Little is known of Rutebeuf. Born in 1245 in Champagne, dead in Paris forty years later, he was most likely a juggler by trade, with probably some training as a cleric, since his Latin was good. The details of his life are gleaned from his poems—a source which can reflect reality as accurately as a funhouse mirror. But since the simplest solution tends to be the best, it might just be easier to take him at his word.
First, there’s the name: “Rute,” in Old French, means both “crude” or “coarse”; and “Beuf” means “ox” or “bull,” the “boeuf” of modern French. The name, regardless of whether it was given to him by someone else or bestowed by the poet upon his own brow, is fitting, since his poetry is lumbering, thumpy, and stubborn, like the ox of medieval farms.
The poems I have translated here are taken from Les poèmes de l’infortune, and as the title suggests, the furrow being repeatedly plowed here has everything to do with Rutebeuf’s luck, or lack of it: poverty, gambling debts, a doomed marriage, writer’s block, his inability to put food on the table, partial blindness (possibly afflicted by a rival), and his marginal status in a society increasingly ruled by money and greed. The inclusion of minute biographical details in his poems, real or ornamented, was unique among the trouvères, who, like their contemporaries, the troubadours of the south, were busy plugging away at the abstractions of courtly love.
While the accounts of his trials are no doubt seasoned with hyperbole, there’s reason to accept some truth in them—perhaps not so much in the immediate details, but in the harrowing need to express them. He talks of going shoeless in the summer and logless in the winter, which might be something he actually lived through, or just symbols of his destitution (or both: in the end, the poems accommodate both possibilities.) What rings true is his rage against the absurdity of his situation, the contempt he has for his poverty. That it can exist in the first place.
If his poems are to be believed, Rutebeuf was probably working on the fly, producing poems quickly (“reels” he called them, which is just another word for the blues), keenly noticing what the public liked—what sold—and immediately beginning the hustle anew. There’s a great air of improvisation, or arbitrariness, in his choice of rhymes, which lends the whole thing a giddy joy; it all feels like a juggler juggling, scrambling not to drop any elements. The tension between that joy and the hardships being represented in the poems themselves is where irony may or may not come into play in Rutebeuf’s work. I say ‘may or may not’ because, nestled in that irony, there are genuinely beautiful lyrical moments that cut through the rhetorical bombast, delivering real emotion:
What have my friends
come to be
that I held so close
to me
and cherished so?
They seem to be all
scatter-sown
and I have starved
the soil;
I have failed them.
But these friends too
weren’t hardy friends
for since I’ve
suffered God’s avenge
from all sides,
none have come to sit
and bide.
I think the wind has
taken mine;
gladness is gone:
it’s the wind that
sweeps the friends along
and it was windy at
my door.
So why Rutebeuf, and why now? Apart from the fact that it was fun to translate these poems, and challenging, both because of their formal elements and the theatricality of their style, it was the cry of woe in the darkness that spoke to me; the presence of a confounded and wounded ‘I’ recoiling at the degradations imposed on an innocent, bodily ‘me’. The poems are constantly leaping between these two poles. Perhaps this speaks to Rutebeuf having possibly dwelt on both sides of the class divide; of having perhaps once lived at court (there’s mention of a wetnurse in one of the poems), and later, among the poor and dispossessed. (Or maybe the ‘I’ has always been aristocratic, and the ‘me’, bawdy?) In any case, it was refreshing to read poetry that didn’t come from the main shapers of literature at the time—the rich and powerful—and by extension, not having to endure their universalized ‘problems’ and ‘preoccupations’; what would be reified, in the following centuries, as ‘literary concerns’. Why should we care about what a lord thought was right? Truth is, most of us are just one or two major fuckups away from Rutebeuf’s predicament, a predicament that, still today, is largely the byproduct of our political organization. Any poet who had to make their meals stretch or scramble to make rent, amidst a sea of irredeemable abundance, knows what Rutebeuf is talking about: the game is rigged, power is a swindle, life is hard, words are just words. Art runs alongside our struggles, surely; but it can’t, in the final hour, resolve this kind of problem.
A final note on Old French. I only really started to enjoy Rutebeuf when I turned to the original Old French, rather than the modern French translation on the opposite page of my edition. The moment I jettisoned the over-literal modern translation, I began to be fascinated and deeply enticed by the compression and double-jointed syntax of Old French. Things weren’t so set in stone yet; it was all still malleable. I tried to keep some of the spirit of that Old French, not only syntactically, but in how it reasons with humour, always chuckling in the face of some immensity, some unalterable destiny decided long before the individual arrives on stage. In our global, streamlined world, the truly foreign resides increasingly in the past, accessible only through layers of sedimented language and troves of forgotten but once-meaningful images. I have attempted to let some of that chime here.
W.V., Montréal, November 2022
William Vallières is a Montreal poet. His work has appeared in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry, Grain, and Event, among other places. His chapbook Poor Rutebeuf, a translation of the French medieval poet Rutebeuf, just appeared with above/ground press. His first book of poems, Versus, is out with Véhicule Press.
