'Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?' - Will you leave poor Villon here? - the poet asks in an appeal from Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where he was detained at the Bishop's pleasure, probably in 1461. 'Epistre a ses amis' reads now, in the light of so much scholarship, translation, loose-clad homage and general ventriloquism on the part of a wide and posthumous circle of acquaintance from Swinburne to Lowell and beyond, like a request to be left in peace - Villon is something of a cottage industry and the generator has been whirring fairly constantly beside the mallow patch. But it's the translators most of us have to thank for knowing him at all.

LRB 20 April 1995 | PDF Download