{"id":298716,"date":"2014-07-16T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/07\/16\/latest-review-love-sonnets-by-louise-labe\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:38","slug":"latest-review-love-sonnets-by-louise-labe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/07\/16\/latest-review-love-sonnets-by-louise-labe\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Love Sonnets & Elegies" by Louise Lab\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews<\/a> section is a piece by Brandy Harrison on Love Sonnets & Elegies<\/em> by Louise Lab\u00e9, translated by Richard Sieburth and published by New York Review Books.<\/p>\n

Brandy is a new contributor to our band of reviewers, and is currently finishing an Honors BA degree in English Language and Literature in St. Catharines, Ontario.<\/p>\n

Here’s the beginning of her review:<\/p>\n

\n

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<\/blockquote>\n

\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<\/blockquote>\n

For the rest of the review, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Brandy Harrison on Love Sonnets & Elegies by Louise Lab\u00e9, translated by Richard Sieburth and published by New York Review Books. Brandy is a new contributor to our band of reviewers, and is currently finishing an Honors BA degree in English Language and Literature […]<\/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":[67456],"tags":[1646],"class_list":["post-298716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298716","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=298716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309796,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298716\/revisions\/309796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}