On “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time” by Larry Levis

Larry Levis’s dramatic monologue, “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time,” invokes the opening lines of one of Villon’s most famous poems, “Ballade des Pendus,” (Ballade of the Hanged Men), also known as “Frères Humains” or “Epitaphe Villon.” Villon’s poem was published posthumously in 1489 and has been widely — though not conclusively — acknowledged to have been written while Villon was in prison awaiting execution (his sentence was later commuted to banishment from Paris).

Villon’s opening two lines read, in French: “Frères humains, qui après nous vivez, / N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis,” and are translated by Galway Kinnell as: “Brother humans who live on after us / Don’t let your hearts harden against us.” These lines are a conventional plea for Christian charity typical of the Middle Ages, as the following two lines (again, Kinnell’s translation) make clear: “For if you have pity on wretches like us / More likely God will show mercy to you.” Yet the hanged speakers in Villon’s poem don’t seek any simple charity from their “brother humans,” but instead ask for the prayers of their “brothers” so that they, the hanged, might find some form of redemption and absolution, although their bodies have already rotted and been devoured by both birds (in Villon, magpies and crows) and the elements.

During the years 1972–1974, while studying for his doctoral exams in modern letters at the University of Iowa, Levis had become immersed in French poetry and also, under the guidance of Daniel Weissbort, the practice and theory of translation. Levis had been reading both Villon and Baudelaire in French since the time he was an undergraduate, and had more recently discovered other French poets he’d come to love — Gérard de Nerval, Jules Supervielle, and Pierre Reverdy. Of the surrealists, Levis admired most Robert Desnos and Paul Éluard, for their poetry, and André Breton, for his nerve.

Four hundred years after Villon, in his poem “Au Lecteur,” Baudelaire would offer his own trenchant testimony as he cataloged a carnivalesque stream of characters and despairs that could have been drawn directly from Villon’s age and poetry into Baudelaire’s “modern” Paris. The speaker in Levis’s poem is the self-named François Villon — who lives in both his own time and in the equally merciless, equally savage late twentieth century — as voiced by Levis, who has shrewdly chosen Villon as his own Baudelairean semblable, his own poetic frère. In the raw conclusion of the Levis poem, Villon presents himself as being hanged not by the neck but upon a cross, and crucified, a still-living mirror for those of us he is addressing — he is our “disappearing likeness on the cross!” No wonder that we live in a time both ancient and immediate, as Levis-and-Villon notes, when “there’s not one tear left in all of us.”