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Unread 04-25-2017, 08:08 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Bill, I'm probably being unfair to Ronsard.

Ronsard certainly dedicated love poems to a long series of teenaged women, for some of whom we have historical details. But we know that at least some of these poems were commissioned in praise of other men's mistresses; and Ronsard's relationships with the others may have been mostly literary, modeled in part on Petrarch's ever-so-chaste yet ever-so-obsessive worship of his Laura, and in part on poetic traditions like the blazon and effictio (which Shakespeare mocks in his Sonnet 130; these systematically catalogued and praised each part of a beautiful woman's anatomy, apparently without implying that the poet had done actual primary research into the particulars; they're far too restrained to be exercises in bawdiness, IMO).

Yes, Ronsard fetishizes very young women's barely-budding breasts in several poems, but this may simply be his imagination at work, supplemented heavily with borrowings from tradition.

Ronsard couldn't marry Cassandre Salviati--an Italian who was 15 when he met her at age 21 at a court ball--because he had taken minor orders, although he was never ordained a priest; she married someone else the next year. He continued to dedicate poems to her, or to the idea of her. And he continued to receive ecclesiastical posts for the rest of his life, despite his well-known side job churning out erotic poetry.

Some scholars feel that Ronsard's relationship with Marie Dupin, also 15 years old when they met, may not have been strictly platonic. However, his relationship with Hélène de Surgères, who was a teenager when Ronsard was 45 years old (and who is the addressee of the sonnet John quoted above), is widely regarded as nothing more than literary.

The other dedicatees of his love poems include Marguerite, Jeanne, Madeleine, Rose, Sinope, Ginèvre, and Isabeau. We know that there was more than one Marie, but one was a duke's mistress, and her poem of praise was commissioned. Some of these names may have been pseudonyms, following the classical tradition, and some may have been entirely fictional constructs, created as excuses to write love poems. We don't know.

In sum, there's not enough solid evidence to support my earlier statement about Ronsard, which I retract.

I think several of us have taken stabs at translating the Ronsard sonnet above. I'll post mine if others will post theirs. (I've also translated his sonnet about the flea enjoying access to somebody's breasts--Cassandre's, I think.)
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