François Villon is acknowledged as one of the greatest of all French poets. Since the nineteenth century, his “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” has become the basis for a sequence of English translations by a variety of writers and critics, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andrew Lang, Tom Scott and Robert Lowell, among many others. Yet, despite this intense literary attention, there remains something peculiar, enigmatic, about this poem, attested to by many major commentators: everybody enjoys it, is even captivated by it, but nobody wants to know anything more about it. This state of affairs is all the more surprising given that the Testament as a whole has proven rich fodder for philological investigations. This article examines this state-of-affairs as exemplary of a kind of state-of-emergency for translation. It argues that the reception history of “unknowing enjoyment” fostered by the poem is already inscribed in – “preprogrammed” by? – the structure of the poem itself, and that a careful interpretation of the poem’s deployment of proper names is able to articulate something essential about the relations of enjoyment, not-knowing, language and death that are at the heart of the translation of poetry more generally.