The Elephants

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

Christine de Pizan comes from elsewhere: first of all, from another language.1

Linguistic hospitality, therefore, is the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving the word of the Other into one's own home, one's own dwelling.2

1 ] Over six hundred years ago, a young foreign-born widow wrote about struggling to feed her kids, wearing a patched-up coat to do battle with creditors, fending off humiliating remarks and unwelcome sexual innuendoes without disgruntling anyone in power.3 She wrote not in the language of her birth, but in the language of the country she made home.

2 ] One of the first women known to have earned a living through writing, Christine de Pizan was brought to France as a child after her father, a professor at the University of Bologna, entered the court of Charles V as a physician and astrologer. In 1390, Christine's husband died suddenly, leaving her with three children to support, along with a niece and widowed mother. Christine began writing, undertaking a rigorous course of independent study, securing royal patrons, and producing an astonishing body of work in a brief span of approximately 20 years.

For her early lyric poetry, Christine took as her model the poetic formes fixes outlined by Eustache Deschamps in his Art de dictier (The Art of Writing Poetry), a leading authority of the era, along with Guillaume de Machaut, who pioneered the French poetic vernacular.4 At the same time, Christine re-imagined conventional courtly themes—previously engaged with idealized notions of chivalric love—to convey the deeps bonds of a happy marriage and the piercing loss of widowhood.

3 ] In a letter dated February 10, 1404, Christine wrote to Deschamps, twenty years her senior: "Your great reputation has encouraged me, dear master and friend, to send you this. . . . if you would like to see examples of my little understanding in my works, you can order them, without special inquiries for I'm looking for your comments." Deschamps responded with generosity and kind encouragement, likening Christine to one of the nine muses and thanking her "a hundred times" for her letter, "received with great joy."

Their exchange, translated into English by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski,5 reminds me of Emily Dickinson's letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, written over four hundred years later in another language, another country: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask."

Both women, extraordinary in their work, felt alone in their undertaking. And they were. Both wrote themselves into a literary world inhabited by men, and in doing so, expanded that world for others through the newness and possibility of their language.

4 ] Christine often referred to herself as seulette, a woman alone, small and of little consequence in comparison to the male auctours of her time. In a time and place unaccustomed—even hostile—to independent women, Christine undertook to produce manuscripts for royals. That her books are read and studied centuries after their making is its own small miracle. In part, it was achieved through Christine's own brilliance and fortitude. In part, it was the support of those in power who helped her—and the translators who continue to bring her writing into language anew.6

5 ] One day, fortune brought me into the gracious presence of one of those translators, a preeminent scholar of medieval French and Italian literature who answered my most basic of questions as if they were the most critical he had ever heard.

Q. Do you think Christine spoke Italian at home with her mother?
A. Well, hmmm. We can't know for certain, but yes, yes. I imagine she did.

Q. Do you think Christine ever wanted to marry again?
A. Well now, let me think about that some more.

6 ] In learning her craft as a poet, Christine practiced the formes fixes of the ballade and the rondeau. Both make appearances in « widow rounds », with the Middle French versions found in the first volume of Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, edited by Maurice Roy and published in 1886.

When I first searched for the Roy volumes, they were missing from the library shelves. But they found me soon enough, as did the codex of a queen.

7 ] Translation, or "translacion" as she calls it, is not a neutral subject for Christine. She will never write in Italian, but her native language exists within her like a source or a potential resource.7

8 ] In learning how to translate Christine, I first looked to the translators and scholars who brought her to me. I looked to dictionaries and chronicles. I glossed, erased, and invented.8 But the poems themselves were conveyed by language that had taken up residence within me, though I had yet to know it.

9 ] In 1418, civil violence and foreign invasion caused Christine to flee Paris. She is believed to have spent the last dozen years of her life in an enclosed abbey, a kind of exile-by-circumstance. With the exception of two manuscripts (one of which is the first poem relaying Joan of Arc's 1429 victory at Orléans), no writing from these years are known to exist, but the more I learned about Christine, the more I began to wonder.

Amid the cadence of wondering, the language dwelling inside emerged as Marina's, a young woman of imagining who serves as scribe for Christine during this historical period of silence.

10 ] Poetry comes to know that things are. But this is not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgment––and that constitutes a sort of unknowing.9

When I first saw Christine's name, French was not a language I knew well. I am learning it still. Marina made translation possible. She refused silence to what is unknown.10 Whether she translated me or I translated her, I cannot say.

11 ] The work of translation might thus be said to carry a double duty: to expropriate oneself as one appropriates the other. We are called to make our language put on the stranger's clothes at the same time as we invite the stranger to step into the fabric of our own speech.11

12 ] The ballade and rondeau of Christine's poetic apprenticeship emerged out of dance and song traditions; as portrayed in The Queen’s Manuscript of 1414, their lyrical music depended not on punctuation cues, but on an understood knowledge of the forms. The question then became: How might I convey this music to the unfamiliar while carrying over a sense of the manuscript original? Maybe more urgently: How might the voice of the woman who composed these poems resonate six hundred years after the keen grief that compelled their making?

To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable).12

Some say all poetry is translation. Whether this can be known, I cannot say, only that Marina's invention permitted me to enter the music of Christine's voice more deeply, in what Earl Jeffrey Richards recalls as the here and now. What remains constant: To hear a voice that sings across time and space is to understand our own experience as knit to others. Maybe this is one way translation expands the possibility for knowing, the capacity for compassion.

Q. And the woman who called herself seulette?
A. Yes, now that you ask. Yes, I think she married poetry.

Inside the presence of each other's language, we are never alone.

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