Renaissance and Medieval Studies

Series Editor: Charles Ross

This is a verse-translation of a sixteenth-century French poet who is considered one of the greatest of all Renaissance lyric poets. The translation endeavors to capture and convey the intensity, passion, and musicality of Ronsard’s verse. The book includes an introduction, which discusses Ronsard’s classical orientation and his poetic engagements as well as the translation process. The translations include explanatory notes. The French text is included en face.

Eric MacPhail, author of Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist’s Progress

Hailed as the Prince of Poets of the French Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard composed a rich body of love poetry that has captivated audiences and challenged scholars for many centuries through its undulating, liquid forms and powerful metamorphic imagination. Blending oneiric fantasy and mythological profusion … this poetry appeals to readers steeped in the classical tradition and receptive to an esthetic of vitality and abundance rather than the brooding self-pity more characteristic of Petrarchism. This new translation captures the essence of a poetic legacy whose exuberance and emotion can still be deeply felt today.

-Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John’s College

Ronsard is a towering figure in the history of European poetry, but his work is little read these days other than in the form of single-line quotations. Henry Weinfield has made a substantial selection that reflects different aspects of Ronsard’s immense output from his earliest love-sonnets to his death-bed meditations. Translating sixteenth-century French poetry into English verse while remaining close to the original is a formidable task, but Weinfield’s sensitivity and ingenuity are equal to the challenge: he has found an idiom which both retains the flavor of the Renaissance and remains fluent and transparent to modern ears. The French text is provided on facing pages so that even those unfamiliar with early modern French will be able to explore the original. This is an important act of cultural transference that will give Ronsard’s extraordinary poetic imagination a new lease of life for readers of the twenty-first century.

• Paul Auster, Editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

First came Henry Weinfield’s irreplaceable versions of Mallarme in 1994, and now comes a second masterpiece of translation with this new selection of Ronsard. Weinfield has a supernatural talent for rendering the most difficult poets into clear, cadenced, and beautiful English. The man is a wizard.

About the Translator

Henry Weinfield is Professor Emeritus of Liberal Studies and English at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught from 1991 to 2019. In 2018 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete this translation.