Jean-Antoine de Baif

Jean-Antoine de Baïf (born February 19, 1532 in Venice , † September 19, 1589 in Paris ) was a French poet. He was friends with Pierre de Ronsard and belonged to the group of poets La Pléiade led by him . He was the best known of several contemporary authors who tried to introduce a quantitative metric based on the syllable quantities of ancient Greek and Latin in French literature .

Life

He was born the illegitimate son of the diplomat and humanist Lazare de Baïf . His upbringing was placed in the hands of the most famous intellectuals of the era, namely Jean Dorat , whom he would later follow to the Collège de Coqueret , and Charles Estienne . Baïf left an extensive work, Les Amours (1552/58), the Les Météores (1567) inspired by Virgil's Georgica , the Passe-Temps (1573) and Les Mimes, enseignements et proverbes (1581), which are considered his best work become. But none of his works became really famous. Joachim du Bellay , another Pléiade poet, called him "le docte, doctieur, doctime Baïf" (German about the learned, more learned, most learned B. ).

plant

In 1570 Baïf founded together with the composer Joachim Thibault de Courville and the poet Pierre de Ronsard and under the royal patronage of Charles IX. the Académie de musique et de poésie in his house in the Paris suburb of St. Marceau , which had a strong impact on contemporary poetry. In 1574 Baïf published the Étrennes de poésie française in the technique of vers mesurés or vers mesurés à l'antique , d. H. in a metric that was based on the quantitative poetry of ancient languages. A fifteen-syllable quantifying verse was named after him verse Baïfin . His other works in quantitative metrics - a complete, an unfinished Psalter and several volumes of chansonettes - did not appear in print.

Under the influence of ancient literature , European Renaissance authors had tried on various occasions to introduce the quantitative metric with its weighting of long and short syllables in languages that were not always suitable for it. Jacques de la Taille had written a Manière de faire des vers en français comme en grec et en Latin in 1562 ("Instructions for writing French verses as in Greek and Latin", printed in 1573). However, Baïf went so far in this venture that he invented a writing system to reproduce both the pronunciation and the metrics of his verses.

Nevertheless, he cannot be seen as a language reformer like Louis Meigret , Jacques Peletier du Mans or Petrus Ramus . He never tried to change the traditional spelling of French, his own spelling was reserved for verses in quantitative metrics. Although literary criticism had often not even dealt with the verse mesurés , they were considered clumsy; they remained largely unknown. Some composers, including Claude Le Jeune ou Jacques Mauduit , set them to music in the Musique mesurée . This had a lasting influence on the music of the 17th century, especially the word-tone relationship.

Baïf arranged for the theater stage the Eunuchus of Terenz as L'Eunuque (1565, printed 1573) and Miles Gloriosus von Plautus as Le Brave (1567); from the Greek he translated the Antigone by Sophocles . He also made translations of Bion von Smyrna , Moschus , Theocrit , Anacreon , Catullus and Martial .

literature

Heinrich Nagel: Jean Antoine de Baif's metrical verses. A contribution to the knowledge of French metrics in the 16th century . (Dissertation) Leipzig: Mutze 1878
Mathieu Augé-Chiquet: La Vie, les idées et l'œuvre de Jean-Antoine de Baïf . Paris / Toulouse: Hachette-Privat 1909. Reprint Geneva: Slatkine 1969
Jean Vignes: Mots dorés pour un siècle de fer. Les Mimes, enseignemens et proverbes de Jean-Antoine de Baïf. Texts, contexts, intertexts . Paris: Champion 1997. ISBN 2-85203-688-6
Jean Vignes: Jean-Antoine de Baïf . Paris: Memini 1999. ISBN 88-86609-19-1
Yvonne Roberts: Jean-Antoine de Baïf and the Valois court . Bern u. a. 2000. ISBN 3-906765-01-6
Elizabeth Vinestock: Poétique et pratique dans les "Poèmes" de Jean-Antoine de Baïf . Paris: Champion 2006. ISBN 2-7453-1316-9

Web links

Wikisource: Jean-Antoine de Baïf - Sources and full texts (French)

Literature by and about Jean-Antoine de Baïf in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

↑ Jaumann, Herbert: Handbook of learned culture of the early modern times. Vol. 1: Bio-bibliographical repertory . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, p. 59. (Online version at Google Books)

personal data
SURNAME	Baïf, Jean-Antoine de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French poet
DATE OF BIRTH	February 19, 1532
PLACE OF BIRTH	Venice
DATE OF DEATH	September 19, 1589
Place of death	Paris

[1] Jaumann, Herbert: Handbook of learned culture of the early modern times. Vol. 1: Bio-bibliographical repertory . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, p. 59. (Online version at Google Books)