Henry Weinfield
Photo courtesy of Henry Weinfield
Bio
Henry Weinfield is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. His translations include the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé and (with Catherine Schlegel) Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. In addition, he is the author of Without Mythologies: New and Selected Poems, The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity, The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History, and many poems and essays. He is Professor of Liberal Studies and English at the University of Notre Dame.
I am thrilled to be the recipient of an NEA Fellowship for my translation of the selected sonnets and other poems of the sixteenth-French poet, Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85). I have been working on the translation for about five years, and the NEA Fellowship will allow me to take a leave from my teaching duties at Notre Dame and bring the project to completion. The NEA Fellowship also gives recognition and validation to my labors—which of course is something that all writers crave. So I’m very pleased and grateful.
"On the Death of Marie" by Pierre de Ronsard
[translated from the French]
IV
Just as one sees the rose on its stem in May,
In youthful beauty, in its earliest flower,
Making sky jealous of its vibrant color,
By Dawn’s tears watered at the break of day:
Grace in each fold and love in full display,
Embalming the gardens and the trees with odor;
But beaten by rain or by excessive ardor,
Languish and die, till fold upon fold falls away:
So in the earliest newness of your youth,
Your beauty honored both by sky and earth,
Fate cut you off, and now your dust reposes.
For obsequy, receive from me these tears,
This bowl of milk, this basket full of flowers,
So that alive and dead you are naught but roses.
About Pierre de Ronsard
Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85), one of the greatest poets of the Renaissance, was the leader of the famous Pléiade group of poets in 16th-century France. Steeped in the classics, his aim was to renovate and enrich French poetry and the French language. An extraordinarily prolific poet, Ronsard wrote sonnets, odes, hymns, elegies, discourses, satires, and epigrams, as well as an unfinished epic. His poetry was celebrated in his own time and had a major influence on subsequent French poetry. His sonnets, written in the Petrarchan form, are to French poetry what Shakespeare’s are to English. This collection will include approximately 150 sonnets by Ronsard, among them his most famous, as well as several of his elegies and discourses.