2
A cheese wheel of wool
hauled seven days
to Saint Remy fair
& a jousting dummy
sailed over the Seine
on a fart & a half
Our worlds are so divided
A bloodsucking parasite
said to them: By my soul
I rammed a hogshead of oats
into the ass of an ant
7
Deep down in a cunt
there lived a badger
weaving gold brocades
& a monk’s cowl
pursued Vermandois
all through Mont Laon
I asked them in Scottish
Could we fatten our peas
with a butterfly’s balls
make castles & belfries
from the penis of a snail?
9
I saw a tower
with one nimble spin
flung up to the clouds
I watched a noon hour
follow four herons
into an oven
If not for two gnarled sticks
shot from an arbalest
who knocked up two nuns
four unbuttoned tunics
would be incurably dead
13
A stillborn geezer
with a short sneezer
hefted a windmill
A capsized outhouse
was all fitted out
with two linen sheets
They were all quite astonished
by a small pot of suet
at the gate of a garden
when a rat spread before them
the farts of an old Tartar
14
Aioli of hay
a cheese made of bread
& beans made of peas
& pebbles of grain
& stones made from lees
& one Gallic Scot
A cat speaking Greekish
took Lord Allan hostage
which became too much trouble
when two high-born monkeys
mounted & rode Vermandois
15
A wool taffeta
was taking great pains
to fuck a pea pod
To have her veins bled
Great Babylon came
for lessons in French
Vermandois came to fight
& he silently brayed
on a steed of gold braid
Fourteen months fled away
one non-calendrical day
16
A duckling mustard
dragged Lower Egypt
behind the West Wind
A stiff carriage shaft
battered the cervix
of a basket of air
A cat hawking the moon
took by ambush a tergo
ten ants in a convent
whereupon Paris fled back
from Tyre to the Occident
from the Fatrasies d’Arras
Anonymous
translated from the Old French by Donato Mancini and Ted Byrne
Read the original in Old French
These poems belong to a poetic genre that was short-lived, emerging first in the mid-thirteenth century as the fatrasie, and then taking on a second life in the early fourteenth century as the fatras. The two forms are sufficiently similar that they have traditionally been classed together as a single genre.
The fatrasie, like the fatras, combines a tightly knit poetic and logical (or grammatical) structure with wildly illogical content. The structure of the fatrasie prescribes eleven lines of verse, in two unseparated strophes, usually disconnected from each other in content. The first strophe has six lines, often giving the impression of two tercets. Each line has five syllables and the rhythm tends toward singsong. There are two rhymes for the entire poem, and in the sestet they are arranged sequentially: aab / aab. In the quintet that follows, the rhymes are crossed: babab. The quintet is made up of seven-syllable lines and there is a rhythmic disjuncture between the sestet and the quintet, the rhythm of the quintet being slower, less regular, subtler, and more complex.
The action of the fatrasie, as with that of the fatras, is above all “impossible,” and was identified as such at the time. The impossibilities are arranged around several axes, involving actors who generally have no human agency—objects or part objects, abstractions, animals—or persons acting outside of their usual range of activity or capability, and actions that are not possible in a world governed by rules of logic or law or physics. These actions may be obscene, anti-clerical, xenophobic, violent, blithering, uncanny, uproariously funny, or astonishingly beautiful, not in any particular order or distribution.
These poems have not been translated into English before. Because of this, we decided that our translations should not bend the content in order to render the complexity of the form. Our most important role was to give an adequate sense of the “meaning” of the poems. As a result, we have translated their superabundant wordplay only where this was possible without substitutions that harm the meaning or change the actual content. We have accepted assonance and consonance, double-meanings, homophonies, and sometimes even rhyme, when they have come to us, as poets, in our attempt to also provide enjoyable English language poetry.
The fatrasie, like the fatras, combines a tightly knit poetic and logical (or grammatical) structure with wildly illogical content. The structure of the fatrasie prescribes eleven lines of verse, in two unseparated strophes, usually disconnected from each other in content. The first strophe has six lines, often giving the impression of two tercets. Each line has five syllables and the rhythm tends toward singsong. There are two rhymes for the entire poem, and in the sestet they are arranged sequentially: aab / aab. In the quintet that follows, the rhymes are crossed: babab. The quintet is made up of seven-syllable lines and there is a rhythmic disjuncture between the sestet and the quintet, the rhythm of the quintet being slower, less regular, subtler, and more complex.
The action of the fatrasie, as with that of the fatras, is above all “impossible,” and was identified as such at the time. The impossibilities are arranged around several axes, involving actors who generally have no human agency—objects or part objects, abstractions, animals—or persons acting outside of their usual range of activity or capability, and actions that are not possible in a world governed by rules of logic or law or physics. These actions may be obscene, anti-clerical, xenophobic, violent, blithering, uncanny, uproariously funny, or astonishingly beautiful, not in any particular order or distribution.
These poems have not been translated into English before. Because of this, we decided that our translations should not bend the content in order to render the complexity of the form. Our most important role was to give an adequate sense of the “meaning” of the poems. As a result, we have translated their superabundant wordplay only where this was possible without substitutions that harm the meaning or change the actual content. We have accepted assonance and consonance, double-meanings, homophonies, and sometimes even rhyme, when they have come to us, as poets, in our attempt to also provide enjoyable English language poetry.
Anonymous is the unknown author of the Fatrasies d’Arras, which are fifty-five in number and, along with eleven poems written by Philippe de Remi, comprise the total corpus of the poetic genre known as the fatrasie. The Fatrasies d’Arras were undoubtedly written by a member, or members, of the nobility or haute bourgeoisie of Arras, which at the time was a wealthy merchant city. Although some scholars assume that these are unsigned works by a single author, our hunch, from working with these poems so closely for the last two years, is that they bear the fingerprints of several hands. It seems to us that they are game poems or puzzle poems of some kind. One poet may have provided some aspect of the finished poem—the rhyme words, for example, or the first six lines, or the paradoxes—and a second poet may have filled in the rest. In critical writing to come, we hope to present all the internal evidence we have of their multi-authorship, so that readers may decide for themselves.
Donato Mancini makes visual and procedural poetry, bookworks, and visual art. His books and chapbooks include Snowline (2015), Loitersack (2014), Buffet World (2011), Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Hell Passport no. 22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006), and Ligatures (2005). Notable exhibitions of his visual artworks have included exhibitions through Artspeak, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Western Front, Gallery Atsui, Malaspina Printmaker's Society, Open Space (Victoria), and CSA. His books have twice been nominated for the ReLit award in Canada. Same Diff, his most recent book, was a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. Having spent much of his life in Vancouver, Mancini is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Ted Byrne was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and moved to Vancouver in the late 1960s. His earlier writing appeared in publications like Canadian Forum and the Fiddlehead, and he is the author of Aporia (1989) and Beautiful Lies (1995) and the co-editor of The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser (1999). He was also a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective for ten years. Byrne is working on various writing projects, including a sequel to his novel Beautiful Lies and a book of short poems. Byrne’s most recent book, Duets (2018), a collection of translations of Louise Labé and Guido Cavalcanti, is published by Talonbooks.
