A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere, With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought. --Algernon Charles Swinburne, "The Roundel," A Century of Roundels (1883) Le poete qui commence sa ballade ne sait pas trop ce qu'il y mettra: la rime, et la rime toute seule, lui suggerera des choses inattendues et charmantes, auxquelles il n'aurait pas songe sans elle, des choses unies par des rapports lointains et secrets, et qui s'enchaineront avec un peu du desordre d'un reve. --Jules Lemaitre, "Theodore de Banville" (1885) Algernon Charles Swinburne was always the most French of Victorian poets. In the late 1850s, as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, Swinburne came under the influence of a French revival of medieval poemes a forme fixe, such as the ballade, rondeau, rondel, and triolet. These French fixed verse forms were given their final shapes by their mid-fifteenth-century masters, Duke Charles d'Orleans and Francois Villon; four centuries later, these forms were recovered by the poet and critic Theodore de Banville and the loose cohort of poets known as the Parnassians. When Swinburne withdrew from Balliol in 1859, he began translating Villon, whom he playfully called that "poet, pimp, and pickpocket." (1) Indeed, Swinburne was so taken with Villon that he and his friend D. G. Rossetti even proposed translating Villon's oeuvre into English. While this plan never materialized, the medieval French fixed forms of the Villon circle that they did translate and with which they experimented in the 1860s helped inaugurate a post-Spasmodic, Pre-Raphaelite verse culture dedicated to the poet's technique and the poem's rhyme. This "reaction in favour of form" was chronicled by the critic Edmund Gosse in his 1877 "A Plea for certain Exotic Forms of Verse": "The dignity and service of rhyme, strangely neglected in the last generation [the Spasmodics], were insisted upon by the younger writers [Swinburne, Morris, and the Rossettis], who fed the exhausted sources of music with new combinations of old forms and with a happy reproduction of ancient measures." (2) By the 1870s, Swinburne and the "English Parnassians"--a coterie of poets and critics including Gosse, Austin Dobson, Edward Dowden, W. H. Henley, Andrew Lang, and R. L. Stevenson--had popularized medieval French fixed forms in England. Indeed, as the literary historian James K. Robinson points out, in the last third of the century, "English Parnassianism" and the "vogue of Villon translation" characterized English verse culture. (3) In this late-Victorian culture of rhyme, and a quarter-century after first experimenting with Villon's fixed forms, Swinburne reworked Villon's rondeau to invent his "roundel," publishing A Century of Roundels in 1883. It received mixed reviews. Those who condemned Century felt that it exemplified not only Swinburne's characteristic valuing of sound over sense but also, given its preoccupation with infants, his betrayal of his radical, scandalizing youth. For instance, in the 1883 Literary World, the anonymous reviewer concludes, "Mr. Swinburne's muse is here no longer the wild bacchante of earlier days; she treads a statelier measure, clothed to the point of decency, if not precisely in her right mind." (4) And Gerard Manley Hopkins growled in a 29 April 1889 letter to his friend Robert Bridges that Century was mere "rot about babies, a blethery bathos." (5) This critique continued through the twentieth century with Century's content dismissed for sentimentality, and it continues today with Century's form dismissed for triviality. (6) Most recently, Peter McDonald denounced Century because of its facile rhymes: "It is easy to point out instances of banal relation in Swinburne's habits of rhyme, and (especially in his later work) of banality that topples over into triviality. Certainly, the author of A Century of Roundels (1882) [sic], in his protracted and pitiless formal homage to Christina Rossetti's self-scrutinizing and acoustically self-attentive verse, comes close to rendering the startling originality of that poetry completely inaudible. …

中文翻译：

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韵的尽头：斯威本百年的圆韵和维多利亚晚期的韵律文化

圆圆被制成圆环或星光球，以令人愉悦的工艺和不为人知的狡猾声音。——阿尔杰农·查尔斯·斯温伯恩，“圆圆”，圆圆的世纪 (1883) 诗集开始了 sa Ballade ne sait pas trop ce qu'il y metra: la rime, et la rime toute seule, lui suggerera des selecteds inattendues et Charmantes, auxquelles il n'aurait pas songe sans elle, des selections unies par des rapports lointains et secrets, et qui s'enchaineront avec un peu du desordre d'un reve。——Jules Lemaitre, "Theodore de Banville" (1885) Algernon Charles Swinburne 一直是维多利亚时代最法国化的诗人。在 1850 年代后期，作为牛津大学贝利奥尔学院的一名本科生，斯威本受到法国中世纪诗歌复兴的影响，如民谣、回旋曲、回旋曲、和三重奏。15 世纪中叶的大师查尔斯·德奥尔良公爵和弗朗索瓦·维永赋予了这些法国固定韵文的最终形状。四个世纪后，这些形式被诗人兼评论家西奥多·德·班维尔和一群松散的诗人重新发现。当斯威本于 1859 年从巴利奥尔退出时，他开始翻译维永，他开玩笑地称他为“诗人、皮条客和扒手”。(1) 事实上，斯威本对维永如此着迷，以至于他和他的朋友 DG 罗塞蒂甚至提议将维永的作品翻译成英文。虽然这个计划从未实现，但他们在 1860 年代进行了翻译和试验的中世纪法国固定形式的维永圈帮助开创了一种后痉挛、前拉斐尔派诗歌文化，致力于诗人的 技巧和诗的押韵。评论家埃德蒙·戈斯 (Edmund Gosse) 在 1877 年的“对某些异国情调的诗歌形式的恳求”中记录了这种“支持形式的反应”：“押韵的尊严和服务在上一代 [痉挛] 中被奇怪地忽视了由年轻的作家 [斯威本、莫里斯和罗塞蒂斯] 创作，他们用旧形式的新组合和古老措施的快乐再现为枯竭的音乐来源提供了支持。” (2) 到 1870 年代，斯威本和“英国帕纳西斯派”——包括戈斯、奥斯汀·多布森、爱德华·道登、WH亨利、安德鲁·朗和 RL 史蒂文森在内的一群诗人和评论家——在英格兰普及了中世纪的法国固定形式. 事实上，正如文学史学家詹姆斯·K·罗宾逊指出的那样，在本世纪的最后三分之一，“ 英语 Parnassianism”和“Villon of Villon 翻译”是英语诗歌文化的特征。(3) 在维多利亚晚期的韵律文化中，在第一次尝试 Villon 的固定形式之后的四分之一个世纪，斯威本重新编写了 Villon 的 rondeau 以发明他的“roundel” ，” 1883 年出版了《A Century of Roundels》。它收到了褒贬不一的评论。那些谴责 Century 的人认为，它不仅体现了斯威本对声音的重视而不是感觉，而且鉴于其对婴儿的关注，他背叛了他激进的、令人反感的青年时代。例如，在 1883 年的文学世界中，匿名评论者总结道：“先生。斯威本的缪斯在这里不再是早期的狂野酒神；她采取了一种更庄严的措施，穿着得体，即使不是在她正确的头脑中。” (4) 杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯 (Gerard Manley Hopkins) 在 1889 年 4 月 29 日给他的朋友罗伯特·布里奇斯 (Robert Bridges) 的一封信中咆哮道，“世纪”只是“关于婴儿的腐烂，一种无用的沐浴。”(5) 这种批评持续了整个 20 世纪，世纪的内容因多愁善感而被驳回，直到今天，Century 的形式因琐碎而被驳回。（6）最近，彼得·麦克唐纳（Peter McDonald）因其轻松的押韵而谴责 Century：“在斯威本的押韵习惯中，很容易指出平庸关系的实例，并且（尤其是在他的后来的作品）的平庸，推翻为琐碎。当然，A Century of Roundels (1882) [原文如此] 的作者，在他对克里斯蒂娜·罗塞蒂 (Christina Rossetti) 自我审视和声学上自我关注的诗句的冗长而无情的正式敬意中，几乎使那首诗的惊人独创性完全听不见。…