22 Misc Laff: Villon
- Jon Nelson
- 12 hours ago
- 2 min read
There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone. There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people. So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons either; but this isn’t always the case. These persons of the first sort are often able to transmit their intoxication with themselves to others. —“The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician”
No, there won't be any more stories, longish, shortish, or otherwise, none, never, nowhere. If you need something to distinguish an autographed edition of something, I can give you globs of poetry to use (I never swore off writing poetry) but no more stories. — Letter
Another gem in Lafferty’s Vogelsprachekund translations is François Villon’s “Ballade des menus propos.” Rabelais admired Villon and helped carry his comic, satirical, earthy, subversive medieval voice into the French Renaissance. Villon himself was a fifteenth-century French poet, born in Paris around 1431. Like Ambrose Bierce, he eventually disappears from the historical record; after 1463, we lose sight of him. Before that disappearance, he led a troubled life filled with poverty, prison, exile, and, always, conflict with the law. He is still one of the best-known poets of the French Middle Ages, chiefly for Le Lais and Le Testament.
In “Ballade des menus propos,” Villon uses the fixed form of the ballade, with its closing address to a “Prince,” to make repeated claims of knowledge: of ordinary life, social rank, religion, labor, pleasure, and death. He sounds clever and worldly, as though he can judge everything around him—masters and servants, monks and fools, wine and horses, Rome and death itself. Yet the refrain turns the poem inward, however far outward it ranges. How can a man know so much about the world and still fail to understand himself? Probably because human beings are often acute observers of others and mysteries to themselves, an insight that did not begin with Freud.
There is a widely circulated line, often misattributed to Freud: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, surrounded by assholes.” Villon’s bad luck, and his triumph, was that he was not merely surrounded by them. He was one himself, and for the ages.
