Art Et Fonction (document en anglais)

Dictes moy où, n’en quel pays,

Est Flora la belle Romaine;

Archipiada, ne Thaïs,

Qui fut sa cousine germaine,

Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine

Dessus riviere ou sus estan,

Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine?

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Où est la très sage Héloïs,

Pour qui chastré fut et puis moyne

Pierre Esbaillart à Saint Denis?

Pour son amour eut cest essoyne.

Semblablement, où est royne

Qui commanda que Buridan

Fust geté en ung sac en Seine?

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Tell me where, or in what land

is Flora, the lovely Roman,

or Archipiades, or Thaïs,

who was her first cousin;

or Echo, replying whenever called

across river or pool,

and whose beauty was more than human?

But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Where is that brilliant lady Heloise,

for whose sake Peter Abelard was castrated

and became a monk at Saint-Denis?

He suffered that misfortune because of his love for her.

And where is that queen who

ordered that Buridan

be thrown into the Seine in a sack?

But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Queen Blanche, white as a lily,

who sang with a siren’s voice;

Big-footed Bertha, Beatrice, Alice,

Arembourg who ruled over Maine;

and Joan, the good maiden of Lorraine

who was burned by the English at Rouen —

where are they, where, O sovereign Virgin?

But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Prince, do not ask in a week

where they are, or in a year.

The only answer you will get is this refrain:

But where are the snows of yesteryear?

________

NOTES (partly based on the notes in Anthony Bonner’s bilingual edition of Villon’s Complete Works, Bantam, 1960):

Flora was a celebrated Roman courtesan mentioned by Juvenal. “Archipiada” is thought to be Villon’s misremembering of Alcibiades, an Athenian man (a friend of Socrates who appears in Plato’s Symposium) who was reputed to be a model of beauty, and who in the Middle Ages was therefore assumed to be a woman. Thaïs (featured in a novel by Anatole France and an opera by Massenet) was an Athenian courtesan who accompanied Alexander the Great to Egypt. Calling her Archipiada’s “first cousin” is a way of saying that they were equally beautiful. Echo “was once one of Juno’s attendants, and became the confidant of Jupiter’s amours. Her loquacity, however, displeased Jupiter; and she was deprived of the power of speech by Juno, and only permitted to answer the questions that were put to her. Pan was one of her admirers. Echo, after she had been punished by Juno, fell in love with Narcissus, and, on being despised by him, she pined away, and was changed into a stone, which was still permitted to retain the power of voice” (Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary).

Peter Abelard was one of the greatest medieval philosophers. He recounts his affair with Heloise in The Story of My Misfortunes, which is usually included in editions of their letters. Rexroth discusses them in More Classics Revisited and recommends Helen Waddell’s fictional retelling, Peter Abelard, as a good introduction. Buridan, a renowned 14th-century scholar at the University of Paris, was also the hero of a famous legend. When he was a student it was rumored that the Queen of France was inviting students to her palace (which bordered on the Seine), giving them fine meals, sleeping with them, and then having them tied up in a sack and tossed to a watery death in the river. Buridan managed to get himself an invitation, and everything the rumors said turned out to be true. For three days they ate, drank, listened to sweet music and made love. Then came his time to be tossed out the window. But Buridan had arranged for a barge full of hay to pass beneath the palace. As he landed in it, his fellow students guiding the barge dropped a large rock into the river to reassure the Queen. (Unfortunately for the credibility of the story, the queen

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