Le Livre du Voir Dit

by Guillaume de Machaut

La collection Lettres gothiques se propose d'ouvrir au public le plus large un accès a la fois direct, aisé et sûr à la littérature du Moyen Age. Un accès direct en mettant sous les yeux du lecteur le texte original. Un accès aisé grâce à la traduction en français moderne proposée en regard, à l'introduction et aux notes qui l'accompagnent. Un accès sûr grâce aux soins dont font l'objet traductions et commentaires. La collection Lettres gothiques offre ainsi un panorama représentatif de la littérature médiévale. Guillaume de Machaut est un des plus grands écrivains du Moyen Age français, un écrivain de la gamme de Pétrarque, dont il est l'exact contemporain. C'est aussi un très grand musicien, salué comme tel à notre époque par Stravinski, Schoenberg, Berg, Boulez. (Dit véridique) est son oeuvre la plus célèbre et la plus émouvante. Ce texte à deux voix, mêlant récit en vers, pièces lyriques et musicales, lettres en prose, se donne pour une histoire vraie, celle des amours d'un poète illustre et vieillissant avec une toute jeune fille, son admiratrice. Il pose avec subtilité la question de l'autobiographie et est à ce titre souvent mentionné et invoqué. Mais il était jusqu'à ce jour très peu lu, faute d'être accessible. Ce volume en offre la première édition critique et la première traduction en français moderne. L'une et l'autre sont l'oeuvre posthume d'un grand savant. Elles ont été revues et sont présentées par la meilleure spécialiste actuelle de Guillaume de Machaut et de la poésie française du XIVe siècle.

Genres: Historical, France

829 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Guillaume de Machaut (ca.1300-1377) est un compositeur et écrivain français du XIVe siècle. Il a mené une vie dans le monde laïc, au service de mécènes et en liens étroits avec la Couronne de France. Il a aussi mené une vie ecclésiastique en tant que chanoine de Reims. Clerc lettré et maître des arts, il a marqué pendant au moins un siècle la production artistique européenne.

Guillaume de Machaut (ca.1300-1377) is a 14th-century French composer and writer. He led a life in the secular world, in the service of patrons and in close ties with the Crown of France. He also led an ecclesiastical life as a canon of Reims. A literate clerk and master of the arts, he marked European artistic production for at least a century.

(Source:Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Ricardo Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Aquila is right. This is amazing. Who doesn’t like a book that mixes a verse storyline with prose love letters and songs. There is an English translation out there. Find it!

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometime around the end of 1362, just after Machaut finished the previous poem (La Fonteinne amoureuse), he was approached through a friend by a young noblewoman, evidently also a developing poet and singer, whom the nineteenth-century editor, Paulin Paris, first identified as Peronnelle d’Armentières, proposing that they exchange poems and love-letters. We should understand this in the context of the literary motif of “courtly love”, where a poet represents himself as being passionately in love with an unapproachable “dame”, generally of a higher social class, who inspires his poetry. The difference in this work is that it is two-sided, with the lady responding with her own letters and poetry. The letters and poems are included within a verse narrative by Guillaume. It was essentially a literary game; Machaut was in his sixties, while Peronelle was “between 15 and 20.” Undoubtedly, both were flattered by the situation, he by the adulation of a charming young woman and she by the attentions of a man who was already one of the most famous poets and musicians in France, if not all of Europe. Unfortunately, the editor in his introduction and extensive notes takes the relationship far too seriously, comparing it to Bettina von Arnheim’s infatuation with Goethe. The fourteenth century was not the Romantic early nineteenth century! He suggests that their “relationship” was broken off by Peronelle’s impending marriage (we actually know very little about her.) Now, it is certainly plausible that such a game might be considered awkward in a married woman; it is even more plausible that the duties of a married woman would leave her little time for literary games; and it is most plausible of all that the literary collaboration was never intended to be of a longer duration than the composition of what is already a very long book (more than twice the length of La Fonteinne amoureuse.)

This was apparently the work of Machaut’s which was most popular among his contemporaries, who would have understood the convention, and for long after his death, until the Renaissance made all mediaeval literature unfashionable. It was widely influential on other works, including Chaucer’s Book of the Duchesse. I think it is much less to the taste of the modern reader than La Fonteinne amoureuse; in fact to be honest I found it very long-winded, repetitious and frankly boring in many places. When there is a hiatus in Peronelle’s letters, he fills in the poetry with dreams and mythological stories which tend to be rather confused. The editor, convinced that this is a “real time” correspondence, tries to explain away discrepancies between the dates of the letters and the actual events they mention; actually, if we understand that this is a fictional correspondence, it is perfectly understandable that two letters exchanged a week or two apart might be supposed to have come after a break of several months, since these long absences are an important part of the plot. The writing of the book seems to have lasted about a year.

[Lulu]

c. 1362-1365

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/k...


Le voir dit ("A True Story") Often seen as Machaut's masterpiece, this poem is an early example of meta-fiction, and tells of the sadness and separation of the narrator from his lady, and of the false rumors that are spread about him. The narrative is stuffed with prose letters and lyric poems that the narrator claims were in truth exchanged by the unhappy lovers and put in the book at the behest of his lady. The work is, however, highly satirical, and mocks the conventional paradigm of medieval courtly literature by presenting himself as an old, ill, impotent poet who becomes the lover of a young and beautiful maiden, who falls in love with him from his reputation as a poet alone. Though the work is called a voir dit or true story, Machaut includes many inconsistencies which force the reader to question the truthfulness of his story.