Synopses & Reviews
Louise Labé was born between 1516 and 1522 in Lyon, France. Her father was a ropemaker and her mother died when she was an infant. It is thought that Labé may have been sent to the sisters of the convent of La Déserte for her primary and secondary schooling, where she would have learned the arts of needlecraft and music in addition to Latin and Italian. Legend has it that she excelled on horseback and jousted in tournaments dressed as a man. In her twenties, Labé married a ropemaker twenty years her elder. In her lifetime she gained a reputation as a scholar and, to her enemies, as a
femme sçavante, or courtesan. Her complete writings,
Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize, were published in 1555 and included a preface dedicated to Clémence de Bourges, three elegies, twenty-four sonnets, a prose work titled “The Debate Between Folly and Love,” and twenty-four homages to her addressed by various Lyonnese men of letters. After her death on Febuary 15, 1566, her legend continued to grow. Rilke famously published his German versions of Labé’s sonnets in 1917, and in his anthology of sixteenth-century verse, Léopold Senghor pronounced her “the greatest poetess ever born in France.” To this day the “Ami” of her love poems remains a mystery.
Richard Sieburth is a professor of French and comparative literature at New York University. He has translated works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, Michael Palmer (into French), Henri Michaux, Maurice Scève, Gershom Scholem, Georg Büchner, Guillevic, and, most recently, Nostradamus’s The Prophecies. He received a PEN/Book of the Month Translation Prize for his translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, and has also edited a number of Ezra Pound’s works, including A Walking Tour in Southern France, The Pisan Cantos, Poems & Translations, and New Selected Poems and Translations.
Karin Lessing is an American poet who has been living in Provence, France, since 1962. She was born in Görlitz, a town now split by the German–Polish border, and emigrated to the United States at an early age. Her Collected Poems was published in 2010.
Synopsis
Louise Labé is commonly regarded as the most original woman poet of the French Renaissance. The daughter of an illiterate rope maker in Lyon, known to her contemporaries for her unusual learning as well as her skills as a singer and lutanist, Labé was in her thirties when she published her complete Works in 1555 and then disappeared from the scene, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century. Her love poetry, made famous by Rilke’s German versions, is published here with the originals en face and newly rendered into English by award-winning translator Richard Sieburth, who also includes a biographical chronology of the poet, notes, and an informative afterword to this edition. These Love Sonnets and Elegies confirm Labé’s reputation as the first modern Sappho.
About the Author
Louise Labé (c. 1522–1566) was a member of the sixteenth-century Lyon school of humanist poets dominated by Maurice Scève. Her wit, charm, and accomplishments, and the freedom she enjoyed provoked unverifiable legends, such as those claiming she rode to war, took to dressing like a man, and was a cultured courtesan known as La Belle Cordière (the Beautiful Rope Maker). In addition to love sonnets and elegies, Labé’s works include a dedicatory letter advocating women’s education and writing, and a philosophical prose dialogue,
Débat de Folie et d’Amour (
The Debate Between Folly and Love).
Richard Sieburth’s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings and The Salt Smugglers, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s poetry. His translation of Maurice Scève’s Délie was a finalist for the PEN Poetry Translation Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Karin Lessing is an American poet who was born in Görlitz, a town now split by the German/Polish border, and emigrated to the United States at an early age. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently Collected Poems. Lessing has been living in the Lubéron area of Provence since 1962.