Rutebeuf’s Lament – Rutebeuf/Ferré
“Friends Since Childhood” (2004)
__________
having disparaged the only translation
I could find on the Internet of a poem
that is in French as famous as in
English Elizabeth Barrett Browning‘s
“How do I love thee? Let me count the
ways.“, her 43rd “Sonnet[ ] from the
Portuguese”, I decided to translate
myself the excerpt from “La Complainte
Rutebeuf“, of Rutebeuf himself, 1245 –
1285, which became its indelible, and
apparently timeless, virtual
manifestation
Rutebeuf’s entire poem is written in
Old French, and excerpts of it were
adapted into an updated French in
1956 by Léo Ferré, a French
troubadour of the time, who then
made it into a song that everyone
French remembers, despite, or
maybe because of, its archaisms
though Ferré familiarized the French
for his listeners, it was still in an older
French, like rendering Chaucer‘s
14th-Century English into Shakespeare‘s
17th-Century counterpart tongue, “But
look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, /
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern
hill”, “Hamlet”, act l, scene l, lines 166
and 167, for instance
in my translation below, I eschew –
Gesundheit – such a daunting
challenge, but have chosen rather
to highlight the humanity that I find
especially compelling in the original
composition
Rutebeuf today would sound
something of a cross between Harry
Nilsson and Bob Dylan, I think, of my
generation, the one for his
straightforward simplicity, his crushing
intimacy, the other for his social
consciousness and probable greater,
therefore, longevity
but will even Bob Dylan endure 800
years
some will, some have, some do
but who
we will never know
Richard
______________
Rutebeuf’s Lament
What has become of my friends
that I had held to be so close
and loved so dearly,
they were too carelessly tended,
I think the wind has blown them away,
friendship has been forsaken.
And as the wind passed by my door,
took all of them away.
As time strips the trees of their leaves,
when not a leaf on a branch remains
that will not hasten to the ground,
and poverty befalling me,
from every corner appalling me,
as winter edges on.
These do not lend themselves well to my telling
of how I courted disgrace,
nor of the manner.
What has become of my friends
that I had held to be so close
and loved so dearly,
they were too carelessly tended,
I think the wind has blown them away,
friendship has been forsaken.
And as the wind passed by my door,
took all of them away.
Sorrows do not show up on their own,
everything that was ever to happen
has happened.
Not much of common sense, a poor memory
has God granted me, that God of Glory,
not much in sustenance either,
and it’s straight up my butt when the North wind blows,
sweeping right through me,
friendship has been forsaken.
And as the wind passed by my door,
took all of them away.
Richard
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