Customer Reviews

Regrets, The (European Poetry Classics)

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Du Bellay's "The Regrets" is truly an amazing piece of work. Unlike the other French (and English) sonneteers, du Bellay's sonnet sequence does not describe the pains of love but the pains of exile. (Much of "The Regrets" was written while du Bellay, who hailed from Anjou, France, was working for his father's cousin Cardinal Jean du Bellay in Rome.) However, du Bellay often uses the tropes of love poetry to describe the dolors of his exile.

"The Regrets" plays with a lot of tones and subjects. Du Bellay confesses in the beginning that he is not trying to write of lofty subjects but of everyday life. And that is precisely what we get: du Bellay writes sonnets about having a lot of debts, life in Rome, etc. He satirizes the Roman court and the Church. He writes of politics and religion. Du Bellay uses a lot of word play and really plays with the structure of the sonnet. Most importantly, du Bellay manages to alternate between serious and comic modes with ease. By interspersing lamentful, sometimes querulous poems with humorous ones (usually at the expense of Roman life), the speaker (who is clearly du Bellay) gains a lot of depth and makes his pain more sympathetic to the reader. In "The Regrets," du Bellay creates a truly moving work.

Many of the poems are addressed to Du Bellay's friends in France, including Pierre de Ronsard, and thus "The Regrets" resembles an epistolary narrative. For "The Regrets" is clearly a narrative sequence, with a progression that results in a truly surprising ending. Indeed, "The Regrets" seems to point to the novel form in its narrative structure. Although all sonnet sequences share a progressive narrative, none of them are so rooted in external as well as internal events.

"The Regrets" is a must-read for anyone interested in French literature, and it is perhaps the most interesting and moving sonnet sequence I have ever read. It is funny and sad, playful and tragic, pensive and silly, and really like no other Renaissance sonnet sequence.

N.B. Slavitt's translations are adequate,but trying to adhere to the original rhyme scheme only makes for awkward phrasing in English. Slavitt modernizes the language as well, which is interesting but disorienting (du Bellay didn't use any curse words). Luckily, this is a bilingual editon, so a glance at the other side of the page shows you what you're missing in English - du Bellay's interesting structure and word play, as well as what ever phrases the translator decided not to translate or translated as something else entirely.