The Regrets

A pocket size book. Joachim Du Bellay (1525-1560) was one of the most attractive figures of the French Renaissance. Walter Pater presented him as a kind of fin-de-siecle writer tht fitted in with his own aestheticism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Du Bellay was a vigorous innovator, an advocate of the use of the vernaculr at a time when that was a hard fought cause. In Les Regrets, a long sequence of sonnets far removed from the conventional Petrarchan manner popular in the 16th century, the poet talks to his friens and talks freely giving them his impression of life in Rome which he seeing not merely as a traveller and sight-seer but as one following the intrigues and corruptions of the day as a young man in the train of a French cardinal-diplomat. Du Bellay was on the inside of things. Observant, sceptical of all pretensions, witty and outspoken, he gives an incomparable picture of the age in some of the most accessible and readable verse of his time. This poet may be remote from Pater's version of him, but he is part of our tradition through his impact on Edmund Spenser and others. C.H. Sisson translates the sonnets in the conversational and intimate tones in which they were composed.