RICHARD SIEBURTH
As John Hollander observes in his classic study, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700, for nearly a millennium Boethius’s De Institutione Musica set the terms for the Western imagination of music. This sixth-century treatise influentially divided music into three parts: musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. By musica mundana Boethius intended the overall harmony of the universe, ultimately grounded in the Pythagorian music of the spheres but also perceptible (or rather, intelligible) in the cosmological order of elements, astral bodies, and seasons. Boethius in turn described musica humana as “that which unites the incorporeal activity of the reason with the body … a certain mutual adaptation and as it were a tempering of high and low sounds into a single consonance”—with the crucial notion of “temperament,” as Hollander points out, here referring not only to the tuning of strings but to the proportionate tempering of the various parts of the human whole (body and soul, thought and feeling, etc.). Boethius’s third category, musica instrumentalis, refers to what Hollander terms “practical” (as opposed to “speculative”) music, that is, the actual singing or playing of music (flute, lyre, harp, or, as we move into the Renaissance, viol or lute).1 In the following pages, I would like to briefly address the music of Scève’s Délie (and the possibilities of its translation) in terms of this tripartite Boethian model, still very influential in mid sixteenth-century Lyons through its more recent reformulation by Ficino.
Composed of 449 dizains interspersed with 50 emblematic woodcuts, the Délie is commonly acknowledged to be the first illustrated canzoniere of its kind. Unlike Petrarch’s Rime sparse, whose “vario stile” included sonnets, ballads, and sestinas, Scève’s lyric sequence of 1544 is devoted to the manic (depressive) hammering home of a single chord 449 times in succession, each of its dizains composed of 10 lines of 10 syllables and each observing the identical claustrophobic rhyme scheme: ABABBCCDCD. A first challenge to the translator: how maintain what John Ashbery has called the “fruitful monotony” of this kind of grid composition while at the same time allowing for all its minute variations and overtones?2 Or: how, within the compact ambit of each of these 10 x 10 matrices, produce an harmonia that would be faithful both to the original Greek meaning of the term (that is, the ratios of scales or horizontal melodic schemata taking place in time) and to its more modern polyphonic developments (that is, the blending of simultaneously sounding musical tones in a vertical all-at-onceness)?3 Given the importance of the visual emblems to the overall rhythm of the Délie, these two kinds of harmonies—the temporal and spatial—also inform the ways in which the text speaks both to the reader’s (or lover’s) eye and ear, for Délie, the obscure object of desire, is experienced throughout the sequence both melodically and chordally, that is, both as a gradual disclosure of fetishized partial objects and as a kind of sudden and overwhelming jouissance that strikes her lover blind or dumb.
True to Boethius’s tripartite schema, the microcosm of the lover’s musica humana in the Délie (i.e., the whole agon of inarticulate sobs, sighs, cries, and “silentes clameurs” that constitutes the ground tone of Scèvian song) is frequently situated vis-à-vis the musica mundana of the macrocosm. Délie, “Object de plus haulte vertu” (as she is described in the subtitle), may be an anagrammatic embodiment of the Platonic Idée (like Samuel Daniel’s Delia), but she is also, as the following dizain rather programmatically declares, a mythical sky-goddess and cosmic instance of the interdependence of eros and thanatos, day and night. Bearing within her name the solar radiance of the Delian Apollo, she is also his sister Diana, goddess of the moon and—in her more archaic Greek guises—Artemis the virgin huntress, Hecate the witch, and Persephone, queen of the Underworld:
Comme Hecaté tu me feras errer
Et vif, & mort cent ans parmy les Vmbres:
Comme Diane au Ciel me resserer,
D’ou descendis en ces mortelz encombres:
Comme regnante aux infernalles vmbres
Amoindriras, ou accroistras mes peines.
Mais comme Lune infuse dans mes veines
Celle tu fus, es, & seras DELIE,
Qu’Amour a ioinct a mes pensées vaines
Si fort, que Mort iamais ne l’en deslie.
As Hecate, you will doom me to wander
Among the Shades, alive & dead a hundred years:
As Diana, you will confine me to the Sky
Whence you descended to this vale of tears:
As Queen of Hell in your dark domain,
You will increase or diminish my pains.
But as Moon infused into my veins,
You were, & are, & shall be DELIE,
So knotted by Love to my idle thoughts
That Death itself could never untie us.
How translate the overtones of proper names? In the original, lines 8 and 10 wittily exploit the homophony of the name DELIE and the verb “deslie” (here rhymed as “untie”). Lier in turn derives from the Latin ligare (to bind or gather, as in religio, the bond between man and gods)—which provides one of the most crucial vocables in the entire work, namely the word lien (not unrelated to the city of Lyon, another metonym of Délie), at once the bitter bondage that sadomasochistically links master to slave and the musical legato that provides the sweetest ligature of love. Given the paranomastic poetics of the Délie—where letters, words, and semes continuously tie and untie themselves into different knots—the verb “délier” can occasion a veritable “délire,” a hermeneutic delirium in which reading, like dreamwork, forever unravels into a mis- or dis-reading (“délire”) that is never far from … translation.5
The masculine subject in the above-quoted dizain plays a rather passive role vis-à-vis the all-powerful cosmic Object of his desires. As the unquiet shade of an unburied body, he is condemned by Hecate to wander—still “alive,” not yet fully “dead”—through the Underworld for a hundred years before he can reach the Place of Eternal Rest. Or, like the hunter Orion who offended Artemis/Diana, he has been “confined” or “restrained” to the Sky in the shape of a constellation, condemned to revolve endlessly through the heavens. And finally, like the sick man under the influence of the moon, his fevers merely increase or decrease according to her waxings or wanings. The medical metaphor is made even more explicit in D 383:
Plus croit la Lune, & ses cornes r’enforce,
Plus allegeante est le febricitant:
Plus s’amoindrit diminuant sa force,
Plus l’affoiblit, son mal luy suscitant.
The more the Moon waxes, & extends her horns,
The more she soothes the sick man’s ague:
The more she wanes, & loses force,
The more he ails, & wastes away.
As one can hear, the anaphoric “plus … plus” (“the more … the more,” with the caesura falling after the fourth syllable both in the French and the English) serves to establish the rhythmic and causal link (or lien) between the musica mundana of the phases of the moon and the musica humana of unruly temperatures. The period between the recurrences of this kind of intermittent fever was called an “interval” during the Renaissance. This space in between, this respite from pain, this caesura, provides a duration of time—ranging from the shortest of moments to the longest of years—in which the sufferer is promised (erroneously, it turns out) some sort of solace:
O ans, ô moys, sepmaines, iours, & heures
O interualle, ô minute, ô moment,
Qui consumez les durtez, voire seures …
O years, O months, weeks, days & hours,
O intervals, O minutes, O moments
Who swallow up the pain, however sour …
(D 114)
This conception of time as made up of a series of salvific gaps (or feast-days, as in the “intervalle” defined by Cotgrave’s dictionary as “the flesh-daies between Christmas and Ashwednesday”) in turn prepares for the more musical definition of the term “interval”—the distance separating two sounds in harmony or in melody—that is beginning to make its way into French via the Italian around the time that Scève publishes the Délie.6 This new usage makes it possible to read the “interval” of the following dizain below as referring not only to the measurement of geographical features, but to the more traditional figure of the musica mundana. Here the challenge to the translator was how rhythmically to convey Scève’s condensation of the whirling energeia of an entire Renaissance mappemonde into the microcosm of a mere hundred syllables:
De toute Mer tout long, & large espace,
De terre aussi tout tournoyant circuit
Des Montz tout terme en forme haulte, & basse,
Tout lieu distant, du iour et de la nuict,
Tout interualle, ô qui par trop me nuyt,
Seroa rempliz de doulce rigueur.
Ainsi passant des Siecles la longeur,
Surmonteras la haulteur des Estoilles
Par ton sainct nom, qui vif en ma langueur
Pourra par tout nager a plaines voiles.
Every long, & wide expanse of Sea,
Every whirling tract of solid land,
Every Mountain ridge both low, & high,
Every distant site of day, & night,
Every interval, O you who unsettle me,
Will be filled by your sweet severity.
Thus surpassing the spans of Time,
You will climb beyond the spheres of Stars,
Your sacred name, sped by my misery,
Traversing all creation at full sail.
(D 259)
These are a but a few examples of how Scève attunes the music of the spheres to the private tempers of the scorned lover’s body and soul. Boethius’s third category of music, musica instrumentalis, makes itself felt less through the occasional references to lyre or lute (in D 158, D 316, D 344) than through the traditional wordplay (which Hollander informs us goes back to Cassidorus) on the possible homophonic confusion between the Latin chorda (string or catgut) and cor, cordis (heart)—which gives us the expression “heartstrings.”7 As the Concordance to the Délie reveals, Scève’s canzoniere contains a relatively high incidence of the terms “accordes” (2), “accordz” (5), “discord” (1), “discords” (1), “discordz” (3), “concordes” (1) and “cordes” (2), all resonating within (and against) the sounds of two of the most frequent words in the book, “Coeur” / “coeurs” (114) and “corps” (59).8 In D 376, the dizain moves from an initial “Corps” to a terminal “discords” (or “dis-corps”?) as the lover, no longer an infernal shade doomed to errancy by Hecate, now becomes the “shadow” of the body of the beloved, a male moon reflective of the dark light of his female sun. The suggestion of celestial bodies, in any event, encouraged me to (liberally) translate “En me mouant au doulx contournement / De tous tes faictz” as “As you move me to assume my orbit / Around all you do or say”—with the rotations of this musica munda in turn leading me to register the final “discords” not simply as “discordant” (etymologically from dis + cor, apart + heart) but rather as the more explicitly musical “out of tune” (dis + chorda):
Tu es le Corps, Dame, & ie suis ton vmbre,
Qui en ce mien continuel silence
Me fais mouuoir, non comme Hecate l’Vmbre,
Par ennuieuse, & grande violence,
Mais par pouoir de ta haulte excellence,
En me mouant au doulx contournement
De tous tes faictz, & plus soubdainement,
Que lon ne veoit l’vmbre suyure le corps,
Fors que ie sens trop inhumainement
Noz sainctz vouloirs estre ensemble discords.
You are the Body, & I your shadow, lady,
In my abiding silence, you govern
My motion, not as Hecate holds sway
Over the Shades by violence, & disarray,
But by the attraction of your excellence,
As you move me to assume my orbit
Around all you do or say, far swifter
Than a shadow chasing after its body,
Were it not for something inhuman
When our two wills fall out of tune.
(D 376)
Behind the oxymoronic “ensemble discords” of the last line of this poem lies the rich tradition of concordia discors—the term Horace used to describe Empedocles’s vision of a world shaped by the perpetual strife between the four elements, yet ordered by love into a higher “discordant harmony.” Scève’s deployment of the topos in the above dizain is far more bitter, however, for the beloved’s indifference or willfulness produces not the ultimate harmony of musica humana, but a note “trop inhumainement” jarring to the poet’s well-being—“something inhuman / When our two wills fall out of tune.”
D 344, “Leuth resonnant, & le doulx son des cordes,” the sole dizain in the collection that actually mentions a lute—even though seven poems of the Délie were set to music during Scève’s lifetime—provides one of the most achieved examples of Scève’s wryly ironic music of discordance.9 This lyric has often been compared to Louise Labé’s celebrated Sonnet 12, “Lut, compagnon de ma calamité”—the authenticity of which, however, has been recently cast into doubt by Mireille Huchon, who argues that the work of La Belle Cordière was mostly written by Scève and his circle of male poet friends.10 In Labé’s sonnet (so its witty conceit runs), the lute has not only been her faithful “companion” in calamity, but also the “témoin irreprochable” (irreproachable witness) of all of her sighs and the “controlleur véritable” (accurate observer or secretary) of all her sorrows. But the problem is: so often has the lute accompanied her in her complaints, so deeply has it been touched by her piteous tears that even should she try to make some sort of more pleasing noise (“quelque son delectable”), the instrument, grown so accustomed to her sad songs, simply renders back all her joys as laments:
Et si te veus efforcer au contraire,
Tu te destens & si me contreins taire
To paraphrase: no matter how I try to force you [to play] otherwise [i.e., to respond to my joy], you come unstrung and reduce me to silence.
This discordance between performer and instrument, between the lyric “I” and the conventions of the poetry of complaint to which it must submit—a theme also treated by Wyatt’s nearly contemporaneous “Blame not my lute”11—is brilliantly explored in Scève’s D 344, a brief song that again turns on the crucial wordplay of “cordes,” “accordes,” and “accordz”:
Leuth resonnant, & le doulx son des cordes,
Et le concent de mon affection,
Comment ensemble vnyment tu accordes
Ton harmonie auec ma passion!
The initial apostrophe to the lute delicately attunes the vibrating sibilance of the s’s to the more guttural pluckings of the hard c’s, both of which resonate across the nasalized sequence of the /ã/ or the / / sounds. The caesurae within each line establish a slight pause, allowing for internal rhyme (“resonnant” / “concent” / “Comment” / “vniment”) to play itself off against the alternating masculine and feminine endings of the lines. As in Labé’s sonnet, however, this initial statement of harmony, wherein the lute seems to act in unanimous concert with the poet’s own passion, swiftly gives way (by a transitional “lors” which echoes “cordes” and “accordes”) to its opposite:
Lors que ie suis sans occupation
Si viuement l’esprit tu m’exercites,
Qu’ores a ioye, ore a dueil tu m’incites
Par tes accorz, non aux miens ressemblantz.
The symmetrical syntax of line seven (“ores a ioye, ore a dueil”) underscores a typically Scèvian moment of cyclothimia (now joy, now grief)—here incited, paradoxically, by the chords/strings of the lute which leave him no respite in his “unoccupied” state of even-temperedness or equanimity and instead “excite” his spirits into discord. One more turn (via a crucial “car”), and the end of the poem screws down like a vise:
Car plus, que moy, mes maulx tu luy recites,
Correspondant a mes souspirs tremblantz.
The soft s’s and hard c’s of the opening lines here return, but voice a significant reversal of the initial situation. If at the outset of the poem the lute’s “harmony” was in unanimous “accord” with the speaker’s “passion,” here the instrument (or again, the poetic genre of complaint itself) seems to betray the poet—precisely because of its articulateness (that is, its capacity to “recite” his pains to his lady) and its mellifluousness, to which the deep, sincere alogos of his own “souspirs tremblantz” (trembling sighs) proves capable only of a distant “correspondance.”12
Of the following English translation of this dizain I can only say that like the lute (or lover) in both Labé’s and Scève’s poems, it tries to provide companionship to the original, aware that its acts of faithful witnessing or accurate observation will inevitably cause it to waver between harmonious accord and outright dissonance. Like the unresembling “accorz” of Scève’s D 344, the “discord” of a translation vis-à-vis its original almost always lies in the various ways in which it is forced to become more explicit, more articulate, more “clear” (and more disincarnate) than the trembling sighs it tries to body forth in another language—even if it manages (as here below) to provide a “sympathic vibration”13 in response to the original’s rhyme scheme, the patterns of its caesurae, and the swift skitter of its tetrameters:
Resounding lute, & sweet pluck of strings,
And the concert of my affection,
How you accord into a single song
Your harmony and my passion!
Yet when I am without occupation,
You put my mind through so many paces
That from joy to sorrow it now races
In your chords, so unresembling mine.
For you speak to her with such graces
Of the pain I only tremble forth in sighs.
D 17, the final dizain I would like to address in this quick survey of Scèvian musics—be they mundana, humana, or instrumentalis—is a lyric that ecstatically celebrates the harmonia that obtains between the poet and his beloved. Although the precise term “harmonie” (used on several occasions in the Délie) does not occur here, it is nonetheless present through the double negative of line 10, “Qu’auecques nous aulcun discord s’assemble” (literally, “than no discord assemble itself among [or between] the two of us”)—which, seeking to foreground the theme of “sympathetic vibration” that runs throughout the canzoniere, I have translated as “Than any discord throw us out of tune.” Like the anaphoric “plus … plus” of D 383 previously discussed, this dizain is governed by a similar trope based in the mathematical (or musical) notion of proportion, here expressed through the temporal figure (repeated three times) of “plus tost … que”—an adynaton that expresses the counter-factual condition of impossibilia (e.g., before our love could change, the unthinkable would have to happen). Whereas in the previous poems we have examined the musica humana composed by the two lovers was often related to the musica mundana made by the turnings of celestial bodies (earth, sun, moon, constellations), here Scève fuses an implicit allegory of cosmic harmony with the literal features of the landscape around Lyons—the river Rhône roiling down from the Alps and flowing into the more placid waters of the Saône while the two large hills of the Mont Fourvière and Mont de la Croix-Rousse overlook this convergence from on high:
Plus tost seront Rhosne, & Saone desioinctz
Que d’auec toy mon Coeur se desassemble:
Plus tost serons l’vn, & l’aultre Mont ioinctz,
Qu’auecques nous aulcun discord s’assemble:
Plus tost verrons & toy, & moy ensemble
Le Rhosne aller contremont lentement,
Saone monter tresuiolentement,
Que ce mien feu, tant soit peu, diminue,
Ny que ma foy descroisse aulcunement.
Car ferme amour sans eulx est plus, que nue.
This is a poem of conjunctions and disjunctions, of gatherings and dispersals—as played out in the rich rhymes of the first five lines: “desioinctz,” “ioinctz,” “desassemble,” “s’assemble” “ensemble.” As Defaux points out in his recent edition of the Délie, Scève lifts all these rhymes directly from a poem by his master, Clément Marot, who here, at the concrete level of sound, plays the Rhône that flows into Scève’s Saône just as much as does Petrarch—whose Sonnet 208 popularized the figura etymologica of Rhodanus rodens: “Rapido fiume, che d’alpestra vena / rodendo intorno (onde ’l tuo nome prendi)” (“Swift river, from your Alpine spring gnawing a way for yourself, whence you take your name”), which Scève in turn translates in D 417, “Fleuve rongeant pour t’attiltrer le nom / De la roideur en ton cours dangereuse.”14 The dramatic confluence of the Rhône (male, violently “gnawing” its course down from the Alps) and the Saône (peacefully female) at Lyons provides Scève not just with a metaphor for erotic harmony, but also, given the explicit intertextual echoes that resound through this poem, allows him to locate his own Lyonese Délie as the intersection where his great precursors, Petrarch and Marot, receive their most achieved translatio.
Translation, like love (or music)—as I have been trying to suggest with Scève—involves being apart together, mutually ingathered by an interval or caesura that, as he puts it in D 376, renders us “ensemble discords.” One of the particular typographical features of the original 1544 printing of the Délie which I was anxious to maintain in my edition was the productive dissonance of its spelling and its pronunciation—that is, the disjunction between how Scève’s words look on the page and how they sound (even though, like so much poetry from the distant past, it may be well-nigh impossible to accurately reconstruct its actual music—veni, vidi, vici or weni, widi, wiki?). In D 17 and elsewhere, the rivers Rhosne and Saone (as Scève spells them, though I use the modern French spellings Rhône and Saône in my translation) indeed chime perfectly to the ear, even if they do not exactly rhyme to the eye. This disparity—this différance?—between pronunciation and orthography opens a gap, an aporia, in which the temporality of the proper name—its history, its etymology—makes itself felt. Thus the “s” in Scève’s “Rhosne” becomes a placeholder for the river’s evolution from its Latin Rhodanus into Renaissance French, just as the circumflex on the modern Saône roofs over its Latin onomastic origins as the river Segona or Saucona—all these consonants and syllables that have been lost in the course of the etymological riverrun now contracted into the rich vowelly O’s of RhOWne and SOWne, so clearly audible when the two enter into rhyme at Lyons and then flow south together where they eventually spill into the Mediterranean Sea in a final Liebestod:
N’apperçoy tu de l’occident le Rhosne
Se destourner, & vers Midy courir,
Pour seulement se conioindre a sa Saone
Iusqu’a leur Mer, ou tous deux vont mourir?
(D 346)
In my English version, I have tried to capture the concordia discors of Rhosne/Saone by avoiding the obvious end rhymes and instead displacing them to the inside of the line (“Don’t you see,” “From the east,” “And die in their sea”). I then close the dizain with a purely anagrammatical eye-rhyme (“Saône” / “as one”):
Don’t you see the Rhône turn
From the East, & rush South,
To conjoin with its Saône
And die in their Sea as one?
To conclude, I would like to call attention to a further typographical feature of the original printing of Scève’s Délie, a feature which only I. D. MacFarlane’s 1966 edition of the poem retains but which almost every subsequent French edition (including Defaux’s) omits—namely Scève’s eloquent use of the ampersand (which is “normalized” into an “et” by all of his French editors). To return to D 7, here is how the harmony between the Rhône and Sâone is typographically expressed:
Plus tost seront Rhosne, & Saone desioinctz
This pattern of disjunctive conjugation, which involves two terms at once linked by an ampersand yet separated by a comma, is repeated two more times in the poem (with the same interplay of a metrical caesura after the fourth syllable and an optical blink of the eye after the fifth or sixth):
Plus tost seront | l’vn, & l’aultre Mont ioinctz
…
Plus tost verrons | & toy, & moy ensemble
In adopting this rather idiosyncratic form of punctuation—“x comma and y,” or “both x comma and y”—Scève (or his printer in Sulpice Sapon’s shop) followed the rules laid down by yet another of his mentors, the humanist, publisher, and translator Etienne Dolet. Dolet published his treatise on punctuation, De la punctuation de la langue Francoyse, as part of his La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre in Lyons in 1540, four years before Scève’s Délie.15 It is perhaps no accident that it took a traducteur of Dolet’s eminence to understand that the minute visual and rhythmic interval defined by the tmetic comma preceding an ampersand provides a perfect punctum for the music of Scève’s poetry and … its translation:
Rhône, & Saône shall sooner be disjoined
Than my heart tear itself away from you:
The two Mounts shall sooner be conjoined
Than any discord throw us out of tune:
Together, we shall sooner see, I, & you,
The Rhône tarry, & reverse its course,
The Saône roil, & return to source
Than this my fire ever die down
Or my fidelity ever lose its force.
True love, without these, is but a cloud.
Notes
1. John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 24–25, 42, 45.
2. Ashbery’s comments on Scève (which are related to his own Scève-inspired “Fragment” of 1968) are quoted in John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 111.
3. See Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, 26–28.
4. The originals and translations of the Délie are quoted from my Emblems of Desire: Selections from the Délie of Maurice Scève (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
5. Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), an essential anatomy of mid sixteenth-century French, in turn defines the verb “delire” as “to chuse, cull, select, gather, picke out” and “delirer” as “to doat, rave, do things against reason.”
6. According to the Trésor de la langue française (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1983), IV, 467, the Italian term intervallo begins taking on this musical sense in 1546.
7. Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, 42.
8. Jerry C. Nash, ed., Maurice Scève: Concordance de la Délie (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976), 2 vols.
9. Three poems (D 41, D 82, D 89) were set by composers before the actual publication of the Délie and four (D 5, D 131, D 256, D 364) afterward; four of the settings were polyphonic (for four voices), three homophonic. For more detail, see V.-L. Saulnier, “Maurice Scève et la musique,” in Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1954), 89–103.
10. Mireille Huchon, Louise Labé: Une Créature de papier (Geneva: Droz, 2006). The following quotes from Labé are taken from Huchon’s facsimile reproduction of the Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize published by Scève’s publisher friend Jean de Tournes in 1555.
11. Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, 130–131.
12. Pascal Quignard, La Parole de la Délie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974), 65–70.
13. See Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, 137 for a discussion of the phenomenon of “sympathic vibration”—the production of a tone by a free string if another one, placed at some distance, but tuned to exactly the same frequency, is struck. A 1618 emblem of “Love as Sympathetic Vibration” is reproduced on page 242.
14. For Marot and Scève see Gérard Defaux, ed., Délie (Geneva: Droz, 2004), vol. 1, xliv–li. For Petrarch’s Rhône and Scève’s, see Jacqueline Risset, L’Anagramme du désir (Paris: Fourbis, 1995), 53–57.
15 Dolet’s treatise on punctuation is reprinted in Nina Catach, L’Orthographe française à l’époque de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1968), 305–309. My colleague John Hamilton informs me that various musicologists of antiquity introduced what was known as a “komma”—a small interval (about a quarter-tone)—in order to even out or temper the distance between the tonic and the fourth and hence justify some of the inconsistencies in the musical scale. Later musical theorists from the Renaissance on adopted kommas of varying sizes (barely perceptible intervals such as a quarter-tone, a fifth-tone, a sixth-tone) to align the imperfections of musica instrumentalis with the mathematical purity of musica mundana. It would be extremely tempting to connect these intervals to Dolet’s system of punctuation—except that what we call “comma” he calls “point à queue,” and what he calls “comma” we would call a colon (or, “deux points”).
