Love Sonnets and Elegies

by Louise Labe

  Nomen Omen. Louïze Labé Lionnoize—yes, the name of une créature de papier (yet what writer, as Proust reminds us in his Against Sainte-Beuve, is not born of the page?). But, more specifically, the name for a particular errancy whereby the law (of genre, of gender) “labyrinthizes itself” within the immense maze of Renaissance intertextuality—and, for the briefest of moments, comes into its freedom in sixteenth-century Lyon, that ideal City of Ladies once imagined by Christine de Pizan.

  ENTER LABÉ

  The challenge to translate Labé’s verse arrived out of the blue, when New York Review Books editor Edwin Frank suggested it might make a meaningful pendant to my earlier English versions of Maurice Scève’s Délie, published in 2003 as Emblems of Desire. Given what I discovered of Scève in the process of translation and what I now think I understand of Labé, I remain convinced (pace Huchon) that these two poets are not one and the same. Nor do I think that her sonnets and elegies could have been collaboratively composed by the male members of Scève’s coterie. Compared to their productions, Labé’s poems are simply too good, too self-consistent, too singularly themselves, in a word, too different—a difference (to engage for a moment in what feminists call “strategic essentialism”) that has to do, among other things, with the fact that she writes and sings as a woman. And more particularly, she does this (to further historicize things) as a mid-sixteenth-century woman of Lyon who, given her modest background, lives and writes at the margins of Scève’s circle of (male-) privileged poets, humanists, and publishers. She may have been on literary terms with Scève’s sisters, Claudine and Jeanne, acknowledged (albeit minor) poets in their own right; she may have been aware of other women on the Lyonnese literary scene such as Claude Péronne, Anne Tullone, Jeanne Gaillarde, or the very learned Marguérite de Bourg. Judging from the internal evidence of her work, she was also most likely familiar with the Rymes of Pernette du Guillet, whose poetry was posthumously edited and published by Scève and Tournes. The cosmopolitan and progressive “climate of Lyon,” as the humanist Antoine du Moulin boasted in his preface to Pernette’s poems, was definitely hospitable (in contradistinction to that of Paris) to an emerging community of women writers. Labé accordingly addresses her closing elegy and closing sonnet to the “Ladies of Lyon,” and in a prefatory epistle dedicates her book as a whole to the young promising upper-class poetess, Clémence de Bourges “Lionnoize.”

  Labé signs her preface, “Your humble friend, Louïze Labé,” calling attention to her inferior social station. As the daughter of an illiterate ropemaker (however prosperous his marriages)—see the chronology included in this volume—Labé would have been something of an outsider in literary Lyon. In addition, given what was probably her arranged (and childless) marriage to another member of the ropemaking trade, she was reputed (under the moniker “La Belle Cordière”) to have been a women of easy virtue. Some feminist critics dispute this, arguing that it was only too predictable that, in a patriarchal society such as sixteenth-century France, a talented and therefore irregular woman writer of the lower orders should be dismissed (by the likes of John Calvin) as a common, and very likely cross-dressing, whore—shades of Colette. Other scholars have argued that she may have been the Lyonnese equivalent of those “honest courtesans” of Florence or Venice such as the poets Tulia d’Aragona or Gaspara Stampa—sing-song girls of the Renaissance, known for the sophistication of their intellectual hospitality, for the beauty of their voices, for their skills as lutenists, and who now and then accorded their favors to gentlemen, preferably of a literary bent, who might eventually husband their verses toward publication. In either reading, Labé emerges as an problematic figure of exchange.

  Administratively French, but economically driven by the Italian banking industry, Lyon was sixteenth-century France’s most vibrant center of commerce—and it is precisely this prospect of an open intercourse between men and women that animates Labé’s love poetry: “Those women deserved the love they earned, / And, loving, to have been loved in return.” By contrast, the economy of Scève’s Délie still remains closed within the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition: a paralyzed male subject solipsistically contemplating the disintegration of his personality in the mirror of the purely imaginary projection of his own desire—Delia, the Idea, the Idol, the Dark Lady, the Object of Highest Virtue—who for him is by definition always already lost (or dead), the better to fetishize her in his verse. Labé energizes, or some would claim subverts, these inherited conventions of male love poetry by instead insisting on the possibilities (however frustrated, however unrequited) of reciprocity, dialogue, and erotic communion—as in her famous baiser (or kiss) Sonnet XVIII:

  Lors double vie à chacun en suivra.

  Chacun en soy & son ami vivra.

  Then a double life to each shall ensue.

  Each shall live: you in me, & me in you.

  The philosophy of love informing these lines fuses the neo-Platonism of Marsilio Ficino with the cabbalism of Leone Ebreo, but the ease of Labé’s couplet (as I have freely recast its symmetry into English to catch her in the act of rhyme) is a measure of how far French poetry had evolved toward the vernacular ever since the king decreed in his Villers-Cotterêts edict of 1539 that all legal documents be henceforth recorded in the common tongue. Ten years later Joachim du Bellay followed suit, calling for a more naïf—that is, more “native”—literary language in his manifesto Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue. Notwithstanding this, du Bellay, Ronsard, and the other emerging poets of La Pléiade continued to parade their inherited cultural capital with poetic compositions in neo-Latin and Italian—as did the Lyonnese poets of the School of Scève. Labé’s first sonnet, written in a crabbed “Tuscan,” pays due (and perhaps ironic) homage to this Petrarchan humanist tradition, but the rest of the sequence is sung/spoken in a tongue more freshly vernacular (i.e., de-latinized) than anything du Bellay or Ronsard were yet able to master.

  Ronsard, still fighting his Pindaric tendency toward (self-)inflation, is only beginning to discover how to write in the haut stil bas (high low style) around the same time that Labé’s sonnets and elegies appear in 1555. It will take du Bellay another few years before he, too, de-Petrarchizes himself (as he puts in his famous poem “Contre les Pétraquistes”) in order to achieve a more uncluttered mode of utterance. As for Scève, his poetry was always in a class by itself—dense, hermetic, and radically silent in the manner of Mallarmé: the voice of Nobody, the voice of Language. This is definitely not the tongue of Labé. As a (marginal) woman, she works in the vernacular of Villon, or, more specifically, in that of his first modern editor, Clément Marot—whom the young classicist and modernizer du Bellay dismissed in his Defense and Illustration as a mere “rhymester” whose “common manner of speech” and “lack of erudition in the Ancients” seemed a throwback to the Middle Ages.

  Guided by Zukofsky’s credo that poetics is a function having as its lower limit speech and upper limit music, I wanted to make Labé heard in English as a vocalist whose diction is free from belabored classical (or Christian) allusion, and whose register is as clear as the “direct speech” that Pound discerned in H.D. (and behind her, Sappho):

  And when I’m almost completely shattered,

  Lying in bed as if nothing mattered,

  My screams shall light up the entire night.

  (Sonnet V)

  At times she can sound almost Shakespearean in her casual command of epigram:

  C’est à moy seule à qui ce bien est dù,

  Pour tant de pleurs & tant de tems perdu

  This special reward should only be mine,

  For such expense of tears & waste of time

  (Sonnet VI)

  Addressing her inconstant lover, the talk is straight, the undertone bitter:

  But promise, Friend, that when we meet again,

  Love shall no longer prove to be our bane:

  Let the encounter be not hard on me,

  Treat me kindly: be ever so gentle,<
br />
  Remind me again of all your beauty,

  Once so cruel to me, now so simple.

  (Sonnet VII)

  In another sestet (also introduced by a couplet, according to the rhyme scheme of the French sonnet established by Marot in 1539), she caustically reproaches him for his insincere protestations of courtly love:

  Or was it all a cruel ruse on your part

  To pretend to serve me, enslaving my heart?

  Forgive me, Love, if I speak so free,

  For I’m beside myself with rage & grief:

  But I’d like to think, wherever you might be,

  You’re every bit as miserable as me.

  (Sonnet XXIII)

  As the two sestets above suggest, Labé has a very quirky feel for the strophic divisions that the sonnet form inherits from the canzoni of the troubadours and the early Italian poets—an eight-line octave (of two quatrains), followed by a sestet (of two tercets), with the art of the sonneteer consisting in establishing the ligatures that keep these various formal units at once together and apart, at once separate and spliced. While Labé’s opening octaves sometimes come off as static parodies of Petrarchan convention—their quatrains formally balanced in tone and trope and theme and envelope rhyme—the more balletic pace of her sestets is, to my ear (and eye), entirely sui generis. She swivels free at the volta that occurs in the ninth line, which is rhymed as a couplet and often followed by a colon. The syntax is then enjambed to create the brief leap of a synapse across the two tercets (with sometimes another colon thrown in just to put a further flutter in her step). The rhythm she thus achieves can be slightly hectic in its emotional intensity, yet she always alights solidly on her feet. None of her contemporaries, male or female, dances quite this way—or to this kind of music.

  In a celebrated sonnet addressed to her lute (“my companion in calamity”), Labé implores her poetic instrument to engage in a bit of music ficta, that is (in the musicological terms of the day) to “feign” the mathematical interval between tones and semitones. Why, O lute, she asks, can you not at least pretend to be happy (in the major mode), despite all the laments (in the minor) that I have made you so adept at performing? The lute refuses her request—and both poet and instrument become “unstrung” at the sonnet’s turn:

  And if I want you to sing a different tune,

  You come unstrung and strike me dumb:

  But seeing all the tender sighs I expend,

  You favor me in my sad complaint:

  To pleasure in pain am I thus constrained,

  Hoping a grief this sweet might sweetly end.

  (Sonnet XII)

  Though this poem very closely echoes one of his dizains addressed to a lute, this is no longer Scève—especially in its idiosyncratic punctuation of the sonnet form (for which he never particularly cared). Nor is it yet du Bellay or Ronsard, who around this same time are beginning to move the mainline tradition of the French sonnet out of its tight decasyllabics into the roomier (and more discursive) measures of the twelve-syllable alexandrine.

  Nor is it Olivier de Magny—another of Huchon’s contenders for the authorship of Labé’s sonnets, and furthermore reputed by literary lore to have been her lover and muse. Magny is responsible for three of the encomia in her honor (discussed above) appended to Labé’s Works, one of which is indistinguishable from a poem published by Baïf the same year, and another of which is an ode originally addressed by him to another male poet—how queer can it get? The argument for Magny’s authorship rests on the discovery made by nineteenth-century scholars that the octave of the second sonnet in Labé’s sequence is identical word-for-word to the octave of a sonnet he included two years later in his own book of poems, Soupirs, although with a different sestet. Given the collaborative circulation of textual capital in Lyon, this is what probably happened, according to Labé scholar François Rigolot: the two wrote the first part of the poem together, perhaps as a game or contest in the idiom of the Barthesian “lover’s discourse” of the day; then, in the sestet, they went their two separate ways.

  Here, in English, are the identical quatrains that open both sonnets:

  O fair brown eyes, O averted gaze,

  O fervent sighs, O tears unabated,

  O black nights, so vainly awaited,

  O bright dawns, all returning in vain:

  O obstinate desires, O sad laments,

  O wasted time, O labor of regrets,

  A thousand deaths snared in a thousand nets,

  O disasters visited on my intents.

  Who is the speaker here who complains, in a paratactic series of apostrophes (addressed to whom or what?), of the wretched symptoms of love—sighs, tears, sleepless nights, horniness, errancy, despair? A man? A woman? Everything is left in suspension.

  Magny’s tercets just keep the motor running, gunning the tropes toward their predictable close: “O stuttering steps, O flames that burn too warm O sweet errors, O thoughts of my soul That, day and night, whirl me back and forth, // O you my eyes, no, not eyes but fountains, O gods, O heavens, O humankind, For the sake of God, be witness to my love.” This is the rhetorical machinery of a minor courtier poet in the Petrarchan tradition. Labé’s sestet instead swerves in an entirely different direction:

  O laughter, brow, hair, arm, hand & finger:

  she begins, shifting gears, adding (in a playful pastiche of the male tradition of the blason du corps féminin) a list of the fetishized details of the lover’s body, which is abruptly brought to a close by a colon, leading into another apostrophe:

  O plaintive lute, viol, bow & singer:

  —which identifies the object of address as a poet-musician whose gender becomes apparent only in the following line, when we discover how his artful expressions of love have inflamed the speaker of the poem we now are reading:

  Enough heat to set a mere girl on fire!

  The French here runs “Tant de flambeaus pour ardre une femmelle!”—with the term “a female” implying (I am told) a slightly condescending sneer. Labé semi-sarcastically embraces her own objectification as a female (or “mere girl”) only to turn the tables on her lover as she dives into the final tercet. Now explicitly assuming the first-person voice of a woman, she rebukes her smooth-talking inamorato for having merely playacted at passion, while implicitly criticizing herself for having been so gullible as to fall for his performance. Her generous—and unconditional—gift of herself has only elicited a male fear of commitment in return:

  I despair of you: though you’ve torched my heart,

  Your flames licking at its most hidden parts,

  Not a spark of this has seared your desire.

  Taken together, these two sonnets, with their shared octave and radically divergent sestets, published under the dual names of Louise Labé (1555) and Olivier de Magny (1557), provide the perfect palimpsest of an androgynous poem.

  The figure of the androgyne also traverses Labé’s three elegies. These poems precede her sonnets in the original table of contents of her Works, though most scholars agree they were probably written in their wake. More relaxed in style, more conversational in their mode of address, these elegies initially served to introduce the sonnet cycle that her audience of 1555 (and in particular the “Ladies of Lyon”) would subsequently read, while providing a loose history of how their mournful speaker came to love and write. Speaking of herself with what seems an unusual autobiographical precision, Labé in her third elegy notes the first time she fell head over heels in love:

  I hadn’t seen sixteen Winters pass

  When I found myself in this awful plight:

  And here it is, the thirteenth Summer

  Since Love stunned me to the core.

  She is therefore a poet who is now writing in her late twenties (which, at the time, was rather brave to admit). Is this just an effet de réel, a bogus real-life detail merely meant to heighten the illusion that we are here in the presence of an actual older woman in the process of reminiscing? Perhaps, but Labé’s
memory of herself (in the present tense) as a teenager maddened by Love is not something one makes up:

  Sunshine or shade, I no longer care:

  Deep inside, all I feel is Love & fire,

  And go about disguised, a stranger,

  A figure I barely recognize.

  The carefully crafted self-portrait that emerges from these elegies has provided much fodder for the legend of Labé—and particularly for the image she projects of herself as an androgyne. In the same elegy, she informs her sister Ladies of Lyon that in her youth, not simply content to master the (female) art of needlecraft, she also became an expert rider and a champion in the (male) art of tournaments:

  You should have seen me in the lists,

  Jousting away, with my lance held high,

  Dutifully unhorsing all who rode by,

  Spurring on & wheeling my glorious steed.

  She goes on to compare herself to the famous military heroines of Ariosto’s popular epic, Orlando furioso:

  You’d have taken me for Bradamante,

  Or Roger’s sister, the great Marphise.

  Passages such as these may have inspired the anecdote that Louise Labé was also nicknamed “Captaine Loys” by her male acquaintances, in honor of her prowess in the martial arts of war: in this same elegy she paints her younger self as “besotted with Mars & books.” The very year that her Works appeared, a contemporary survey of the women writers of Lyon (by Billon) said of La Belle Cordière “that she could almost be called a man,” not only because of her Cleopatra-like (male) “licentiousness” but, more importantly, because of her “dexterity” in the “virile exercises” of Arms and Letters.