Confluence

Respon moy, meschant Loir, (me rens-tu ce loyer,
   Pour avoir tant chanté ta gloire et ta louange)
   As-tu osé barbare, au milieu de ta fange
   Renversant mon bateau, sous tes flots m’envoyer?

Si ma plume eut daigné seulement employer
   Six vers à celebrer quelque autre fleuve estrange,
   Quiconque soit celuy, fust-ce le Nil ou Gange,
   Le Danube ou le Rhin, ne m’eust voulu noyer.

Pindare, tu mentois, l’eau n’est pas la meilleure
   De tous les Elemens : la terre est la plus seure,
   Qui de son large sein tant de biens nous depart.

O fleuve Stygieux, descente Acherontide,

   Tu m’as voulu noyer, de ton chantre homicide,
   Pour te vanter le fleuve où se noya Ronsard.

(Pierre de Ronsard) 

Answer me, wicked Loir, why do you pay

   Me thus for all the praise I've sung of you?

   Oh monstrous stream! Is shipwreck then my due,

   My boat capsized, to lie in mud all day?

Had I but six lines ever deigned to assay

   In tribute to some other stream than you,

   Whether the Ganges, Nile, or Danube blue,

   Or the great Rhine, would drowning be my pay?

Pindar, you lied: for water's not the best

   Of all the elements; earth is more blest,

   Whose bosom broad with foison doth abound.

Oh Stygian stream! of Acheron's foul brood!

   You would have slain your poet in your flood

   That you might say, "In me was Ronsard drowned!"

(Translation by William Stirling)

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The Loir (sometimes called "the Loir without an E") is the river of Ronsard's birthplace and home, the Manoir de la Possonière at Couture-sur-Loir, 45km north of Tours. The Loir is a sizeable river in its own right, about 300km long. It flows westward (parallel to and north of the Loire with an E), eventually meeting the Sarthe and soon afterwards the Mayenne. The confluence of the three, a wide river but less than 8km long, is called the Maine; it flows south through the strategic city of Angers before joining the Loire.

(Proust's Vivonne is also based on the Loir, but this is at Illiers-Combray, far upstream from Ronsard's home.)

*

As often with Ronsard, the textual history isn't straightforward. The poem appeared in the 1555 Continuation des Amours (Wikisource) as Sonnets en vers héroïques XIX,  but in a different version ("Mais respons, meschant Loir, me rens-tu ce loier"). The revised version I've quoted appears in the editions of Blanchemain and Marty-Laveaux. In Blanchemain (V, 359) it's Les Sonnets Divers LXXXIX, subtitled A LA RIVIERE DU LOIR. I presume both editors found it in the 1584 Oeuvres, the final edition to appear during Ronsard's lifetime (Google Books; the poem is on page 254 among the SONNETS A DIVERSES PERSONNES ("SONNETS DIVERS." on the running titles)). I dare say it's in the 1560 Oeuvres too.

from the 1584 edition of Ronsard's Oeuvres 

*

William Stirling isn't a reliable translator: he's prone to absurd fills (Cassandre's brown eyes are "far browner than a dove's"), sometimes he's deliberately approximate (e.g. "fresne" becomes beech, not ash, in the epigram from Anacreon), and sometimes he just gets the wrong end of the stick*, but he has some successes too and I've found this 1946 volume of Ronsard's lyrics very enjoyable. (The following year he translated an anthology from Machault to Malherbe, and that's everything I know about him.)

* For instance in the ode "Sur tout parfum" where some of the lines he applies to the rose are actually talking about the "fleurette de Mars" (sweet violet), Ronsard's other favourite flower.

[Penguin offer a tempting Ronsard selection, but the translations are in prose. Some people -- James Fenton, for example -- say they find prose translations of lyric poetry helpful (if accompanied by the original-language poem), but a feast of husks is not my idea of fun.]

*

I discovered, glancing through Sidney Lee's The French Renaissance in England (1910), that I've been very insufficiently aware of how much the English poets of the 1590s owed to Ronsard and the Pléiade. General influence (and even blatant borrowings) often went unacknowledged but the French poets were an everyday source of inspiration for Shakespeare's generation. He himself could read French easily, and even write it at a pinch (as in Henry V). Some of the most striking features of his Sonnets owe something to French predecessors: urging the young man to marry and father a son (a variant on the Pléiade's intense meditations on Carpe diem); the immortality conferred by the poet's verse (a note much struck by Ronsard); even, apparently, the idea of a dark-haired lady who causes all sorts of trouble.

*

But I can't blame my teachers, only my gift for tuning out what I'm not interested in. Every time the Pléiade was mentioned I must have switched off: who cares about the influence of poets you never read and can barely name?

One of the things that's turned Ronsard into more than a name for me is his unexpectedly deep feeling for nature, manifested in eg the rose-and-violet ode mentioned above, the hawthorn ode, and the lament on the cutting down of the Gastine forest (near his Loir home).

It's in this Loir poem too. Ronsard has praised his home river in other poems, but now that he's annoyed with it there's no more idealizing, he talks not of the river's sparkling water but of its "fange" (mud, silt): and his mentioning the Ganges and all those other august rivers is clearly a pettish reminder to the Loir that, fondly as he may have praised it, it isn't really all that. The abiding affection is apparent, and the river becomes more real for having silt as well as all the things rivers are usually praised for.

And of course it's a wry comment on Ronsard's enormous fame that the river cares nothing for his immortality-conferring verse, but only (as he jokes) for his celebrity: it sees the benefit of being a news item.

*

I've been looking for Ronsard translations online. Considering how prolific Ronsard was, I haven't found much. As so often, I turn first to A.S. Kline's incredibly valuable site Poetry in Translation. There are 26 Ronsard poems here that give a sort of flavour (mostly love sonnets):

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Ronsard.php

Andrew Lang translated nine poems by Ronsard in Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: With Other Poems (1872). 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/795/795-h/795-h.htm

(They also show up on internet poem sites, invariably without naming the translator).

Three poems translated by George Dillon:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=85&issue=4&page=14

'Twixt Love and Death (translator not named, but it's Curtis Hidden Pages, 1870 - 1946):

https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/twixt-love-and-death

To the Hawthorn-Tree (translator not named, but it's Curtis Hidden Pages, 1870 - 1946):

https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/hawthorn-tree-1

I haven't found any of the translations made by Sylvia Plath in 1956, nor by the recent translators Anthony Mortimer (verse) or Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock (prose).

Keats once wrote a sort of translation of most of a Ronsard sonnet (but he had forgotten how it ended):

https://theamericanreader.com/23-september-1818-john-keats-to-john-hamilton-reynolds/

The Loir at Sougé

[Image source: https://www.souge.fr/ .]