A Timely Villon: Anachrony and Premodern Poetic Fiction

Abstract:Jacques Rancière's poetic concept of anachrony provides a critical tool for probing the many times of premodern poetry. By suggesting the way poems "take time against the grain," anachrony helps us to entertain them as "modes of connection," as "events," that can become present in times other than when they were first created. In Rancière's terms, anachronous poems make leaps in time, and activated once more, engage publics in various new places, about questions foreign to their first era. My test case in this essay: The Ballad of the Hanged Men and The Testament of François Villon. By examining literary translations of Villon's poetry in a growing transnational context, I argue for the unpredictable timeliness of this poetic fiction. In this argument, numerous creators compose Villon anew, including, for example, Édouard Glissant and his poems, other Black poets in the US, as well as writers in Enlightenment and modern-day Europe, in Japan around 1900, too. Such an understanding of Villon's poetry leads to a model of premodern fiction that encompasses the many instances it makes history.