Lecturer in French Language and Literature at Université Gustave Eiffel, affiliated to the Literature, Knowledge and Arts Laboratory (LISAA), Romain Menini was awarded the 2020 CNRS bronze medal for his work on Rabelais, the Reception of Antiquity in the Renaissance and humanist philology. The honour awards the debut work of a researcher in their field. We interviewed the medal-winner.
It’s rare for the CNRS to award a medal to a teacher-researcher in literature. What does this award mean to you?
It's a great pleasure, especially since I’m one of the few academics this year to have been awarded a medal which is mostly reserved for researchers (as opposed to teacher-researchers). Scholarship, the history of books, philology and the study of ancient literature and languages still have a bright future ahead, perhaps! My warmest thanks to Section 35, which chose me. This means that the CNRS believes that you can do high-quality research while maintaining a teaching activity, managing a Letters department and looking after students. It also means that I have been lucky enough to work in the right conditions, here at Université Gustave Eiffel, in my research team (LISAA) and with my colleagues, whom I am very fond of.
You studied Latin and Greek, two languages that have become rare options in education...
I began learning Greek towards the end of middle school, followed later by Latin. In high school, I was the only student in my class learning Greek, and fortunately my lessons were maintained by my school in Sèvres. I always wanted to continue learning these two inseparable languages. Things are a bit grim for ancient languages right now, especially Greek which is, alas, a rarity in secondary education. I’ve always been fascinated by the Greek world, its literature and philosophy. I read Rabelais and his contemporaries through this prism, and more particularly authors with a vested interest in Greek tradition. The Greek world is capital - a truism, but worth remembering - to understanding the evolution of Western society and the world we live in.
What did you discover about Rabelais, an author who already seems to be so well-known?
We think we’ve known all about this author for hundreds of years, but Rabelais remains a mysterious figure. There are gaps in his bibliography; we know he travelled extensively, he used pseudonyms and had secret acquaintances. We discovered recently that, around the 1530s, he used an editor ‘coat-of-arms’ representing, in a crown of ivy, the silhouette of a bird (most likely a bird of good fortune), a chevron and two cross pattees. This ‘coat-of-arms’, complete with a Greek motto, (‘To good fortune, with God’) served to indicate an editorial intervention on the part of Rabelais. Three or four of us spent a certain amount of time hunting down books bearing this coat-of-arms; several publications had previously escaped everyone’s attention.
Which means that you do not work alone?
No, and it’s a pleasure to quote the names of my colleagues and friends with whom I have always worked: Mireille Huchon, of course, Raphaël Cappellen, Claude La Charité, Nicolas Le Cadet, Myriam Marrache-Gouraud and Olivier Pédeflous. And the magazine L’Année rabelaisienne [‘The Rabelais Year’] (5 editions published) is undoubtedly the most magnificent result of this collective entente. Personally, I spent several months in real and virtual libraries hunting for our incognito Rabelais. This investigation reaped its rewards; in a small Greek manual (oh good fortune!) the motto of Rabelais’ editor coat-of-arms appeared, a sign of his editorial supervision. We were thus able to establish a longer list of the books that ‘Master François’ had edited. This sheds new light on a period of his life and his activities. In the last fifteen years, a great number of significant discoveries have been made; on his library, his editorial activity, his work as a doctor, etc. The Rabelais we know today is a little less obscure than the one we thought we knew twenty years ago.
Is Rabelais still an accessible author for the students of today?
Rabelais is a rich but difficult author. The most difficult author of French literature, according to the late Michel Butor. Not just because of his ancient language; he was already relatively obscure for his contemporaries. But Rabelais’ language is above all a contrived language, full of linguistic inventions, neologisms and curious tricks, it’s a casket of secrets and devilishly elusive just about everywhere. A scholarly form of madness. Yet it is this same relative illegibility which is an opportunity for the reader. Proust said ‘Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language’. To read Rabelais is a literary experience ‘without paragon’, to quote the man himself
We’re currently working on a new translation of all Rabelais’ works into modern-day French. I manage a team whose work will be published by Bouquins. Translation is a frustrating task, because you are condemned never to attain the quality of the original version. It is, however, an essential task at present, in an era where the non-specialist reader is unable to read Pantagruel in their language. Translation must be seen as a tool enabling the work of Rabelais to endure. The aim, obviously, is to draw the reader to the original text, with the help of a useful (and amusing) crutch.
‘Attention to language is a way of life, of seeing the world’
Have you observed a decline in the level of language?
First and foremost, I don’t want to play the role of the laudator temporis acti, full of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ and deploring the decadence of our times. That attitude gets us nowhere. I see that my students are just as intelligent today as in the past. There is admittedly a certain culture of tradition which is disappearing, and increasingly faster, perhaps. But for me, that’s not the most important aspect, at least not directly. What is definitely declining, to various degrees, is the quality of written expression. We’re trying to remedy this at the University. The Letters team would really like to act on a problem which concerns all the training programmes. We’d like to participate in considerations which would enable students in all programmes to improve their writing. This is a project on the scale of society, however. It goes beyond the sphere of the university. Attention to language is not just a social imperative, the primary aim is not to distinguish oneself through language. Our leaders often see the problem from this angle, backed up by the Technolangue project. Attention to language is a way of life, of seeing the world. The richer and more accurate your language is, the less limited your life will be.
Nevertheless, you’ve put initiatives in place to help students in Letters.
That’s true. I’ve been head of the Degree in Letters for four years. My colleagues and I set up the ‘Oui, si’ training path in the first-language programme, with ParcourSup [French 3rd level education application process]. We were the first Letters programme in France to offer lower-level students adapted training in their first language, the aim being to help them to write, to speak, to express themselves, find their way and be aware of their weaknesses but above all their strengths. We restored a little Latin to the first year of all Letters degree programmes. The idea behind this is to set things straight, because it has to be said that secondary school offers only superficial training in ancient languages. Latin would appear to fare slightly better at high school level, for reasons we could consider as sociological; parents prefer to place their children in scientific rather than literary streams, but they advocate Latin, a vector of social distinction. So be it! Is that proof of humanism, in the Renaissance sense of the term? Not necessarily...!