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Du Bellay and Hellenic Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the Palatine Anthology were preserved two inscriptions of Bacchylides. One of them, the dedication of a shrine to the southwest wind, was written in behalf of a farmer named Eudemus:
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945
References
1 For abbreviations employed in the following pages consult PMLA, lx, 66. LG represents Lyra Graeca, ed. J. M. Edmonds (London, Heinemann, 1927—Loeb Classical Library).
2 vi, 53.
3 LG iii, 222. Eudemus set up this shrine upon his farm unto Zephyr, the kindest of all the winds. For at his prayer he came to help him winnow the grain quickly from the ripe ears.
4 Cham. v, 16, note 1, and cf. 13, note 2 for an informative discussion of Navagero and his work. Consult also Professor James Hutton's Greek Anthology in Italy to 1800, p. 190 f. and note 1, and p. 354, note 2.
5 Lau. vi, 15.
6 v, 16.
7 ii, 216.
8 LG ii, 86. Yet again will love eye me tenderly from beneath dark brows and cast me with manifold magic into the hopeless net of the Love-Goddess. I swear his approach makes me tremble like an old champion-horse of the chariot-race when he draws the swift car all unwillingly into the contest.
9 LG i, 186. It is to be a God, methinks, to sit before you and listen close by to the sweet accents and winning laughter which have made the heart in my breast beat fast… . When I look on you, Brocheo, my speech comes short or fails me quite, I am tongue-tied; in a moment a delicate fire has overrun my flesh, my eyes grow dim and my ears sing, the sweat runs down me and a trembling takes me altogether, till I am as green and pale as the grass, and death itself seems not very far away.
10 i, 48, Son. xxv, 1 f.
11 As Chamard observes, this sonnet is a translation (a paraphrase might be more exact) of Ariosto, Orl. Fur. xxiii, 125-126. Nothing in this passage of the Italian poet corresponds, however, to the expression flamme subtile.
12 ii, 231, Son. xvii.
13 Cf. iv, 90, 61 f.
14 v, 91 f.
15 The Latin version of the “Baiser” in Du Bellay's Poemata (ed. Courbet, vol. i, p. 498) gives Deûm sodalis as the equivalent of avec les Dieux.
16 Cf. iv, 89, 35 f.
17 In “La Contre-Repentie” there is another imitation of a phrase from the present fragment of Sappho, coupled with a direct reference to the poet herself. The courtesan, repenting of her original repentance, counsels an unrestrained indulgence of the lustful, even unnatural, appetites:
Cherchez, cherchez qui d'un teinct palissant
Trompe l'ardeur de son feu languissant:
… … … … … . .
Ou qui avec quelque compagne sienne
Voyse imitant la docte Lesbienne. (v, 146, 121 f.)
The expression teinct palissant (cf. iv, 90, 57 f.) seems to be a recollection of 
. The reference to la docte Lesbienne occurring in the same context would seem to make this conjecture fairly probable. This poem of Du Bellay's, however, like the one entitled “La Courtisane Repentie,” which precedes it in the Divers Jeux Rustiques, is a translation from the Latin of Pierre Gillebert. Owing to the disappearance of the MSS. of Gillebert, it is impossible to state whether Du Bellay's rendering of the Latin incidentally reveals an independent knowledge of the Greek text of Sappho's ode. (See Cham. v, 136, note 1.)
18 LG i, 183 f. Aphrodite splendour-throned immortal, wile-weaving child of Zeus, to thee is my prayer. Whelm not my heart, O Queen, with suffering and sorrow, but come hither I pray thee, if ever ere this thou hast heard and marked my voice afar, and stepping from thy Father's house harnessed a golden chariot, and the strong pinions of thy two swans fair and swift, whirring from heaven through mid-sky, have drawn thee towards the dark earth, and lo! were there; and thou, blest Lady, with a smile on that immortal face, didst gently ask what ailed me, and why I called, and what this wild heart would have done, and ‘Whom shall I make to give thee room in her heart's love, who is it, Saphho, that does thee wrong? for even if she flees thee, she shall soon pursue; if she will not take thy gifts, she yet shall give; and if she loves not, soon love she shall, whether or no’;—O come to me, now as thou camest then, to assuage my sore trouble and do what my heart would fain have done, thyself my stay in battle.
19 ii, 124, Son. xciii, 1 f.
20 See Cham. ii, 126, note 1 for the full quotation from Ambroise Paré.
21 i, 115, Son. civ, 1 f. See the preceding sonnet for a reference to the illness of Du Bellay's mistress.
22 Perhaps cæur gemissant (line 11) was suggested by 
(line 17).
23 Does this line reproduce Sappho's 
of LG i, 238, frag. 81?
24 i, 71 f. Son. lii, 1 f.
25 Loc. cit., note 1, where the Italian sonnet is reproduced.
26 Lines 26 f.
27 i, 118, Son. cvii.
28 The last line is, it must be confessed, anti-climactic, and spoils the nobly religious tone of the sonnet.
29 The twelfth line is taken from Psalm 26, second verse.
30 Cf. brusle moy jusqu’à l'ame with Ure renes meos et cor meum. The writer is indebted to the consultant of PMLA for the following interesting comment: “Olive cxii borrows appreciably from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans concerning the justification of the elect—via a sonnet of Vittoria Gambara's not noted by Vianey in Les Sources italiennes de l'Olive (‘Scelse fra tutte’ … in Rime diverse …).”