Love Sonnets and Elegies

by Louise Labe

  Sonnet XVIII

  Kiss me, rekiss me: An improvisation on Catullus’s celebrated “Carmina V” addressed to Lesbia (“da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum”), memorably translated into English by Ben Jonson and Richard Crashaw. The fourteen kisses offered by the poet to her lover here parallel the number of lines in her sonnet.

  Then a double life to each shall ensue: Cf. Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love: “We call Love a desire to take joy in union, or truly a desire to be converted and transmuted by union with the beloved” (my translation).

  Love, something crazy comes to mind: The French word folie in this line no doubt echoes the prose “Debate between Folly and Love” that precedes Labé’s elegies and sonnets in her 1555 Works.

  I can’t bear living on my best behavior: For the French adverb discrettement, I follow Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, which gives it as “discreetly, advisedly; prudently; providently, heedfully, circumspectly.”

  Unless aroused to leave myself behind: As Rigolot has observed, the term saillie has definite sexual connotations in the Renaissance. Cotgrave provides “A sallie, eruption, violent issue, or breaking out upon; also, a leap, sault, bound…any disordinate excesse, or excessive out-standing.” As a verb, saillir includes: “to leape one another, as the male doth the female.”

  Sonnet XIX

  Diana, retired in the depth of the woods: The story of Diana surprised by Actaeon enjoyed an extraordinary popularity during the Renaissance. Labé’s rewriting of it here from a woman’s perspective—without the voyeuristic glimpse at the virgin goddess—has been compared to those of Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth and of Aphra Behn.

  Sonnet XXI

  What size? What shade of hair?: Another playful subversion of the male blason tradition.

  Sonnet XXII

  In Endymion’s embrace: The goddess Luna, smitten by the young handsome shepherd Endymion, visited his cave during the dark phase of the lunar month.

  Sonnet XXIV

  Don’t reproach me, Ladies: Addressed to that same sisterhood of “Dames Lionnoises” (“Ladies of Lyon”) as are Labé’s elegies.

  No need to blame Vulcan: I.e., no need to excuse yourself because, like Venus, you are fleeing a husband as ugly as Vulcan; and no need to justify your passion for the Adonis-like beauty of your lover. Love will always follow Folly.

  Of his power to harm & self-estrange: The adjective estrange here points to the power of Love to dispossess its victims of their identities, to “alineate” them, to render them “mad.” See also line 89 of Labé’s first elegy.

  ELEGIES

  Clément Marot, the premier poet of early sixteenth-century France (and first modern editor of the works of François Villon), introduced the elegiac couplets of Ovid into French poetry, casting them into decasyllables arrayed in rhymed distichs (rimes plates). Behind Labé’s Marotic elegies also stand Ovid’s widely-translated Heroides, which are composed of a series of fifteen verse epistles written in the personae of various legendary or mythological heroines of antiquity who address themselves to their lost or absent lovers. In Labé’s case, the object of her address is at once herself, her wayward “Ami,” and that community of “Ladies of Lyon” whose sympathy and education in matters of Love she seeks to encourage by her own example. Probably composed after her sonnets but placed before them in the original 1555 edition of Labé’s Works, these three dramatic monologues establish the autobiographically “Sapphic” voice—however fictive, however derivative of previous literary sources—that will sing the sonnet cycle that follows.

  Elegy I

  Phoebus Apollo, lover of laurels: Petrarch often refers to Laura as his laurel—emblem of poetry, and loss. The story of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne and of her transformation into a laurel tree is told in Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  To sing, not of Jupiter’s / Thunderbolts, nor of those cruel wars: The poet here rejects scientific verse and epic in favor of lyric poetry.

  The lyre that used to sing / Of Lesbian Love: Alludes to the poet Sappho of Lesbos. In the fifteenth epistle of Ovid’s Heroides, she laments the fact that, having loved many women in the past, she has now been forsaken by her faithless (and much younger) male lover, Phaon, and is contemplating suicide. Of the surviving fragments of Sappho, Labé was probably most familiar with “Ode to a Loved One,” cited and commented upon by Longinus in his treatise On the Sublime and adapted by Catullus in his “Carmina LXI.”

  Semiramis, that queen of renown: Legendary warrior queen of Asia Minor who, after the death of her husband Ninus, fell incestuously in love with her son Ninyas. Boccaccio praises her for her military valor, while Dante locates her among the souls of the licentious in the second circle of Hell.

  Thus Love has estranged you from yourself: See the end of Sonnet XXIV.

  I once saw a women who in her youth / Disdained Love: Cf. Ronsard’s later celebrated sonnet to Hélène: “Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle”—or in Yeats’s version: “When you are old and grey and full of sleep.” Echoes of Villon’s “Les regrets de la belle Heaulmière” may also be heard here.

  Elegy II

  The Hornèd Po: Refers to the delta and sinuous course of the Italian river Po, often allegorically represented as a horned god. Biographical readings of the poem here see an allusion to the Italian travels of Labé’s supposed lover, the poet Olivier de Magny (though he did not travel to Italy until February 1555, presumably well after the composition of this elegy).

  Phoebe has closed / Her horns: I.e., it’s now been two full moons since the promised date of your return.

  Could scarcely match that celebrity of name: Ovid’s Sappho similarly boasts of her poetic renown: “Already my fame throughout the universe / Sounds louder than my fellow countryman Alcaeus’, though his style is nobler than Mine; and if grudging nature did not grace / My form with beauty, talent took its place.” (Hine)

  The Pillars of Hercules: The Strait of Gibraltar, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.

  The only pleasure I now know is ennui: Cotgrave’s dictionary nicely seizes the semantic range of Renaissance ennui: “Annoy; vexation, trouble, disquiet, molestation; sorrow, griefe, anguish; wearisomenesse, tediousnesse, irkesomenesse; importunitie; a loathing, or satietie, of; a discontentment, or offence, at.”

  & circle my tomb one last time: The agony of love leading to a fantasy of death and entombment is a prominent feature of Propertius’s elegies.

  Elegy III

  The foolish errors of my youth: A standard topos, already present in Villon (“au temps de ma jeunesse folle”) and further canonized by the first sonnet in Petrarch’s Rime, where he speaks of his “giovenile errore.”

  Arachne: The story of Arachne, the mortal weaver who boasted that her skill was greater than that of Athena, is told by Ovid in Book VI of the Metamorphoses. As punishment for her hubris, the goddess transformed her into a spider.

  You’d have taken me for Bradamante…the great Marphise: Female warrior figure in Ariosto’s popular epic, Orlando furioso. This passage may have inspired the legend of Labé’s military valor and equestrian prowess. Behind this image of the “virile” young woman poet-warrior (or courtesan) lies Horace’s reference in one of his Epistles to “mascula Sappho” (“manly Sappho”).

  Oenone: Oenone laments her abandonment by Paris for Helen of Troy in the fifth epistle of Ovid’s Heroides.

  Jason: Having promised to marry the sorceress Medea after she helped him obtain the Golden Fleece, Jason instead wed Creusa, daughter of King Creon of Thebes. The story is told in the sixth epistle of the Heroides.

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  Labyrinth

  EXIT LABÉ

  IN 2006, MIREILLE HUCHON, a respected authority on Renaissance literature at the Sorbonne, brought out a study that fell like a bombshell on the French literary scene. Entitled Louise Labé: Une créature de papier and issued by Droz, the stai
dest of academic publishers, the book argued that Labé, one of most revered writers of the sixteenth century, had in fact never existed—except on paper. Putting her considerable detective skills to use, Huchon meticulously combed through the philological evidence at hand and reached the conclusion that the 1555 Lyon edition of Labé’s Euvres (Works) was an elaborate hoax concocted by the well-known poet Maurice Scève and his longtime friend, the publisher Jean de Tournes, aided and abetted by two dozen or so local literati eager to lend their reputations to the collaborative invention and celebration of a purely imaginary poetess dubbed “Louïze Labé Lionnoize.” The press had a field day with Huchon’s book: Libération published a review under the rather snarky title “Louise Labé, femme trompeuse,” while Le Monde commissioned Académie Française heavyweight Marc Fumaroli to write a piece about “Louise Labé, une géniale imposture.” Finding Huchon’s thesis “irrefutable,” he compared her work to Frédéric Deloffre’s reattribution, back in the sixties, of the authorship of the seventeenth-century bestseller Les lettres portugaises—long thought to be the work of the Portuguese nun Mariana Alcoforado—to the Count of Guilleragues. By the end of his review, Fumaroli positively crowed as he delivered the knock-out punch: “Exit Louise Labé.” France’s major woman poet of the Renaissance had been asked to leave the stage—and this, just a year after her works had been declared required reading for the national agrégation exam in literature.

  After the dust raised by the “Exit Labé” controversy had settled, it took some time for the international scholarly community to carefully sift through the arguments presented by Huchon: the debate, too technical to be rehearsed in detail here, can be accessed in the dossier devoted to Labé at Siefar.org (Société Internationale pour l’Etude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime). While many specialists praised her extraordinary erudition as a seiziémiste, few were in the end convinced that Huchon had decisively proved that the works of Labé—and in particular, her love sonnets and elegies—were the invention of a coterie of Lyonnese men of letters writing in drag under the tutelage of chief merry prankster Maurice Scève. True, Scève had carried off a literary hoax during his youth that involved the purported unearthing of the tomb of Laura near Avignon—thus confirming the patriotic legend that Petrarch’s muse was indeed the local French beauty Laure de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade, ancestor of the Divine Marquis. The story of Scève’s serendipitous find (which also involved his discovery and decipherment of a “lost” sonnet of Petrarch’s in Laura’s crypt) was told at length by Lyon publisher Jean de Tournes in his preface to his Italian edition of Petrarch’s works of 1545, dedicated to his esteemed friend “Mauritio Scaeva.” And here, according to Huchon, the plot thickens, for not only had Tournes issued Scève’s great canzoniere, the Délie, the previous year, consecrating him as the true French heir to Petrarch, but he was moreover the publisher of the posthumous poems of Scève’s own supposed Laura, the poet Pernette du Guillet (on whose authenticity Huchon also casts doubt) and, ten years later, of the Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize—yet another fictive Laura figure, invented (so Huchon claims) to suit the Lyonnese intellectual fashions of the day. As further evidence of male writers cross-dressing as women authors, Huchon cites a number of other books published in Lyon during this period whose signatures are spurious—among others, the popular Boccaccio-inspired romances by “Jeanne Flore” (in which Scève may also have had a hand), as well as the prose works of one “Dame Isabelle Sforce,” a translation of an Italian book written in disguise by a close literary associate of Scève’s, the Venice-based Ortensio Lando.

  Scève’s colleague Lando, it turns out, was also the author of a book of paradossi, published in Lyon around this same time, that lent further popularity to the art of “paradoxical encomium” already so brilliantly illustrated by Erasmus’s 1511 In Praise of Folly. Sometimes termed adoxography by scholars, this ancient rhetorical practice, much cultivated by humanists throughout the Continent and in England, is based on the (semi-satirical) laudation of persons, objects, or states that are in themselves unworthy of praise—such as poverty, drunkenness, ugliness, blindness, stupidity, folly, or, as the case may be, women (as borne out by the famous late medieval/early Renaissance “querelle des femmes”). Huchon persuasively demonstrates how this playful, paradoxical conversion of negatives into positives determines the logic of the fifty-page prose dialogue entitled “Débat de Folie et d’Amour” that opens Labé’s Works. Translated into English in 1584 by Robert Greene as Debate Between Follie and Love and later adapted by La Fontaine, it proved to be Labé’s most enduring text—until her poetry was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Sainte-Beuve. Inspired by Erasmus and by the cabbalist Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love (also published by Tournes in Pontus du Tyard’s gorgeous translation), this sprightly symposium among the gods of antiquity extols Folly as the driving (if dialectically reversible) force behind the blindness of Love—a thesis that closely connects this “Debate” to the lyric dialogism of Labé’s love sonnets and elegies. Given its numerous echoes of Landi’s Paradossi and other Italian and classical sources, however, Huchon summarily concludes that the text was almost certainly authored by Scève and/or his humanist sodality of friends, her tacit assumption seeming to be that a woman of Labé’s low social standing and level of education—the mere daughter of a ropemaker, after all—would have been incapable of single-handedly orchestrating a philosophical dialogue this nimbly erudite in all its various literary and philosophical allusions.

  Huchon also sees the same pleasure in paradox at work in the second of the longest sections of Labé’s Works, that is, the nearly fifty pages of encomia by divers hands that serve as its appendix or coda. Entitled “Escriz de divers Pöetes, à la louenge de Louïze Labé Lionnoize,” this collection of panegyrics consists of two dozen poems in a variety of forms (sonnets, odes, epistles, madrigals, rondeaux), written in all the major languages of Lyonnese humanism (French, Italian, neo-Latin, Greek) by the most prominent men of letters of the day: Tournes and Scève are here joined by some fifteen colleagues (or co-conspirators) who have been variously identified as Henri Estienne, Antoine du Moulin, Jacques Peletier, Pontus du Tyard, Claude de Tallemont, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Olivier de Magny, et al. Nearly all these homages perform virtuoso variations on the seminal pun “louer Louise” (praise Louise)—an ingenious transposition into French of the Petrarchan “laudare Laura” and an appropriate troubadour senhal (or secret name) with which to anoint the city’s newest female muse—Louïze Labé Lionnoize, a poet whose place of origin is emblazoned in her name (as in the signatures of Pierre de Ronsard le Vendômois, Joachim du Bellay l’Angevin, or Jacques Pelletier du Mans.) The civic pride so ostentatiously on display in this chorus of (self-)celebration no doubt derives from Renaissance Lyon’s desire to emulate and rival Italian culture in the literary field—not only its Petrarchs and its Bembos and Sperone Speronis, but, more particularly, its galaxy of splendid women lyric poets, ranging from the Roman aristocrat Vittoria Colonna to the “honest courtesans” Tulia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa (or, somewhat later, Veronica Franco). Although the existence and/or authenticity of these Italian women poets has, to my knowledge, never been seriously challenged by scholars, Huchon nonetheless insists that in the case of Louise Labé we are dealing with a very sophisticated imposture. Given the number of writers this fabrication obviously involved, why no word of it ever leaked out before Huchon herself uncovered it, she never quite explains.

  The smoking gun for her is the “paradoxical” nature of the praise heaped upon Labé by the authors of these encomia—paradoxical in that (being in on the joke) they obviously know she doesn’t really exist, and even more paradoxical in that (while feigning to extol her heavenly virtues as a woman and a poet) they in fact misogynistically denigrate her as a Lais-like courtesan, a warrior Semiramis, a castrating Medusa, or a bisexual Sappho. The true object of these male poets’ desire and praise, Huchon suggests, is instead none o
ther than Scève himself, the male muse responsible for commissioning their contributions to the volume and the master ventriloquist behind the voice of this new-fangled Lyonnese Laura. Observing that Scève had also officially stage-managed the entry of King Henri II and his Italian wife Catherine de’ Medici into Lyon in 1548, Huchon considers the fifty-page procession of panegyrics that brings up the rear of Labé’s Works to be another such municipal festival, except this time more on the order of those elaborate masquerades so popular in the city under the name of momeries—carnivalesque mummers parades performed by what in Renaissance England were called “guisers.”

  However extravagant this hypothesis of a huge practical joke has seemed to her critics, Huchon’s book nonetheless unwittingly opens up the possibility of a very productive “queer” rereading of Louise Labé’s work. As if to insist on the instability (or “lability”) of all identity and gender, the poets of the “Escriz” appropriate and circulate her proper name as a mobile signifier of desire, caught up in the displacements of translation. She is variously referred to (in Greek) as “Лοισισις Лαβαιας” or (in Latin) as “Aloysa Labaea” or (in Italian) as “dolce Luisa mia”—a poet/muse whose glory (or los, in old French) makes of her the fitting literary lioness of Lyon, an androgynous, multilingual city geographically and allegorically located at the erotic confluence of the (male) river Rhône and the (female) river Saône. Her labial penname “Labé” also gives rise to a number of plays on its Latin cognate baisium (kiss), no doubt in homage to the opening line of her most famous sonnet, inspired by Catullus:

  Baise m’encor, rebaise moy & baise

  (Decorously mirrored in my English version as: “Kiss, rekiss me, & kiss me again”—the sixteenth-century French transitive verb baiser not yet having acquired its modern raunchiness). Further improvising on the mutabilities made possible by the new Renaissance print culture of mobile type, several of her panegyrists similarly scramble her name into the anagram BELLE A SOY (beautiful unto it/him/her/self). In Scève’s brilliant respacing of her signature, she emerges as an onomastic enigma where “la LOY SE LABErynte” (the law labyrinthizes itself)—a deft allusion to Leone Ebreo’s definition of Love as that “subtle chaos” which impedes the “law” of reason from ever providing a safe exit from the “labyrinth” of Eros in which we all find ourselves lost.