Love Sonnets and Elegies Read online

  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.

  Louise Labé

  Love Sonnets & Elegies

  EDITED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY RICHARD SIEBURTH

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation, chronology, notes, and afterword copyright © 2014 by Richard Sieburth

  Preface copyright © 1993 by Karin Lessing

  All rights reserved.

  The preface by Karin Lessing was first published in Sulfur 33 (Fall 1993), edited by Eliot Weinberger.

  Cover design by Emily Singer

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Labé, Louise, approximately 1526–1566.

  Love sonnets and elegies / Louise Labé ; translated by Richard Sieburth ; preface by Karin Lessing.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books poets)

  Selected text in French with English translation.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-731-0 (pbk.)

  1. Labé, Louise, approximately 1526–1566—Translations into English. I. Sieburth, Richard, translator. II. Labé, Louise, approximately 1526–1566. Poems. Selections. III. Labé, Louise, approximately 1526–1566. Poems. Selections. English. IV. Title.

  PQ1628.L2A29 2014

  841’.3—dc23

  2013048993

  ISBN 978-1-59017-748-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Contents

  Biographical Note

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Chronology

  Dedicatory Epistle

  SONNETS

  ELEGIES

  Notes

  Translator’s Afterword

  PREFACE

  Works by Louïze Labé,

  Lionnoize.

  “LIONNOIZE” IS WHAT SHE added to her name. Inseparable, Louise and Lyon. Who, today, would link his or her name to place, claim such intimacy? Stand and be remembered as Parisian, New Yorker, Berliner, Calcuttan? Inseparable and yet neither in her sonnets and elegies nor in her prose does she explicitly refer to anything we connect with the Lyon of today or of the past. Lyon, the ancient capital of Gaul where the Rhône and Saône rivers meet, where mists drape the tall melancholy houses until a beginning mistral disperses them and where each one of sixty thousand hand looms is producing twenty inches of silk per day…

  Silk. Looms and commerce. The great trade fairs have opened the doors between France and Italy: the Renaissance rushes in. Wealth and exchange: silk in exchange for books, books in silk covers?

  But Louise has nothing to do with silk, not directly. What pervades her childhood and most of her adult life is coarse, smelly, and altogether unsuitable for finery and ornament. Hemp is the fiber her father and, later, her husband used to make ropes, the ropes for managing sails and spars, for hauling the multitude of boats on both rivers. She owes much of her luck to all three: relative wealth to the fiber, its craft and trade and it, in turn, enabled the father to provide her with an education, the husband to offer her ease, comfort, and, most precious of all, much undisturbed leisure time. Which she uses. Which she enjoins others to use.

  Of how it was employed, Louise Labé offers some information herself. In the dedication of her book to Clémence de Bourges which is, at the same time, an introduction, she writes: “…but having spent part of my youth practising music and having found the rest too short for my mean understanding…” Modesty or irony. Both, for even in her lifetime, well before her works were published, and later, when they had all but been forgotten, she had earned a reputation as scholar, as “femme très docte.” Like Christine de Pizan before her, she devotes her time to learning, to the study and practice of music and languages, to the composition of verses in Latin and Italian in the manner of Petrarch, the poetic model of her time. (The immense popularity of Petrarch. Again, there is no equivalent today—while Louise is writing, another “Lionnais,” Maurice Scève, claims to have discovered Laura’s tomb in Avignon; the king himself composes an epitaph.) Petrarch and Boccaccio and Castiglione’s Courtier and all the classics known…Learning and pleasure in learning. That she also excelled on horseback and participated in tournaments, a girl of fifteen, sixteen perhaps, in male dress, jousting with others her age on the occasion of a royal visit or passage through town, we know from her own account in one of her elegies. An early surname, “Captaine Loys,” sprung from that.

  Singular but not exceptional. It’s the time and place that are. A brief period in the history of Western civilization in which the revived energies of the past provide a canon and code within which a woman, and a woman of mediocre social status like Louise Labé, can desire and hope, with some confidence, to deploy her talent and gain full possession of her self; a place, Lyon, wide open to the exchange of goods and ideas, with its own constellation of male and female poets, and where, from the year 1500 on, 156 print shops are turning out books by Plutarch, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Aretino, Alberti, Ariosto, Castiglione, Clément Marot, Rabelais, Maurice Scève, Pernette du Guillet, and, in 1555, Louise Labé.

  Time spent. In the sense of what actually happened. The unique experience, the essential encounter that demanded to be recalled, relived, and crystallized in writing and for which her sonnets especially would provide the formal solidity, the perfect sharply defined architecture.

  Does it matter who it was, the handsome youth on his way to fight the wars in Italy who turned her head at sixteen and whom she most likely never saw
again, or, later, the poet who was to rekindle the first passionate emotion? What does matter is “Amour,” the transforming experience of Love which alone could put her on equal footing with the poets of the past whom she admired most and with those of her own time who did or did not come to her house to enjoy her graceful and witty company, admire her garden, and try her exquisite “confitures.”

  Love, then, in its aspect of a formidable, fateful force, in its wrenching physical reality, with its means and effects, its pledges and discourse, its defense, irony, and conventions, is the stuff, fiber, and fabric of her elegies and sonnets. Love appears again in her only work in prose, “The Debate between Folly and Love,” but here much reduced in its claim to precedence. Not only does Love fail to convince Folly with words but also misses his shot and it is up to the gods, in a series of arguments and counter arguments which make up “The Debate,” to stop their quarrel by giving Love and Folly his and her due. In what is at once a story, a comedy and a satire, Love is miniaturized, Venus’s crybaby making a fuss in the Olympian playroom whom Folly puts into place by saying: “…my name is Folly. I am the one who makes you great and casts you down according to my pleasure.”

  Several years separate the poems from the prose and though Louise Labé was praised early for the quality of her prose, it’s the poetry and mainly the sonnets that were remembered.

  Meanwhile the legend grew. A crowd of fervent admirers and a host of enemies perpetuated it to whom she was, in turn, the “Belle Cordière” and “femme sçavante,” or the courtesan, a public scandal. What else could she be? Either idealized as the Renaissance beauty and witty, entertaining scholar, or lowered, just as Folly says, to an aberration by envy, malice, or, according to one of her contemporaries, because no better subject of conversation could prevent one from falling asleep while at the dinner table.

  We know that she was married but how she felt about her marriage to a man twenty years older than she remains her secret. She had no children and hardly ever traveled except to her house in the country where she died, practically alone and forgotten, some time during the year 1566. A year earlier she had made her will in which she provides for her nephews, for her servants, and for the poor, asking to be buried without “display or superstition, that is to say, at night, by the light of lanterns…”

  “Estant le tems venu, Madamoiselle…”

  Time employed. Time spent. And time regained.

  Pavan.

  “Now that the time has come, Mademoiselle, that the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences & disciplines…”

  “And if one of us attains the degree of being able to put her ideas into writing, to do so carefully & not to disdain fame, & to adorn herself with it rather than with chains, rings, and fancy dresses…”

  “But who can keep renown?” echoes her second elegy. Something else, indifferent to the flux of celebrity, is mirrored in her anagram: “Belle à Soy.” Beautiful to one’s self.

  Fame, honor, pleasure. Pleasure in learning, pleasure in conversation, pleasure in writing. How it is to be maintained, intensified. Most precious desire…

  “For the past gives us delight, & can be put to better use than the present; the pleasures from one’s feeling pass away & never return, & sometimes memory fails most where the actions have been most enjoyed.

  …But when we happen to put down our ideas in writing, no matter how busily our mind runs on afterwards & moves unceasingly, if after a great length of time we look at what we have written, we return to the same point and to the same disposition in which we were before. Then we are doubly content for we rediscover the pleasure we had in the past either in what we wrote about or with the present knowledge of those sciences to which we then applied ourselves. Moreover, the judgment our present ideas cast on the former gives us a singular contentment. These two gratifications that come from writing…”

  Stately, elaborately dressed. In the dance, the figure that comes forward to meet her steps out of the past. There is wonder in their gaze, a brief questioning, then recognition. The dancers draw apart.

  “…as for myself, I was looking for nothing else but an honest way to pass the time….

  And because women do not readily show themselves in public alone, I have chosen you as guide…”

  I have chosen you…for the past gives us delight.

  “…to incite you & to make you wish in seeing this work of mine, rough & poorly constructed, to bring into the light another that is better polished & of a superior grace. God keep you in good health. Lyon, 24 July, 1555. Your humble friend, Louize Labé.”

  If Clémence de Bourges, who was still very young when Louise Labé dedicated the book to her, had wanted and been able to take on the challenge, she did not have time, for she died seven years later.

  —Karin Lessing

  Chronology

  LOYSE LABE, the Lyonnese courtesan (also known as “La Belle Cordière” on account of her marriage to a fellow who was a ropemaker by trade), was an excellent horseback rider, which led gentlemen of her acquaintance to dub her “Captaine Loys,” though she was of course a woman—high in spirits, if plain in appearance. At her home, she would graciously receive lords, gentlemen, and other persons of quality, entertaining them with conversation, with music both vocal and instrumental (in which she was well-skilled), with the reading of the copious selection of excellent books in Latin, vulgar Italian, and Spanish that she kept in her chambers, with the tasting of exquisite jams, and she would in the end then privately communicate to them the most secret of her treasures, in a word, share her body with those who would pay. This she would not do with just anybody, and especially not with any low-born mechanicals or tradesmen, whatever the sum they might have wanted to offer her. She was above all fond of men of learning, and favored them in such a fashion that they made up the majority of those to whom she accorded her intimacies. She preferred them to any great lord; indeed, she would have rather provided her favors to the former free of cost than accept a fistful of gold from the latter—which flies in the face of the practices of the ladies of her profession.

  —From The Library of Antoine du Verdier, Containing the Catalogue of all those who have written or translated in French, and in other Dialects of the Realm, including their published and unpublished works (Lyon, 1585)

  1493?

  Pierre Charly, an illiterate apprentice ropemaker, marries the widow of Jacques Humbert, a prosperous manufacturer of hemp cordage who went by the business name of “Labé.”

  1514?

  Death of Charly’s first wife Guillemette. Retaining the commercial brand name “Labé” from his first marriage, he acquires a ropemaking workshop and a three-story house with a large garden on the rue de l’Arbre-sec in Lyon.

  1515?

  Charly remarries Etiennette Roybet, from whom he inherits various further properties in Lyon. This second marriage will produce five children.

  1516– 22?

  Birth of Louise Labé (henceforth “L.L.”) in Lyon.

  1523?

  Death of L.L.’s mother Etiennette.

  1527?

  Charly, now over sixty, remarries Antoinette Taillard, the daughter of a master butcher—a further rise in social and financial standing. They will have two children together. It is surmised that L.L. 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—talents which allowed her to subsequently gain access to the more educated circles of Lyon (Jean de Vauzelle, a relative of the powerful Scève family, was the school’s chaplain).

  1533

  Marsilio Ficino’s Plato published in Lyon. The young poet Maurice Scève claims to have discovered the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura in Avignon.

  1534

  Clément Marot publishes his Ovidian elegies in the second volume of his Adolescence clémentine.

  1538

&nbs
p; Publication in French of Castiglione’s Il cortegiano in Lyon. Appearance in Parma of the Rime of Vittoria Colonna, Italy’s bestselling woman poet of the century.

  1539

  Marot publishes among the first self-proclaimed sonnets in French, translated from Petrarch.

  1542

  According to legend, L.L. may have taken part in the royal reenactment of the siege of Perpignan under the name of “Capitaine Loys,” presumably having learned the arts of swordsmanship and horseback riding from her half-brother François.

  1544

  Publication of Maurice Scève’s Délie in Lyon—the first illustrated canzoniere in French.

  1543– 45?

  L.L., in her twenties, marries Ennemond Perrin, a ropemaker some twenty years her senior who lives at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-de-Confort and the rue Belle-Cordière—which may have provided L.L.’s subsequent nickname, “La Belle Cordière” (The Fair Roper).

  1545

  Posthumous publication in Lyon by Jean de Tournes of the Rymes of Pernette du Guillet, believed to have been the muse of Scève’s Délie. Tournes also publishes (in Italian) Il Petrarcha, dedicated to Scève.

  1546

  Publication of the French translation of Ficino’s De amore.

  1547

  Marguerite de Navarre, King Francis I’s sister, publishes her devotional poems (Les Marguerites) in Lyon with Tournes. Tullia d’Aragone’s Rime appears in Venice. First published mention of “La Cordière de Lyon” in a work by the magistrate Philibert de Vienne (also printed by Tournes), who backhandedly praises her as an “honorable courtesan” in the Italian mold who (unlike the stingy Laïs of Greek legend) is notable for the liberality of her favors.