Clement Marot

Clement Marot's Epistles

The first complete English-language edition of the work of Renaissance poet Clément Marot.

Clément Marot's Epistles is the first complete English-language translation and critical edition of the work of Clément Marot (1496-1544), a royal poet in Renaissance France who ushered in new verse forms and renewed existing ones. Using as its source the authorized complete works of Marot published in 1538, the volume translates and sets to verse all seventy-two of Marot's epistles, employing the same meter and rhyme scheme that Marot used in their original compositions. Focused on capturing Marot's poetic voice, thus maintaining idiomatic and literary integrity, the resulting translation is an attempt to convey the playfulness and pathos of Marot's verse, rendering it accessible to an anglophone public. A robust critical apparatus offers ample footnotes, an extensive introduction, illustrations, a bibliography, a chronological table, and a concordance to the main French-language editions of Marot's epistles. Beyond the more traditional verse epistles, the volume also offers translations of the introductory prose epistles penned by Marot for his Adolescence clémentine of 1532 and the 1538 edition of his complete works, as well as the coq-à-l'âne and other versified satirical epistles, the "artificial epistle" retelling of a popular medieval romance, and more. The book should appeal to English-speaking historians and literary scholars alike, as well as to poetry lovers, who will appreciate a new acquaintance with this distinctive voice from poetry's past.