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That day, is it.
Feb. 14th, 2007 05:46 pmThat dreadful holiday that snuck into this country only a few years ago, as if Carnival didn't harbour horrors enough on its own without the support of pink glittery hearts and the like.
So I meant to write yet another rant on why Valentine's Day is the most over-hyped, commercialized, stupid pseudo-holiday ever.
And then I thought, wait.
You've done that before, and repetitio non placet after a certain while.
And besides, you have the first line of a fricking Valentine's Day poem as your journal title. It would be kind of inconsistent to have that, no matter how much you agree with that sentiment, and then put up a big rant on why YOU do not want to have anything to do with Valentine's Day.
So you don't get the rant.
You get the poem instead. >:D
This is one of the first records, if not the first, to mention Valentine's Day as a holiday of love, and I like it for various reasons; firstly, it is written in Middle English, which is always nice; secondly, it is long and by FAR more intelligent than 'Violets are blue/ Roses are red/ If you don't love me/ I hope you die dead' or the like; thirdly, the lesson is an interesting one, namely (basically) that having a lover is nice for the unenlightened, but the most noble women don't need that to be perfect. Or something like that. [Actually, this poem was likely written as a parody of the chaos around the marriage of Anne of Bohemia. She had three suitors - Richard II, Charles of France, and Friedrich von Meißen - and only decided for Richard II (the royal tercel, so to say) after long deliberations. As the formel eagle doesn't decide within the course of this poem, most scholars presume that it was written before the final decision (i.e. before 1382). But one cannot be sure, and there are many exciting theories concerning the dating of this poem.
Anyway.
As not everyone on my friendslist is fluent in both English and German with a side helping of French, I provide you with a very rough translation along with the original poem [in the version used for the Riverside Chaucer. There are 14 manuscripts that all have slight differences, because Medieval spelling wasn't standardized and the scribes that copied stuff down occasionally interpreted things differently]. Try to read the original, though; it's so much better.
Note on translation: I have tried to stay very very very close to the original, which occasionally makes for awkward sentences. When I have derived from the modern word closest to the Middle English word, that usually happened for a reason. "Men", for example, is often not translated as "man" but as "one". That's because it is the German man, not the English man. Similarly, "cunnyng" does not mean the same as modern cunning, but rather the same as German Können. Middle English "may" is closer to "can" than to modern "may"; pure auxiliaries in the modern English can be full verbs in Middle English; and so on and so on. You may guess for yourselves why I translated the "wel ithewed" in line 47 as "endowed with virtues" rather than "well-endowed".
... I am beginning to sound like Christopher Tolkien in the HoME books, so I'll just shut up and give you the poem now. Have fun. >:D
( You know you want to read it. ... lots of words, though. )
Some day I shall be able to do this table thing so that the appropriate verses are actually next to each other, but it is not this day. It gets closest with a display resolution of 1024 x 768px. >_>
