Love Sonnets & Elegies

by Louise Labé

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 121
Rating:

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.

I know very little about Louise Labé, but I was digging around in the National Poetry Library’s offerings for translated poetry, and dug up Love Sonnets & Elegies, a selection of… well, it’s in the title. The introduction gives a little bit of context about who Labé was (albeit I also went off and read Wikipedia and a few other pages to try to puzzle together a bit more).

The edition is bilingual, and in the ebook it’s all just continuous rather than a facing translation, which I found a bit annoying — it was harder to glance back and forth between the two, and since I can read French quite well, I did want to, while not being so good at French that I felt confident about reading French poetry easily…

I enjoyed Labé’s work quite a bit, in any case, especially when she slipped in references to Catullus. This stanza struck me from one of the poems:

How cruel a thing is fate, how inhumane!
Here I am, recovering from a scorpion’s bite,
Asking its venom to make me well again.

I found myself thinking for some reason, reading Labé’s poetry here, that she’d have done a wonderful voice for Vergil’s Dido.

All in all, a pretty good read. And I’d love a full-length biography of Labé, I think.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)