Jean de Meun

As its existence and history as a highly popular early medieval text, I enjoyed knowing I've read this looooong poem and taking a deeper look at how it reflects medieval attitudes and ideas on love and romance. The allegorical aspect was well done, if a little heavy handed from the view of a modern reader. I liked looking backwards from this text and seeing the influences from Ovid and Greek works, as well as looking forwards and seeing how writers like Chaucer took inspiration from this.

The worst part of this book (again, from a modern standpoint) was the fact that characters had monologues that went on for AGES. We're talking 50 pages here. It was incredibly tedious to get through at times! But I also understand that these detailed monologues were a new thing in developing medieval Western romance and would have been a novelty to hear read, so I don't completely dislike it. I'm just saying it's a read that you've gotta commit to or you're just gonna get lost in the pages and pages and PAGES of speeches.

Like I said, I'm glad I read it! I don't think I'll ever reread the entire poem cover to cover again, but I am going to take a few more zoomed-in looks at the more interesting passages. :)… (more)

23. The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun
translation and notes: from Old French by Frances Horgan (1994)
written: circa 1230/1275
format: 365-page Oxford World Classic paperback
acquired: January read: Mar 3 – Apr 7 time reading: 21:34, 3.6 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: medieval literature theme: Chaucer
locations: mythological garden
about the author: Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1200 – c. 1240). He is named within as the author of the first 4,058 verses, otherwise nothing is known about him. Jean de Meun, author of the remaining 17,724 verses, lived c1240-1305.

There is a terrific review of the same edition of this book on this page by LT user baswood, from 2011. I'll have to leave you to his review to capture the essence.

This was a really influential work. Dante and Chaucer, in particular took this in. Chaucer translated it from Middle French to his own Middle English in the late 1300s. The book is a simple story - a youth, in a dream, stumbles upon a magical garden of dancing immortals. Pleasure, Joy, and so on, fulfil their names. Love is there too, with a quill of arrows. Our youth, firmly struck by five different of Love's arrows, falls deeply in love with a "rose". But when he kisses the rose immortals of very different leanings appear, Jealousy, Shame, Fear, etc, and they react in anger, send him away, and build a fortress around the rose. The youth, now lovesick, strives to find a way back to his rose and appeals to the god of Love.

The work has its own little story. One author, [[Guillaume de Lorris]], otherwise unknown, wrote a short incomplete opening in his own French. Then 40 years later another author, [[Jean de Meun]], associated with the Paris university, expanded and completed it, without changing any of the essential story elements. There is no documentary evidence of this origin story, other than that the work itself states this, and that it changes tone. It opens light, creative, and fun. Then the monologues become really really long. [[Jean de Meun]]'s section keeps the tone light, but he expands the monologues, touching on various philosophical ideas. It gets slow in places.

It's a playful work in several ways. There is, of course, the romance and sex. It gets very explicit, even if the wording is allegorical. But the philosophy is a game touching on serious stuff. The university in Paris was in some controversy at the time between, on one hand, devoutly religious strict scholars, and, on the other, liberal, lay, perhaps even atheist, scholars. There was real bitterness, with scholars getting excommunicated and exiled out of France. [[Jean de Meun]] was playing with some of the more serious ideas getting tossed about. But he's messing around. The references he cites are often misused, or not relevant. The ideas his characters work out get very convoluted, and it's hard to believe this wasn't made confusing by playful intent. In a way it was a Monty Python or Terry Pratchett of its own time - intelligent, fun, irreverent, and impudent.

The idea of tihs is wonderful. The execution will vary with the reader and their mood. I was ok with it but did not fall in love.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8115253… (more)

It's altogether delightful. Charming frontispiece, `Idleness and the Dreamer'. The Prologue, preceded by a list of `Faults Escaped', is just wonderful about translation, the skills required. Daunting, but `he determined to undertake the work, or he would rather say the pleasurable pastime'. It took 18 months. RR `contains only 8000 lines more than the "Divina Commedia" ... so it has been that the 2 and 20 thousand, 6 hundred and eight lines of RR have melted imperceptibly as the days followed on ...'
then, later - `Of the translation here submitted to the public no more need be said than that it has been a labour of love to the author, and that his only hope is, that it may bring an adequate return to the enterprising publisher who has consented to print it.'
The prologue (14 pages) ends - `It will be understood by those who have practised translation how hopeless it is to reproduce the word-play of one language into another. Good critic, ere you censure, try your hand.'… (more)