Curio

Crowning Achievement

Courtesy Yale University Press

Fifteenth-century French painter Jean Fouquet was a curious artist—curious, that is, in the late Middle Ages take on the word. “Curiosity” in those times could refer simply to interests in décor but had a further connotation relating to the care, say, of the curator. So, for artists depicting scenes from the Bible, this meant painting with such attention, precision, and devotion that they inspired awe in the viewer.

Fouquet painted many scenes, Biblical or otherwise, that inspired awe in the viewer, often with a French twist—inserting a French king, for instance, as one of the wise men in Adoration of the Magi. Other elements of this particular painting are, at first glance, just plain curious. The chateau rising up in the background looks like it’s right out of the Loire Valley, and the pillow and carpet in the foreground, as well as banners in the background, are emblazoned with that most Gallic icon—the fleurs-de-lis.

The representation of the lilies that came to stand as a symbol of the French monarchy by the twelfth century was already in place—it would seem to be the case, at least—at the time of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The fleurs-de-lis were there, too, in a Fouquet painting of Charlemagne’s coronation in 800. Fouquet wasn’t the only French medieval painter to use the regnal symbol so freely, but he was by far the one who used it to greatest effect.

Paging through Erik Inglis’s Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France  (Yale University Press, 2011), one sees that in many different settings—coronations, crusades, courtly activities—the lilies were often present and accounted for. It was a hermit who first received the fleurs-de-lis from an angel descending from heaven. The hermit then passed them on to Clothilde, wife of Clovis, the King of the Franks, who converted to Christianity and ruled Gaul. Clovis in turn received the lilies from Clothilde.This concept of religion royale pervades Fouquet’s work, especially the miniatures that illustrated Grandes Chroniques de France and the Chevalier Hours. As one French dynasty led to another, from Merovingian to Carolingian to Capetian to Valois, religion and royalty were inextricable, with the growing implication that the French were the new chosen ones.

During the Hundred Years’ War, the English, seeing what power the fleurs-de-lis had in France, tried to shore up their claim to the French throne by employing the French symbol on a poster displaying Henry VI’s genealogy. The poster didn’t survive, but mention of it appears on the frontispiece to John Talbot’s Shrewsbury Book. The appropriation of the fleurs-de-lis prompted one miffed Frenchman of the day to lament that the English, uniting genealogy and heraldry so deftly, established their false claims in “the most beautiful and notable books that they could make.”

Inglis’s sumptuously illustrated book on Fouquet, funded in part by a grant from NEH, has much more to say on the painter, plumbing the deep reservoir of his genius—the unifying influence in his work, for instance, of both Flemish and Italian masters—but his hand in creating a French national identity may have been his crowning achievement.

—Steve Moyer

Lorca, American Style

Courtesy University of Chicago Press

So, if the English could nearly get away with swiping France’s fleurs-de-lis, perhaps the Americans could take Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and make him into something in their own image. “Image” was the operative word, as “deep image” poets in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies imitated Lorca’s resonant, or “dark,” images. These poets weren’t alone, though, in efforts to mine Lorca’s poetry for something that could buttress their own work; other American poets thought they could tap into the concept of the duende (a hard-to-define term describing emotion, expression, and authenticity, especially in the performing arts, and associated with “having soul”), and translators many times used highly experimental devices to capture the surreal in the Andalusian’s verse.

As University of Kansas professor of Spanish Jonathan Mayhew explains in his NEH-funded Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch (University of Chicago Press, 2009) post-war poets and translators were especially drawn in by Lorca’s concept of the duende, or “deep song.”

The basics of Lorca’s life and work are widely known. He realized early success with a highly folkloric work called Gypsy Ballads, then traveled to New York in 1929, where he wrote a collection called Poet in New York, and delivered his famous speech on the duende in Buenos Aires. Tragically, at the age of thirty-eight in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, he died—a victim of political repression in Granada. Lorca’s intellectual biography, however, has not been written. Little is known of his erudition and his slow, deliberate self-apprenticeship as a writer.

What is known, as Mayhew shows, is that Lorca was not the innocent or untutored genius he purported to be. He read very widely in all genres and times, learning much from Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, of course, but also was a student of poetry in the anonymous tradition. So, even though he was Spain’s great avant-garde poet and dramatist engaged in a wide array of experimental literary styles (the attraction, claims Mayhew, for American poets, especially during the Cold War), he was grounded in traditional modes of expression.

The concept of the duende has added to the Lorcan aura in the U.S., too. Associated in Spain with bullfighting and flamenco, the duende has no true cultural equivalent in the United States, where, in Mayhew’s view, it has been domesticated and come to be synonymous with inspiration generally. The duende is deeply rooted in Spanish and Andalusian culture, though, and the voyage to the Anglo-Saxon mindset may ultimately be fruitless, so there’s no easy path to understanding Lorca’s poetry. Mayhew believes then that a close line-by-line reading of the original or a somewhat literal translation is a good way for English-language readers to start, and is quick to add that translators of the past twenty years or so have been more sensitive to this aspect of reading Lorca and have reacted accordingly.

Translators had few qualms, though, beginning in the thirties, in attempting to approximate Lorca’s deep image and surreal verse, but Mayhew feels their efforts have often been self-serving (a notable exception is Langston Hughes’s translations). Poet-translators who were disciples of Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams attempted to duplicate the impact of Lorca’s images through highly experimental efforts that were neither very faithful nor very poetic. Rather than opting for a solid, literal approach, they attempted to recreate the originality of the source text, often sacrificing comprehension and accuracy in the target language.

The irony, for Mayhew, is that even if Lorca had had translators and English-language editors who really got him, he wouldn’t necessarily have had a wider readership in the United States. Lorca enjoyed a fairly wide and receptive readership, as it was, because the generation of New American Poets, including the Beats and the Black Mountain School, was eminently receptive to him as an avant-garde artist and outsider. The poetry and translations that Lorca’s career has generated in the United States (Robert Creeley’s After Lorca is perhaps the best known example among the poems, and among the translations, Robert Bly’s) have been inspired by poets of the postwar period who have ultimately fallen short, in Mayhew’s view, of Lorca’s towering accomplishments and hard-to-tame talent.

—Steve Moyer

Rufus Refused Credit

While doing research on Richard Rufus at a library in Erfurt, Germany, Professor Rega Wood found a manuscript of Rufus’s that had been misattributed to another philosopher. This detail is from thirteenth-century manuscript she came across in 1983 while researching her critical edition, Richard Rufus of Cornwall: In Aristotelis De Generatione et corruptione, published in October 2011. Courtesy Indiana University

In the twenty-first century, not taking credit for your work—especially in academic circles—does not compute. But in the thirteenth century, particularly among Franciscans, intellectual pride was verboten. Even then, Englishman Richard Rufus may have been an extreme. In spite of a brilliant teaching career in both Paris and Oxford, he refused to cite his own lectures by name, this from a philosopher now widely credited with having provided the essential commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics that enabled later scholars to lay the foundations of Western science.

Professor Rega Wood of Indiana University, with funding from NEH, is bringing Rufus center stage with the online and print publication of his commentaries that had been lost for over five hundred years. “If we want to learn how the Western university curriculum was shaped,” says Wood, “we need to know the works of Richard Rufus, works that were entirely lost between 1350 and 1950.” Perhaps now the Scholastic can rest on his laurels.

—Steve Moyer