La poesie au miroir: La langue et l'imitation dans la poesie latine de la Pleiade

摘要

As they themselves seem to have wanted, the poets of the Pleiade are best known for their contributions to the development of French poetry in which they sought to resurrect the traditions of Ancient verse. However, with their humanist background, the Pleiade poets were, to paraphrase a witty Latin poem by Du Bellay, torn between a love for Latin and a sense of duty toward their own mother tongue; far from hesitating to compose in Latin, they endeavored to secure themselves a place with posterity in Latin poetry. While the particularly strong ideological stance of the Pleiade group lends significance to the study of their Latin poetry, the bilingual nature of their work also helps shed light on the practice of Latin composition in the Renaissance. Governed as heavily by tradition as by contemporary theories of imitation and translation, Latin poetic language gave little room for maneuver; the Neo-Latin poet was typically a reassembler of texts already abounding in commonplaces and poetic conventions. The difficulties of Latin and the intensely personal strivings of the Pleiade poets account for the prominent theme of poetic composition which one finds in their Latin poetry. While Ronsard wrote little poetry in Latin and others concerned themselves mostly with liminary Latin verse, the theme of poetic composition was a major preoccupation for Joachim Du Bellay, Remy Belleau and Jean-Antoine de Baif. For Du Bellay, Latin poetry becomes an erotic confrontation with Neo-Latin poetic tradition in his Amores, a cycle of love poems he devotes to a certain Faustina. Belleau's sparse Latin poetry consisting of translations of Ronsard and self-translations shows struggle with Ronsard's authority and his own emerging poetic identity. Jean-Antoine de Baif's Latin verse dramatizes the question of novelty and plagiarism in Neo-Latin poetry; representing his last attempt to obtain unjustly denied recognition, Baif's Carmina inaugurate a "new poet" who plays with the reader by plagiarizing famous old and new poetry. By individually dramatizing the problems of poetic composition, these Pleiade poets fulfilled their wish to find their humanist voice in Latin.