Translator's Note

“The Verse of Death” (“Li ver de la Mort”) is little-known even inside academic circles, perhaps because it is neither sexy nor particularly scatological. Instead, it’s a rhetorical exercise in apostrophe, or speech that personifies an abstract concept by addressing it directly as though it could listen and answer. In this case, Death.

Like many medieval vernacular poems, “Death” weaves together proverbs and commonplaces that today’s readers, imbued with the modernist passion for innovation, may well disdain as “cliché.” For thirteenth-century audiences, what mattered wasn’t what a poem said. It was how. The cadences afforded by octosyllabic meter, the repetition and variation of rhyme over the course of each twelve-line stanza, would have offered readers and listeners a distinct aural/oral pleasure, even—perhaps especially—when tempered by the austerity of the subject matter.

I have tried to recreate some of that pleasure in English, using rhyme when it came naturally and assonance when it did not. The rhyming is strongest in the final stanza of the English; like the repeated end-rhyme in the French, the rhyme of “prod” with “God” provides the pleasure of the click as the poem locks into place at the end of the last line. 

As for “cliché,” its meaning may be fixed, but its musical possibilities are endless. My translation not only replaces French topoi with English ready-made phrases, such as “take us at your whim,” it also adds alliteration, so that me vie amenuise is rendered as “my life lasts less and less” and a le roi et a le glui is transformed to “fish and fowl both.” Not coincidentally, alliteration tends to be a key feature of the Middle English lyric verse that was being composed by Adam’s contemporaries and successors across the Channel. (Think of “Sumer is icumen in,” “Foweles in the frith,” “Bryde one brere,” or even the late fourteenth-century “I syng of a mayden.”) I hope that by using medieval English poetics as a bridge, my translation will provide a means whereby medieval Romance-language poetry can still be enjoyed—even during our post-post-modern era—on something like its own aesthetic terms.

P.S.

The last line of my translation should in no way be taken as promoting anti-vaccine sentiment. Adam de la Halle, writing in a time and place where most people were ignorant of even basic forms of germ theory, could not have foreseen the advances in medicine that would occur over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Translating his work today, I’d like to add the following:

Please decide to trust your doc
and take the recommended dose.
Why wait until you’re diagnosed?
Roll up your sleeve and get the shot!

Source text of the original Old French is from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français, 25566, f. 67vb-68ra.

Samantha Pious

In the Classroom

Apostrophic Diversion: Death is often personified in literature, as it is here through the rhetorical exercise of apostrophe, “speech that personifies an abstract concept by addressing it directly as though it could listen and answer,” as Samantha Pious writes in her Translator’s Note. Write Death’s response to the address and particular concerns described in this poem. Write this response either in the same style as Pious’s translation of Adam de la Halle’s poem or in another form. How might the specific version of Death, as characterized in this particular poem, respond? How might another version of Death from another work of literature respond?
Bonus points if you draw or create another visual representation of the characterization of Death you envision.