Nick Grammos’s Reviews > The complete works of Francois Villon ; trans., with a biography and notes > Status Update

"I am a lecher, and she's a lecher with me
Which one of us is better? We're both alike
the one as worthy as the other. bad rat, bad cat
We both love filth and filth pursues us
we flee from honour, honour flees from us"

I love the subversive elements:

"I give them leave to start a school
where pupil teaches master"

In the world of brothels there is love and power inversions in the Ballad of Fat Margot:

"Then both drunk we sleep like dogs
When we awake, her belly starts to quiver
And she mounts me, to spare love's fruit
I groan, squashed beneath her weight-
This lechery of hers will ruin me."

He bequeaths nothing but his body to the ground, his library and poems to his mother. He has nothing else.

You have to love old Villon. He is free through poetry to speak of truths unavailable to kings and bishops, priests and rich men. Lucky guy in medieval France.

Villon makes me think of the lines from the Dylan song: "when you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose"

In his own way Villon writes: bien est eureaux qui riens n'y a!

translated as: "That man is lucky who has nothing"

a phrase that is adaptable to any circumstance when our vanities or ambitions don't serve us well. Nothing is something that cannot cause us harm.

laide viellesse amour n'empestre
ne que monnoye qu'on descrie

old age's ugliness will frighten love away
like coins they've taken out of circulation

This edition, from 1960, has French and English facing each other. I can read the English and indulge in the French, though I don't understand much more than the rudiments, I can at least enjoy the sounds and rhythms of the French. I'm sure some of the meanings are changed in 600 years, too. I wonder if the French spelling is modernised. It looks clear and neither Shakespeare or Chaucer are that clear in English.

There's something about these mass paperback books of the mid 20thC that give me a warm feeling. People were getting tertiary educated, the knowledge offered by literature was still real and relevant. There were authors like Villon who were wanting to be discovered. Publishers like Bantam operated on a kind of moral crusade to bring ideas to wide audiences. What happened?