Translating La Ceppède

Abstract

Jean de La Ceppède (c. 1548–1623) is a modern rediscovery. Highly regarded in his day (and praised by St Francis de Sales for his ‘learned piety’) he was forgotten as his friend Malherbe laid the foundations of a classical style befitting Louis XIV’s Golden Age. Several good poets suffered eclipse by le Roi Soleil: too serious to be classified as précieux, their work was judged offensive to good taste, reflecting as it did the troubled world of the Wars of Religion. Later in the seventeenth century the English Metaphysicals were to suffer a similar fate, and it is only in the twentieth century that Baroque poetry has been rescued from either oblivion or Curiosity Corner, to be seen as a development rather than a degeneration of the Renaissance.