This article was first published at The
Master’s Artist.
The
Calvinist theologian was also a poet.
Antoine de la
Roche Chandieu was a Calvinist theologian, student of John Calvin, and a
key figure in the French Huguenot church. He was pastor of the French Huguenot
Church in Paris from 1556-1562, was active in several Huguenot synod meetings
(and for one of which he wrote what is now called the Gallic or French confession). He remained active in the church in France
until it was smashed in the St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. De Chandieu escaped the massacre and
fled to Switzerland. He continued his studies and writings until his death in
1591 in Geneva.
He
was also a poet. He wrote three sonnets on the death of Calvin. He wrote a
whole series of eight-line poems called “Octonaires,”
and a lot of other poetry as well, especially lyric poems. One of his more
recent translators is Nate
Klug, a published poet and a divinity student at Yale University. Klug has
been translating the Octonaires of de Chandieu, but, as he says in his translator’s note,
he’s loosely translating the poems to remain true to the poet’s words and
intent. Five of them can be read at the Poetry Foundation’s web site. Here’s
one Octonaire, as translated by Klug:
Ice
glitters like it’s good.
The
whole world glitters,
Sped
toward ends,
We
all fall in.
Under
the ice is water.
But
under the world, between you
and
the everything
of
your vanishing…
Edith
Grossman, in Why
Translation Matters, speaks to the things that translations can and
can’t do. One thing translations do accomplish, however, is to change the
original. They can’t help but do that, because no language translates perfectly
into another (blame the tower of Babel). Godd translators, however, and
Grossman and I suspect Klug and are good translators, strive mightily to remain
true to the author’s intent and meaning.
De
Chandieu endured imprisonment and persecution. He saw friends massacred. He had
to flee his native country for his own life. Through it all, he maintained his
faith, and his Octonaires were enormously popular during his lifetime, not only
with his Calvinist friends but with French Catholics as well.
Wanting
what you fear,
fearing
your own desire:
icicles
at the heart
form
to burn apart.
When,
in this cycle
of
suffering he sings,
does
the martyr begin
to
suspect himself?
The
Calvinist was indeed a poet. He lived in a time when holding on to one’s faith
could mean death. And I suspect he used poetry to understand that.
Related: A post I did on
a
painting in the St. Louis Art Museum of Gaspard de Coligny, whose death was
the first in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. De Coligny would have known de
Chandieu.
Painting: St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
by Francois Dubois (1570s).
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