the French originals, conveying their sense but not attempting to recreate their poetic

form (Quainton and Vinestock, 2002:xlv). The Spender judges are similarly wary: a Horatian ode

translated as a haiku was ‘an exceptionally worthy winner’ in 2007. But the translator of

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Matisse’s Florilège cannot exercise this freedom. Reproducing Ronsard’s poetic form for its own

sake would almost certainly constitute ‘a bad sign’ (in Meschonnic’s coinage), but there are good

reasons for doing so in a facsimile translation of the Florilège.

The set of type on the page, and ‘the white left by the printer, or chosen in advance by me’ were

central to Matisse’s inspiration, as noted in a letter to Rouveyre (Finsen, 2001:83). Taking the

example of the sonnets in the Florilège, we see that they are almost all arranged across double-

page spreads, decorated with a bandeau at the top of the left-hand page and a cul-de-lampe at

the bottom of the right-hand page (see the glossary in Strachan, 1969:345-9). Matisse

experimented with alternative layouts, as recorded in his working drawings and trial mock-ups

for the book, now in the Bibliothèque National de France. But most often, he chooses to open out

the densely-packed sonnet form, giving us space to ‘read’ the accompanying pictures from left to

right, top to bottom, and to experience the ‘turn’ of the poem’s argument as a physical page-

break. Translating this ‘in facsimile’ means retaining the 14-line form, and Matisse’s

organization of it on the page.

In Matisse’s setting, the book’s opening sonnet Morne de corps ‘turns’ after the first quatrain, at

the page-break, leading the reader’s eye on and up to the top of the right-hand page, and

enacting the poet’s progress from physical and moral weariness, to new love and inspiration.

The location of the page-break is clearly deliberate – other sonnets in the collection are

arranged with eight or eleven lines on the left-hand page, with the relative sizes of the bandeau

and cul-de-lampe reversed: Matisse’s organization of the spreads responds to the individual

demands of each poem, and should be respected in a facsimile translation.

The content of Matisse’s illustrations reinforces the turn in Morne de corps, moving from the

bandeau’s dully conventional trophy of palm leaves and a lyre (representing classical poetry), to

a silhouette of a bird executed in just two lines, its beak and throat open in song, embodying the

physical exaltation and ‘inspiration’ described in the lines above. A translation of the spread

needs to acknowledge this close interaction between poetic form and meaning, and its

visualization in Matisse’s page setting and pictures (fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: Facsimile translation of the opening sonnet spread in Matisse’s Florilège des Amours de

Ronsard (1948).

Rhyme

Rhyme gets short shrift from the Spender judges: ‘Unless you have experience of using rhyme

this is often a strategy that leads nowhere except to contrived, forced lines and clichés’ (Susan

Bassnett, writing in 2007). But there are cautious pleas for rhyme in translation, too:

Of course it is not always necessary to rhyme a poem in English in the same way as it has been rhymed in the original. Indeed, there are occasions when to follow the original would mean sabotaging the poem in English – a language which it is far harder to rhyme unobtrusively. However, simply abandoning any attempt at rhyme often means sabotaging the poem in a different way. The English [of some entries] felt broken, lacked the essential tension that had given the original its power. (Karen Leeder, writing in 2007).

Rhyme is an important feature of Ronsard’s poetry, and a key consideration in my translations

from Matisse’s Florilège. In some cases (as in the sonnet Morne de corps, above), strict adhesion

to the original’s rhyme scheme did not seem essential, while in others, rhyme emerged as a

centrally important feature.

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The opening ten lines of Ronsard’s Elegy to Janet (a remarkable 20-page sequence in the

Florilège) make extensive use of enjambement and sentence structure to undermine the effect of

the elegiac rhyming couplets.

Pein moy Janet, pein moy je te supplie, Sur ce tableau les beautez de m’amie De la façon que je te les diray. Comme importun je ne te suppliray D’un art menteur quelque faveur lui faire. Il suffit bien si tu las sçais portraire Ainsi qu’elle est, sans vouloir desguiser Son naturel pour la favoriser : Car la faveur n’est bonne que pour celles Qui se font peindre, et qui ne sont pas belles.

The end rhymes do not always coincide with the ends of sentences: ‘suppliray’ rhymes with

‘diray’ in the preceding sentence, and the rhyme of ‘portraire’ with ‘faire’ at the end of the

sentence above is down-played and swept along in the enjambement leading to the next line

‘Ainsi qu’elle est…’. This ‘push-me pull-you’ movement, and the role of rhyme in setting up a

pattern of echoes and links outwith the sentence structures, seem to me to embody Ronsard’s

central message of the uncontainability of his mistress’s beauty within the confines of art

(poetry or paint), while at the same time tacitly admitting his own success in so doing by coming

neatly to a full stop at the end of the rhyming couplet in lines 9 and 10. This is the precise

location of Matisse’s first page break in the sequence. His beautiful portrait of Lydia, on the

facing page, looks straight at the word belles, shyly acquiescing to the compliment. Ideally, an

English translation of the Elegy’s opening spread will need to engage with the effect of the

rhyme, just as Matisse has. The rhymes in my translation do work to pull the sentences apart;

and the sentence structure does undermine the effect of the rhyming couplets: ‘how’ rhymes

with ‘now’ in the preceding sentence, which ends halfway through the line. ‘Art’ does not fall at

the end of the sentence (like ‘faire’ in the original), but it does run on ahead through

enjambement to rhyme with ‘part.’

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Fig.2: Facsimile translation of the opening of Ronsard’s Elegy to Janet (pp 30-49 of the Florilège).

In the above translation, the challenge of recreating the elegiac rhyming couplets did ‘sabotage’

the final choice of vocabulary, at times. The initial translation of the poem's vigorous first line

was established almost immediately and naturally, as: ‘Paint for me Janet, O paint me, I pray’,

however this presented the difficulty of finding a rhyme for ‘pray’ at the end of line 2. An initial

solution read: ‘Paint for me Janet, O paint me I pray / On this panel the beauties of she who

holds sway / Over me […]' with the added attraction of enjambement into line 3. Ultimately,

though, ‘plea’ left the way clear for ‘she’ at the end of line 2, and further enjambement into line 3:

‘[…] whom I love.’ Overall, however, the rhyming couplets prevailed in this instance, in my

hierarchy of correspondences.

Structure and placing

The Penguin Classics translators note that rendering Ronsard in clear English prose

necessitated the occasional re-ordering of ‘convoluted sentences containing embedded clauses,

inversions and unconventional word order imposed by the demands of metre or rhyme.’

(Quainton and Vinestock, 2002: xlv). Similarly, one Spender judge advocates ‘re-thinking the

poem […] perhaps changing the structure’ in order to create a living version of the original text

in English (Susan Bassnett, writing in 2011). In the pages of the Florilège, however, Matisse’s

setting often reflects the precise structure of Ronsard’s poems, as in one magnificent spread in

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the Elegy to Janet. Here, Matisse has set the poem so that Ronsard’s descriptions of his

mistress’s breast, belly, and pubis run top to bottom on a single left-hand text page, placed

exactly opposite the relevant sections of Matisse’s full-page drawing of the woman’s torso.

Alternate spreads in the Elegy feature text pages opposite blank space, and these may be

translated more freely, but an effective translation of the spread described above should try to

retain the precise ordering and placing of the lines: breasts and shoulders in lines 1 to 8

(counting from the top of the page), the girl’s belly in lines 9 to 14, and ‘l’autre chose’ in lines 15

to 18 at the bottom.

To update or not to update?

Writing in 2008, Spender judge Susan Bassnett clearly endorses breathing new life into old

poetry through thoughtful updating:

[…] when a poem comes from a culture that is distant in time as well as place, the task of the translator is so much harder. The principal decision to take is whether to try and modernize the poem or to try and convey a sense of its antiquity in some way […] this year there were some very fine translations of ancient poetry, and all those we singled out had decided on a contemporary recreation. We even had one translation wittily written as a text message.

But there are dissenting voices, too:

‘I have only one query and I voice it with some hesitation. It concerns the fondness of many of the entrants for what historically is called “imitation,” based on the source text, but updating, presenting it in plausible contemporary garb; this practice verges on parody […] the approach has a long history and its appeal is obvious. However, it also encourages a somewhat unhistorical way of reading old or ancient texts, applying an often problematical parallelism. While the challenge to the imagination is clear, and the chance of finding sympathetic contemporary readers is enhanced, I venture to suggest that some caution is called for and translators should examine their motivations and objectives, and contextualize the parallels drawn.’ (Daniel Weissbort, writing in 2006)

Again, the translator of Ronsard-with-Matisse has had the choices made for him, and is

(paradoxically) ‘free’ to swim in the artist’s wake. Quite simply, Matisse retains the archaic

spelling of the 1578 edition of Ronsard’s complete works. He wants the poems to look old on the

page, while his drawings mostly eliminate historical detail or the risk of anachronism: the

distance between his ‘modern’ drawings and the period poems is immediately visible. Only one

picture retains a slight historical flavour: an amorous courtier sports a goatee beard, ruff and

bloomer-style pantaloons, but even these are down-played in the final image, compared to

earlier working drawings (see Delektorskaya, 1996: 264).

Recreating this ‘time-lapse’ with archaic English spelling in a facsimile translation of the

Florilège would almost certainly constitute another ‘bad sign.’ But the book’s typography does, I

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think, entitle the translator to recreate a certain period ‘aura’, using words and expressions

loosely inspired by Wyatt, Shakespeare and the Metaphysicals, where appropriate. My use of the

word ‘sans’ in the translation of the sonnet Marie qui voudroit vostre nom retourner (see ‘Metre

and rhythm’, below) is one example. Another is the use of the apostrophe to shorten words (this

can also help with metre: ‘whate’er’ in the opening sonnet, for example). One key issue I felt

unable to resolve fully was the use of ‘you’ or ‘thee,’ ultimately avoiding the latter for fear of

straying too far into pastiche, although it may constitute a justifiable English equivalent of the

Florilège’s archaic French spelling.

Simile, metaphor and imagery

Inevitably, a facsimile translation of Ronsard’s simile, metaphor and imagery in the Florilège will

take its cue from Matisse’s pictures. One striking example occurs in the sonnet Marie vous avez

la joue aussi vermeil. The Penguin Classics prose translation reads:

Marie, you have cheeks as red as a rose in May, you have hair between brown and chestnut, coiled into a thousand curls, prettily twining right around your ears. When you were small, a sweet little bee made its delicious nectar on your lips, Love left his arrows in your stern eyes, Peitho gave you a voice unmatched by any other. You have breasts like two mounds of clotted milk, which swell round as apples, just as in early spring two buds enfolded in their sheaths swell round as apples. Your arms are those of Juno, your breasts are those of the Graces, you have both the brow and the hand of Aurora. But you have the heart of a fierce Lioness. (Quainton and Vinestock, 2002:29).

Lines 9 to 11 of the French sonnet are discussed in an article by Christine Scollen-Jomack (in

Ford and Jondorff, 1986:109ff), explaining the background to the Penguin translators’ otherwise

rather surprising translation of 'monts de lait' (describing Ronsard’s lover’s breasts) as 'mounds

of clotted milk.' Ronsard’s original readers doubtless pictured the form, colour, sheen, even

perhaps the slight wobbling movement of two perfectly-moulded laits caillés (a kind of cultured

‘blancmange’), set in round bowls and freshly turned out – a culturally-specific image par

excellence. But English readers of the above translation may picture an unpleasantly lumpy,

curdled substance.

Scollen-Jomack points out that the 1578 sonnet (the version translated for the Penguin Classics

edition, and chosen by Matisse for the Florilège) is Ronsard’s own revision of an earlier

published version. The Penguin translation retains a knowing echo of the earlier lines:

Vous avés les tetins comme deus mons de lait, Caillé bien blanchement sus du jonc nouvelet Qu'une jeune pucelle au mois de Juin façonne

In the later version, as Scollen-Jomack puts it: 'the cheese does not disappear altogether, but it is

considerably diminished' (Ford and Jondorff, 1986:109). For the translator, the key question is

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whether the 'monts de lait' are a visual reference to two rounds of fresh, white lait caillé, or

simply an adjectival phrase evoking colour and shape (‘milk-white mounds')? Again, Matisse’s

setting in the Florilège lights the way. Other poems in the collection use ‘de lait’ to describe

colour, but our most important clue lies in the artist’s recurrent breast images throughout. The

sonnet Marie vous avez la joue aussi vermeil has no pictorial accompaniment, but the preceding

spread includes the closing sextet of the famous sonnet Marie, qui voudroit vostre nom retourner

above a cul-de-lampe of two round fruits nestling in foliage – a metamorphic image of breasts as

fruit (apparently lemons). The nipple-like tips of the lemons point straight at a full-page portrait

of Lydia on the opposite page, her breasts demurely hidden beneath a frilled jabot. Similar

images of breasts as fruit are a recurring leitmotiv throughout the book.

Clearly, Matisse is uninterested in ‘cheesy’ breasts; and Ronsard himself seems eager to

diminish their impact in his 1578 revisions to the sonnet. The ‘milk-white breasts’ are compared

just two lines later to rosebuds: ‘deux boutons que leur chasse environne […].’ The translator of

the Florilège in facsimile is free to set cheese imagery aside and take lait as a reference to colour.

The Florilège’s opening sonnet, Morne de corps, is a different case. Here, Matisse has

extrapolated his own imagery (music and song), although the French poem contains no musical

imagery as such, and we should be careful, in translation, not to insert it. Matisse’s images

should be left to stand as imaginative extrapolations from the text, not literal illustrations.

Metre and rhythm

Metre and rhythm are seldom discussed by the Spender judges, and they are arguably the most

difficult features to translate between English and French. In a facsimile translation of the

Florilège, however, there are often good reasons to try and recreate their impact. One English

commentator, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, praises Ronsard’s use of the alexandrine, ‘the danseur

noble of French verse-rhythms’ but which can be ‘something of a stumbling block to the English

ear.’ Wyndham-Lewis hymns ‘what Ronsard can do with the alexandrine; the emotional range

behind that disciplined clarity, the scrupulous French command of a technique whose

mechanism has often been compared, in its delicate strength, to a watch-spring.’ (Wyndham-

Lewis, 1946:5). Matisse’s setting of the Florilège implicitly endorses this: two of Ronsard’s best-

known sonnets to Marie take pride of place at the beginning of a separate section, introduced by

its own title spread (fig. 16), featuring an arrangement of six singing nightingales in three lines

of two, and a glorious bouquet of twelve flowers: the perfect visualization of the even pace,

balance, deceptive simplicity, naturalism and flourish of the twelve-syllable alexandrines to

come.

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The translator of the ensuing sonnets can only swim on, then, in Matisse’s wake, engaging like

him with Ronsard’s alexandrines, and attempting to replicate their evenly-balanced song and

tri-syllabic metric feet.

The first sonnet in the ‘Marie’ sequence is Marie qui voudroit vostre nom retourner – sonnet IX of

Ronsard’s revised Second Livre des Amours of 1578 – prefaced by a left-facing profile gazing

back to the title spread’s visual tribute to the alexandrine:

Marie, qui voudroit vostre nom retourner, Il trouveroit aimer : aimez-moy donc Marie, Vostre nom de nature à l’amour vous convie. Pecher contre son nom, ne se doit pardonner.

S’il vous plaist vostre cœur pour gage me donner, Je vous offre le mien : ainsi de ceste vie Nous prendrons les plaisirs, et jamais autre envie Ne me pourra l’esprit d’une autre emprisonner.

Il fault aimer, maistresse, au monde quelque chose. Celuy qui n’aime point, malheureux se propose Une vie d’un Scythe, et ses jours veut passer

Sans gouster la douceur des douceurs la meilleure. Hé, qu’est-il rien de doux sans Venus ? las ! à l’heure Que j’aymerai plus, puisse-je trespasser.

The French poem’s opening line has a flowing quality embodied in the amphibrach metre,

consisting of four tri-syllabic feet of unstressed-stressed-unstressed syllables: the line’s four

stresses fall on ‘Marie’, ‘voudroit’, ‘nom’ and retourner’. The metrical scan takes its cue from the

natural ‘unstressed/stressed’ pronunciation of the name Marie, but there is a slight rhythmic

Fig. 3: The title spread of the Amour de Marie sequence in the Florilège. The bouquet was selected from a series of alternatives, none of which feature twelve blooms. As if to emphasize the final choice of twelve, Matisse printed the alternatives as finished lithographs and included them in a separate portfolio of ‘rejected’ images, with the first 20 numbered copies of the Florilège (see Duthuit, 1988:216).

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stumble in line 2, on the word ‘trouveroit.’ The remaining lines open mostly with anapaests (two

unstressed and one stressed syllable): the metre has ‘turned itself around’ while still retaining

the basic four-foot rhythm.2 The lines fall mostly into two even halves with a hiatus in the

middle, serving as a pause for thought between two rushes of ideas.

A recent English verse translation by Rosemary Clark uses iambic pentameters (Clark,

2006:167-80).

Marie, if men should try to twist your name

They'd find aimer – so love me then, Marie.

Your name requires it. You must loving be;

Refusal would be mortal sin and shame.

If you consent to pledge me all your heart,

I give you mine, and so we shall partake

Of all life's pleasures; and I undertake,

No other fancy shall command my thought.

Mistress, to love is every mortal's share.

A man who loves not, wretchedly must bear

A Scythian's life, and all his days will spend

Without the sweetest of all sweets the height.

What! Without love, where then lies all delight?

The day I love no more, then may I meet my end.

Clark’s translation sounds rhythmically quite different from the French: the trotting metre, the

rhythmic stumble and turnaround, and the evenly-balanced four-foot lines are sacrificed to the

iambic metre, although the lines do often fall into two (unequal) halves. In the context of

Matisse’s Florilège, this translation would not compound the artist’s implicit visualisation of

Ronsard’s alexandrines in the section’s title page.

With an opening quatrain consisting entirely of eleven-syllable lines, and no clear

approximation to the rhythmic turnaround, my own English translation reads:

Marie, he who wishes to turn your name 'round

Will find the word aimer: so love me, Marie,

Your name is a summons, 'tis Nature's own plea,

To sin 'gainst one's name does all pardon confound.

2 Interestingly, we might note that Marie’s profile in Matisse’s accompanying picture (fig. 4) can also be

visually ‘turned around’ so that her slightly parted lips form a perfect cupid’s bow, echoing a recurrent leitmotiv throughout the book.

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If you will, give your heart as a pledge unto me,

As I give you my heart: so life's pleasures we take.

Desire for another shall nevermore make

Of my spirit a slave: in your love I am free.

Mistress, we must, in this world, love some thing.

Unhappy is he who loves nought, and would bring

On himself a Scythian, barb’rous life sans ease

Never tasting the sweetest of sweets all his days.

Sans Venus, alas! what pleasures remain? I pray,

Come the hour when I no more shall love, may life cease.

This translation does include some reasonably natural-sounding alexandrines, but 'padding'

was required to achieve this, often because French conjugation tends to add extra syllables to

verbs which may be far shorter in English. In this way, the final words of the first tercet (‘in your

love I am free’) satisfy the metre by adding a ‘gloss’, but do not introduce extraneous material or

meanings. At the same time, certain expressions in the French are strikingly condensed, like the

line ‘Ne me pourra l'esprit d'une autre emprisonner.’ The explicit reference to another woman

(‘une autre’) becomes implicit in my version, as it does in Clark's.

Conclusion

Translating Ronsard’s poetry in Matisse’s setting revealed a clear hierarchy of correspondences,

informed in each case by Matisse’s responses to aspects of his chosen texts: sometimes rhyme

prevailed, sometimes metre, and sometimes poetic form or the precise location of an individual

word. The close interaction between the text and Matisse’s visual setting was not an

insurmountable constraint on the translation. In practice, it provided pragmatic guidance and

clarity, and a valid endorsement of the decision to translate poetry as verse.

Beyond the rarefied world of the livre d’artiste, an informed awareness of the relationship

between words and pictures can enhance the successful commercial translation of integrated,

interactive media. In many ways, the pioneers of the livre d’artiste foreshadow the evolving

roles of visual and verbal content and their interaction in modern media. Mallarmé’s legacy is

especially remarkable. As a teacher of English, the poet developed hand-made tools enabling

pupils to work alone and intuitively: one is card (reproduced in Sigridur Arnar, 2011:167) with

a sketch of a flower pot, and a cut-out butterfly attached to a cord threaded through the heart of

the flower. From a starting position alighted on the flower, the insect can be pulled out on the

thread and placed ‘above’, ‘below’ or ‘upon’ the flower. The relevant prepositions, in French and

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English, are written in their correct relationships to the pot. The student moves the butterfly to

the words, reads them and visualises their meaning, exactly as with modern, interactive, digital

resources for language learning.

The livre d’artiste stands today as a pioneering, integrated medium. But its central fascination

remains the depth and imagination of an artist’s response to a great literary text. In the effort to

recreate that cross-disciplinary encounter – page by page, line by line – the much-maligned

translator of poetry as verse, dancing the tightrope with fettered legs, finds guidance and

support, even a safety net.

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Bibliography

Matisse’s complete illustrated books are catalogued in Duthuit (1988), below. Catalogues of

livres d’artistes in general are to be found in Strachan (1969) and Khalfa (2001).

Livres d’artistes and related literature

Sigrídur Arnar, A. (2011) The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book and the

Transformation of Print Culture, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press

Strachan, W. J. (1969) The Artist and the Book in France, London: Peter Owen

Matisse

Aragon, L. (1971) Henri Matisse, roman, Paris: Gallimard; paperback edition, Paris:

Gallimard/Quarto, 1998

Delektorskaya, L. (1996) Contre Vents et Marées: Peinture et livres illustrés de 1939 à 1943, Paris:

Editions Irus et Vincent Hansma

Duthuit, C. (1988) Matisse, Catalogue raisonné des ouvrages illustrés, Paris: Claude Duthuit: pp 3-

5

Finsen, H. (ed.) (2001) Matisse Rouveyre : Correspondance, Paris: Flammarion, 2001

Guillaud, Jacqueline and Maurice, (1987) Matisse: Rhythm and Line, Paris and New York:

Guillaud Editions

Watkins, N. (1988) ‘Matisse at Waddington Graphics’, in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 130, no.

1029: pp 942-3.

Ronsard

Clark, R. (2006) ‘”Love for Marie”, by Pierre de Ronsard’ in Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 3

issue 1-2: pp 167-180.

Buon, G. (ed.) (1578) Les oeuvres de P. de Ronsard, Gentil-homme Vandomois, rédigées en sept

tomes, reveues et augmentées, Paris: G. Buon

Scollen-Jomack, C. (1986) ‘Ronsard’s Vanishing Cheese’ in P. Ford and G. Jondorf (eds), Ronsard

in Cambridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press : p. 109-122

Quainton M., and Vinestock, E., (eds and trans.) (2002) Pierre de Ronsard: Selected Poems,

London: Penguin Classics

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Wyndham-Lewis, D. (1946) Ronsard, London: Sheed & Ward

Translation

Meschonnic, H. (1999) Poétique du traduire, Lagrasse: Verdier [My translations here.]

Holmes James S. (ed.) (1988) Translated! Papers on literary translation and translation studies,

Amsterdam: Rodopi

Venuti, L. (ed.) (2004) The Translation Studies Reader (second edition), New York and London:

Routledge