Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose
A passionate and formally virtuosic translation of the complete work of France’s first feminist poet — and the first English translation to faithfully render Labé’s actual original rhyme schemes.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publisher Date: 2006
Pages: 296
Language: English and French
In their bilingual edition of Louise Labé’s prose and poetry, Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch offer scholars, students, and teachers an elegant, much-awaited, and long overdue critical translation of one of the most important women writers of the French sixteenth century.
Leah Chang, H-France Review
From The Publisher
Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé’s sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé’s elegies in their entirety.
Excerpt
Sonnet 18 [“Kiss Me Again”]
Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss
me again, with your richest, most succulent
kiss; then adore me with another kiss, meant
to steam out fourfold the very hottest hiss
from my love-hot coals. Do I hear you moaning? This
is my plan to soothe you: ten more kisses, sent
just for your pleasure. Then, both sweetly bent
on love, we’ll enter joy through doubleness,
and we’ll each have two loving lives to tend:
one in our single self, one in our friend.
I’ll tell you something honest now, my Love:
it’s very bad for me to live apart.
There’s no way I can have a happy heart
without some place outside myself to move.
Awards
Honorable Mention for Most Significant Book Published in the Field of Early Modern Womens Studies. Society for the study of Early Modern Women and Gender, 2006