With the steady rise of feminist scholarship and criticism in recent decades, it is little wonder that the work of Louise Lab\u00e9 should be attracting, as Richard Sieburth tells us in the Afterword to his translation, a \u201cwide and thriving\u201d quantity and degree of attention. What is also unsurprising\u2014and slightly depressing\u2014is the rather gossipy nature of the comment and controversy surrounding Lab\u00e9\u2019s work, both past and present. Her contemporaries, we are told, spread rumours that she was a courtesan, albeit one with discerning taste in her clientele. In recent years, one Renaissance scholar has claimed that Lab\u00e9\u2019s poetry was actually written by a group of men, and that Lab\u00e9 herself never even existed. The life of a female writer, it seems, comes with some interesting occupational hazards.<\/p>\n
Regardless of what she was or wasn\u2019t, Lab\u00e9 herself is proudly conscious of her femininity in her work, and Love Sonnets & Elegies<\/em> offers some rewarding insights into a pioneering female mind. In her dedicatory epistle to Cl\u00e9mence de Bourges, Lab\u00e9 expresses her desire to see women \u201csurpass or equal men not only in beauty but in learning & worthiness,\u201d and her poetry contains nods toward a community of presumably like-minded women, whom she addresses with a charming spirit of familiarity in \u201cSonnet 24\u201d (\u201cDon\u2019t reproach me, ladies, for having loved\u201d) and in \u201cElegy I,\u201d in which she pleads, \u201cJoin in my sorrows, \/ Ladies, when you read of my regrets. \/ Some day, I may do the same for you.\u201d Such disarming intimacy is hard to resist.<\/p>\n Writing in the sixteenth century, it is inevitable that Petrarchan tropes find their way into Lab\u00e9\u2019s work from time to time. Love dominates all of her poetry, and her verse is least inspiring when it is littered with such clich\u00e9s as \u201cI live, I die: I flare up, & I drown \/ The colder I feel the hotter I burn\u201d (\u201cSonnet 8\u201d). Yet there is something undeniably refreshing in hearing a female voice engaging in the sort of poetic objectification usually dominated by Renaissance male writers, and Lab\u00e9 seems to positively relish beating them at their own game: \u201cSonnet 21\u201d finds her wondering aloud, \u201cWhat height places a man beyond compare? \/ What size? What shade of hair? What color of skin?\u201d; elsewhere she coos to her lover in \u201cSonnet 11,\u201d \u201cHow sweet your glances, how lovely your eyes \/ Small gardens blooming with amorous flowers.\u201d Whenever she isn\u2019t carefully evaluating her lover piece by piece in the best blason tradition, she is occupied with calling him out for the sort of perfidious behaviour usually decried as the preserve of sly females, as when she berates him in \u201cSonnet 23,\u201d \u201cWhere are those tears once shed & now no more? \/ Or that Death on which you solemnly swore \/ You would love me for the rest of your life?\u201d It is not often that we hear a female answering back in early modern verse, and it makes for enjoyable reading.<\/p>\n Yet happily for the modern reader, Lab\u00e9 is not a mere Renaissance novelty, for her work frequently rises above the literary constraints and conventions of her era to provide lines of genuine pathos and wit that translate well across the centuries. Her endings can be particularly strong, as when the close of \u201cSonnet 5\u201d finds her confessing that, \u201cwhen I\u2019m almost completely shattered \/ Lying in bed as if nothing mattered \/ My screams shall light up the entire night,\u201d or when \u201cSonnet 16\u201d finds her chiding her lover, \u201cYou\u2019ve doused your flame in some other sea, \/ Much colder than I ever claimed to be.\u201d If Lab\u00e9 really is a (literally) man-made fiction, she is certainly a very convincing one\u2014the voice in these verses is strong and distinctive, imbued with a warmth and charm that is consistently present.<\/p>\n Richard Sieburth\u2019s translations are elegantly concise and direct, giving Lab\u00e9\u2019s verses a supple feel in his English renderings. Any reader with a taste for Renaissance verse will find much to enjoy in this slim volume, and even a general reader may find it well worth his or her time to make the acquaintance of the lady of Lyon. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the steady rise of feminist scholarship and criticism in recent decades, it is little wonder that the work of Louise Lab\u00e9 should be attracting, as Richard Sieburth tells us in the Afterword to his translation, a \u201cwide and thriving\u201d quantity and degree of attention. What is also unsurprising\u2014and slightly depressing\u2014is the rather gossipy nature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[57116,3426,57106,57126,1796,39056],"class_list":["post-298706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-brandy-harrison","tag-french-literature","tag-louise-labe","tag-love-sonnets-elegies","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-richard-sieburth"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337496,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298706\/revisions\/337496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}