For Maurice Scève: Ten Versions and One Tribute
Enis Batur
Translated by Clifford Endres and Selhan Savcıgil-Endres
Translators' Notes:
Enis Batur can rightly be considered one of Turkey's leading literary figures. Born in 1952, he has by now published a hundred or so books ranging from poetry to novels, essays, travelogues and an autobiography. In addition he has served as director and chief editor at several publishing firms including the publications branch of Yapi Kredi Bank; currently he is executive director of Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi (Red Cat Publishing House.) His prolific output and high public profile have often led pundits to credit him with bringing about a sort of renaissance in Turkish private publishing. However, his eleven poems based on Maurice Scève’s masterpiece, Délie, belong to a renaissance of a different kind. |
Scève (ca. 1501-1564) was a native of Lyon, where in the 1530s he and a small coterie called the Sodalitium Lugdunense were, in the tradition of Renaissance imitatio, writing poetry in neo-Latin, which they were pushing to become the standard literary language of France. A shift in the political winds, however, combined with a passion for Petrarch's Canzoniere turned him to the vernacular, and in 1544 he brought out the Délie. In it 449 ten-line, ten-syllable dizains explore the terrain not only of erotic love poetry but of the philosophical idealism of Plato and Scève's Italian Neoplatonist contemporaries. In addition it includes fifty allegorical woodcuts in the manner of medieval emblem books. The images––unicorn, phoenix, Orpheus, alembic, woman winding yarn––form a graphic counterpoint to the poet's words. Batur's ten-line "versions" of Scève—to call them "imitations" or "translations" would be inaccurate—play off the poems and images both. (Poem IX is a good instance.)
Interestingly, 10 dizains in classical French = exactly 1000 words. However, Scève’s immediate models were Petrarch and his Laura, as not only had the poet turned from neo-Latin to the Italian vernacular, but animated his sonnets for twenty-seven years with the love of a woman. There is a story (perhaps apocryphal) that Scève, while studying in Avignon, once visited Laura's grave and discovered therein a small iron box containing one of Petrarch's sonnets. His own love object, by contrast—Pernette du Guillet—was a poet in her own right, but her lines are frequently at distinct variance to those of her would-be lover.
Enis Batur came to the Délie primarily through serendipity. He writes, "I first heard about Maurice Scève and his poems in 1969 from a young teacher who was passionate about French classical poetry. He would fall into a swoon as he recited du Bellay and Ronsard. But at the age of seventeen and under the spell of the Baudelaire-Mallarmé-Rimbaud trio (at the time we didn't know about Lautréamont), I didn't feel I could appreciate Scève. Thirty years passed before the real encounter took place. About a year after Elegies: The Sarcophagus of Mourning Women was published in English [1996, trsl. Saliha Paker and Clifford Endres], I received a letter from John Ashbery in which he remarked that my Elegies reminded him of Maurice Scève's Délie. Only much later did I understand what high praise his kind words were."
Scève's reputation, after falling into centuries of obscurity after the sixteenth century, was revived early in the twentieth century by French modernists such as Valery Larbaud, and in English by Ashbery, who in 1969 published a long poem (Fragment) inspired by Délie, consisting of fifty dizains and twenty-five "emblems" by Alex Katz. Batur composed his versions in 2001, publishing them in Neyin Nesisin Sen in 2007. He has commented on his desire to create a "metatext"—an aspiration that puts him squarely in the company of Scève and his fellow humanists, whose absorption of classical texts by way of imitatio paved the way to the great work of Du Bellay, Ronsard, and the Pléiade.
The forthcoming book, which will include the following poems, will be published by Talisman House.
Interestingly, 10 dizains in classical French = exactly 1000 words. However, Scève’s immediate models were Petrarch and his Laura, as not only had the poet turned from neo-Latin to the Italian vernacular, but animated his sonnets for twenty-seven years with the love of a woman. There is a story (perhaps apocryphal) that Scève, while studying in Avignon, once visited Laura's grave and discovered therein a small iron box containing one of Petrarch's sonnets. His own love object, by contrast—Pernette du Guillet—was a poet in her own right, but her lines are frequently at distinct variance to those of her would-be lover.
Enis Batur came to the Délie primarily through serendipity. He writes, "I first heard about Maurice Scève and his poems in 1969 from a young teacher who was passionate about French classical poetry. He would fall into a swoon as he recited du Bellay and Ronsard. But at the age of seventeen and under the spell of the Baudelaire-Mallarmé-Rimbaud trio (at the time we didn't know about Lautréamont), I didn't feel I could appreciate Scève. Thirty years passed before the real encounter took place. About a year after Elegies: The Sarcophagus of Mourning Women was published in English [1996, trsl. Saliha Paker and Clifford Endres], I received a letter from John Ashbery in which he remarked that my Elegies reminded him of Maurice Scève's Délie. Only much later did I understand what high praise his kind words were."
Scève's reputation, after falling into centuries of obscurity after the sixteenth century, was revived early in the twentieth century by French modernists such as Valery Larbaud, and in English by Ashbery, who in 1969 published a long poem (Fragment) inspired by Délie, consisting of fifty dizains and twenty-five "emblems" by Alex Katz. Batur composed his versions in 2001, publishing them in Neyin Nesisin Sen in 2007. He has commented on his desire to create a "metatext"—an aspiration that puts him squarely in the company of Scève and his fellow humanists, whose absorption of classical texts by way of imitatio paved the way to the great work of Du Bellay, Ronsard, and the Pléiade.
The forthcoming book, which will include the following poems, will be published by Talisman House.