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  The Clovisiade of Jean-Marie Gabriel Darrodes de Lillebonne  Background By the 1800s, zeal for Christian epics had burned up all its fuel: though long narrative poems were still quite popular (as seen, in English, in Southey, Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, etc.), the epic style was now outré .  Even by the 1700s, few were hits, besides Klopstock's Der Messias (1748-1773).  The quest to craft a Christian epic was quixotic in the 1800s: even more delusional was the hope that readers would pay for it. Yet such material considerations did not stop Jean-Marie-Gabriel d'Arodes de Lillebonne (1781-1838).  He wrote a few shorter poetic works—some Diverse Little Works (1805), and a book of Odes to the Emperor Napoleon (1806)—but his chief-work was the The Clovisiade, or, The Triumph of Christianity in France .  It was intended as a monumental work of 24 cantos, matching the Iliad or the Odyssey (though still short of Nonnos of Panopolis' 48-canto Dionysiaca );...

  Introduction Christ is risen!   I intended to post this closer to Pascha, originally on Great and Holy Saturday, but it is still fitting even now.  This poem is a loose translation, close to a paraphrase, of a passage from the Christiad , a Latin epic poem by Marco Girolamo Vida (1485-1566).  Here, he represents the descent of Christ into Hades to free the souls imprisoned there; Vida's description of Hell and Satan, throughout the Christiad , was a key influence on John Milton's descriptions in Paradise Lost .  My translation is written in a kind of four-foot blank verse, an unrhymed, loosely iambic tetrameter.  (True blank verse, as in Milton, is unrhymed iambic pentameter.)  It is not perfectly metrical, but I inclined more towards closeness to the original than to metrical perfection. There are a number of full English translations of Vida's epic; the 18th-century translations (John Cranwell, Edward Granan) are in heroic couplets; the 20th-centur...