.

For All Who Labor

by Christine de Pisan (1364-c. 1430)

Lady, fair branch where God’s grace blooms,
Our labors, Saint Bernard assumes,
Are benefited by your task
To help those who ply hoes or brooms
When night falls and when day resumes.
Our guiding star and shield, now ask
For all who labor on the earth
That toil and soil bring bread to birth,
That work be held in high repute,
Esteemed for its salvific worth,
That God be served with grateful mirth
Rejoicing in much well-earned fruit.

Ave Maria

.

.

For the Female Sex

by Christine de Pisan

Virgin Mother, God’s own handmaid,
By the Trinity arrayed
As Temple with Himself replete,
Sage Saint Jerome this truth relayed:
Before, during, after you laid
Sweet Jesus in His swaddling sheet,
God kept you from all stain and doubt.
Protect the female sex devout,
Wife, widow, nun, and damoiselle.
From women’s souls and bodies rout
The threats and slanders all about;
Preserve us from the fires of hell.

Ave Maria

.

.

For the Poet and Her Loved Ones

by Christine de Pisan

Virgin, by your fountains chaste
Of pure eyes weeping as you faced
The Cross and your Son’s bitter pains,
Wherein His blood our guilt erased,
You too His sacrifice embraced
For us, as Saint Anselm explains.
Hear me, I beg, although my sin
And failings of my friends and kin
Have made His death obligatory.
Implore that our faults be forgiven,
And by your tears, for us please win
Abundance of His grace and glory.

Amen

.

.

Original French

From a sequence of eighteen petitions to the Blessed Virgin Mary entitled L’Oroyson Nostre Dame, composed by Christine de Pisan no later than 1407.

XV

Dame, de grace la droite ente
Qui devant Dieu nous represente,
Et ce tesmoigne saint Bernard
Nostre moyen et nostre sente,
Nostre escu quant pechié nous tempte,
Qui pour nous prie main et tart;
Pour tous les laboreurs de terre
Te pri que leur veuilles acquerre
Sauvement, et leur donnes grace
Que tel labour puissent pourquerre
Dont Dieu soit servi en tout erre
Et toute la terre en soit grasse.

Ave Maria

XVII

Vierge mere, de Dieu ancelle
De la Trinité temple et celle,
Saint Jerosme en fait mencion,
Après l’enfantement pucelle,
Sur toutes femmes tu es celle
Qui de grace eus prevencion:
Pour le devot sexe de femmes
Te pris que leur corps et leur ames
Tu ayes en ta sainte garde,
Soient damoiselles ou dames
Ou autres, gard les de diffames
Et que feu d’enfer ne les arde.

Ave Maria

XVIII

Vierge pure, par les fontaines
De tes chastes yeulz et les peines
Qu’a ton filz veïs en la croix,
Dist saint Ansiaume, et les vaines
De son corps qui pendoit en aines
Ouvertes, te pri qu’os ma voix
Et a ton filz, qui fut mort mis
Pour moi et pour tous mes amis,
Il te plaise a faire priere,
Et la gloire, qu’il a promis
A ceulx qui ont pechié remis,
Nous ottroit et grace pleniere.

Amen

.

.

Margaret Coats lives in California.  She holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University.  She has retired from a career of teaching literature, languages, and writing that included considerable wrk in homeschooling for her own family and others.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


CODEC Stories:

19 Responses

  1. Warren Bonham

    Reading these was a great way to start my Labor Day (although I won’t be doing much laboring today). All 3 were exceptional but I really enjoyed the first. We need to be reminded that work has “salvific worth” (a great phrase BTW). We’ve been busy training people to expect handouts of daily bread from the government rather than serving God with “grateful mirth” so that we can receive His bread that satiates eternally.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, Warren. Work does much more than meet needs, which is all the government dole can do. Or rather, as Christine indicates in her poem, work helps us meet higher needs such as the requirement to serve God, develop the earth and our abilities and virtues including gratitude, a grace that moves us toward heaven. Glad you see the potential here!

      Reply
  2. Mary Gardner

    Margaret, thank you for translating these beautiful prayers. They made a sweet adjunct to my morning devotional today.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you, Mary. Christine de Pisan is a master of devotional poetry, so widely known before our time. In addition to this group of 18 prayers, she wrote another of 15 brief lyrics, and a magnum opus of 60 quatrains on the life and passion of Christ. Despite the lack of popular interest today, I hope many poets are composing devotional verses addressed above.

      Reply
  3. Roy Eugene Peterson

    All three poems are beautifully phrased and rhymed both in French and in your English translation. You have resuscitated three more gems from the past to once again sparkle with your divine powers polishing them for us to appreciate and love. Labor Day was indeed the perfect day to resurrect the first one and to realize labor and the fruits of labor were recognized in the distant past with joy in the hearts of those who happily fulfilled their tasks. All three from the female perspective are marvelous prayers from a devoted poet,

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks for your constant appreciation, Roy. One other clear perspective about work in this era is that results are not guaranteed, and thus laborers need to do their diligent best, pray for a good outcome, and still be thankful and joyful when they receive it. But things seem to be nearly the same for us!

      Reply
  4. Jeremiah Johnson

    “That toil and soil bring bread to birth . . .
    That God be served with grateful mirth”

    Good thoughts! Feels like a meditation on “give us this day our daily bread” – something he provides through our working, which he enables us in.

    That, and the call to labor with joy before him!

    (of course, I realize that in the context of your poem it is, more directly, Mary working the enabling 🙂

    Reminds me of Van Dyke’s “Work” sonnet – which I framed and put on my desk a number of years ago:

    https://allpoetry.com/poem/8507939-Work-by-Henry-Van-Dyke

    On another note, I have my World Lit I students read some of Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies” every semester, and I think I’ll add your translation of “For All Who Labor” to our readings.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Jeremiah, thank you for your comment and for Van Dyke’s sonnet on work, so inspiring in itself and so appropriate for Labor Day. I have delayed acknowledging you because I know Van Dyke is somewhere in my material on “fair forms” of poetry, and I wanted to share my gleanings from him. He was a poet of great talent, and you probably know his most famous lyric is the hymn, “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” sung to Beethoven’s melody from the Ninth Symphony. I have been intrigued by his next most famous piece, “For Katrina’s Sundial.”

      https://allpoetry.com/For-Katrinas-Sun-Dial

      I’m surprised to find several versions of this online, but the one at allpoetry has both parts in the correct order, and does not alter the wording I know and appreciate.

      There’s also a very good rondeau:

      https://allpoetry.com/A-Rondeau-of-College-Rhymes

      The analysis of this poem by artificial intelligence shows just how blind and lame AI can be. The poem has merit for its mature touch of self-deprecation that nonetheless preserves a sense of worth about any writing of poetry.

      I’m glad you reminded me of Van Dyke, and glad you can use my translation to show World Lit students that Christine was a poet. The “City of Ladies” is certainly her best known work, and often reading it alone conceals much of what she values in her poems, namely, devotion, hierarchy, tradition, royalty, a stable social order, and patriotism. All this from someone who lived during the Hundred Years’ War and the Great Western Schism!

      Reply
  5. Paul A. Freeman

    Your translations transport us into the world of the late Middle Ages with great skill, Margaret.

    My fave image – ‘…soil bring bread to birth’.

    Thanks for the read.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      That’s a good one, Paul, because even after the soil does its toil, millers and bakers must labor with the grain to bring bread to birth. Some things haven’t changed much since the Middle Ages. Thanks for your reading and comment!

      Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    The maintenance of those rhyme schemes in the English is quite a feat. It’s one of the hardest things for a translator to pull off well. A language can be as recalcitrant as a mule when you’re trying to get it to move in a fixed direction.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you as always, Joseph. The direction is fixed by the poet whose work being translated, so the translator must indeed coax the mule, sometimes by moving meaning and image around until the best path to take, without losing much of the French mule or adding so much as to create an English beast, becomes apparent. The process, though, is very much worth the collaboration with a good fellow poet, as you know.

      Reply
  7. C.B. Anderson

    Great stuff — in translation and probably in the original. No fluff here, just concise locutions that challenge the recalcitrance of the most steadfast unbeliever.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you, C. B. No-frills clarity is essential in these verses that start with a theology quote to support specific petitions the poet wants to make. In all eighteen of the poems, her ultimate request is salvation for those connected to her in any way, and she is courtly enough to say so with finesse. By the way, like Christine, I include recalcitrant associates in my devotions!

      Reply
  8. Tom Rimer

    Margaret, what lovely poem-prayers these are, and you are indeed a master at finding such natural rhymes in English, always a difficult task. I find it interesting that she refers to prominent church fathers in two of these poems. Is this a common practice? It is a slight jolt from the emotions expressed in the rest of each poem, as it gives a somewhat didactic feeling, but was obviously important to her to include this. But these are lovely poems, good for Labor Day or any day,

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Tom, thanks for your comment and question. “To speak with authority” is structural in this set of poems. Each of them mentions a saint or statesman to support praise of the Virgin in the first six lines, then makes a petition in the last six. These are public devotions by Christine as court poet, unlike her other two sequences of devotional quatrains, that I mentioned above to Mary Gardner. This group begins with prayer for Christendom and the Church, then gives a great deal of attention to members of the French royal family before coming to Christine’s noble patron, and varied classes of the populace in hierarchical order. This approach suits any society with recognized levels of status, and it claims status and significance for the poet’s work.

      The working class featured in the first poem here is not just a “lower” class, though. Medieval persons understood labor as required of everyone “lapsus” or fallen. Thus in some way all took part in the work assigned to Adam and Eve, of tilling the soil and bearing and raising children.

      Reply
  9. Jonathan Kinsman

    Artigianato molto raffinato, Professoressa Emerito!!! Brava! Brava! Brava!

    [sorry for the Italian, Margaret, but I had Jean-Pierre Barricelli for the language and the major (Comp Lit) and loved habits never pass.

    Cristina da Pizzano (she preferred la francaise, but she was born in Venezia) is one of those stellar pillars of wisdom, wit and talent that steer the course of Western Civilization and are largely forgotten outside the Garden of Akademos.

    The rulers she influenced! The times her ideas and work improved! The genius of her gifts! I especially love her Proverbes moraux, those couplets that to me are the model for our Western ‘haiku’ (‘amusement sentence”) or apothegms.

    And your translations!! You have demonstrated the skill, rhythm and music moving from one language to another, centuries across the dance floor, without stubbing a metrical foot. You are impressive, Dr Coats.

    My favorite is For the Female Sex. Your use of six key Old French words in Modern English garb is delicious (like an apple snap again of a Washington state Honeycrisp). I can think of no other compliment than food. Your translations are a feast for the senses. Virgin, arrayed, replete, relayed, devout, slanders, preserve: good words with religious connotations and a hint of clashing arms (‘arrayed’).

    Thank you Margaret. Keep sending Evan more. Merci, mon amie!

    Jonathan

    Reply
  10. Margaret Coats

    Tante grazie, Jonathan! I’m glad you enjoyed this selection from Christine’s devotions. I rendered in English various lyrics by her during a long study of “fair forms.” I prefer that term to “fixed forms.” Christine herself proves that they were anything but fixed. The only other selection on this site is the following post, which is more extensive than this one.

    https://classicalpoets.org/2021/02/13/for-valentines-day-the-tale-of-the-rose-by-christine-de-pisan-1364-1431-translated-by-margaret-coats/

    Please take a look and tell me what you think. I am intrigued that you have a special fondness for her moral proverbs. That neglected work does show how Christine covered most of the bases of medieval literature: religious, courtly, moral, pastoral, and love poetry.

    I appreciate the specific remarks on my translation. It really is necessary to keep the music moving from one language to another when one begins to feel affinity for the foreign poet. Chaque ami de telle grande poetesse est mon ami.

    Reply
    • Jonathan Kinsman

      Thank you Margaret for your Tale of the Rose. I write of roses and beauty endlessly (and boringly in all truth to my literary circle). I am fortunate that I married a ‘rose’ (Shoshana) and who embroidered a red rose on my plastron when I was a competitive collegian in Fencing at UC Riverside, oh, last century or so! I would have to admit that I am a late Middle Ages poet as Shakespeare with his updated Morality plays. As all of us are, I contend, who – like Christine and her age – composed lyric poetry in set forms, borrowing lines or changing lines and imitating one another.

      As Charlotte Cooper-Davis wrote of her: “Part of the individual poet’s challenge was to push the boundaries of these set forms, composing poetry that followed the formal constraints (in terms of rhyme patterns, number of lines and so on), but innovated creatively within their limits.” [Christine de Pizan, Life, Work, Legacy, p. 16]

      As one who has written Fabula Rosa (an extended lyric) on the rose, it’s symbolism, it’s metaphoric purpose, it’s miraculous creation, I hone in on similar and varied approached. Your translation is the most fluid of all I have read. The judicious use of older English words such as ‘wheresoe’er’, ‘trifling’, and ‘vanquish’, and others sets the proper tone and solemnity to the Tale.

      This must be published. The prose explanations are fine. You choose those sections where you can give us the moment others of her time experienced.

      I am sure your husband will comply. If not, tell him Lady Love will require him to relinquish his seat at the round table (the kitchen hah!).

      I leave you (for now) with what you surely agree: if we men would but follow the teachings of the Church, the admonitions of Christine de Pizan, the wit of Shakespeare, the approach of Dante, Western Culture would see another renascence,
      An eternally verdant age:
      an Epoch of Attars,
      a century of centifolias,
      a lifting of Damasks . . .

      Thank you again for sending me the link. Here in California the first poem ever printed (and used as an advertising poster) was for a dance in Monterey.
      It is very similar in approach, from the male view, of the women of Alta California.

      We continue the best of what we do to praise the gifts He has bestowed on us. And one of them is the talent and music of Margaret Coats!!

      Jonathan

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Captcha loading...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.