Love Sonnets and Elegies
Page 9
But as this third elegy continues, her carefree tomboy existence is suddenly threatened when Love unexpectedly takes aim at her heart. This Love is not the cute little Cupid of Renaissance iconography, but a frightening god of war who defeats everybody on the field of battle with his all-powerful Dart of Desire. As it penetrates her (sham male) armor, the arrow, in a violent act of rape, reduces her to a helpless, womanly thing:
The breach once made, Love drives in
And, first thing, deprives me of rest:
At my wit’s end, knowing no redress,
He won’t let me eat or drink or sleep.
The tale of the warrior queen Semiramis, recounted in the first elegy, rehearses the same scenario. Having gloriously led her troops in combat (dressed as a man), the Queen of Babylon, struck down by Eros, develops an incestuous passion for her own son. Sick with desire, she is forced to abandon the field of Mars and is reduced to languishing passively on her couch—her “aigreurs Martiales” feminized into “douceurs geniales.” Labé addresses her thus:
You’ve put hot-tempered Mars to rest
To lapse into sweet voluptuousness.
Thus Love has estranged you from yourself,
As if changed into someone else.
But the most complex figure in this drama of female devirilization is the poet Sappho, whose lyre of Lesbos Labé proudly appropriates as her own at the outset of her first elegy. The most notable woman poet of antiquity—indeed, sometimes known as the “tenth Muse”—Sappho famously loved young girls, owing to what Horace later identified as her “masculine” (mascula) penchants. But Eros (again) will set things straight: as if to punish her for the transgressions of her youth, he causes her to fall disastrously in love with the young ferryman Phaon—who displays no ardor in return. Driven to wit’s end by her unrequited passion, Sappho eventually kills herself by throwing herself off the Leucadian cliffs. The audiences of Roman low comedy apparently thought the whole situation quite hilarious: a once-proud lesbian now humbled into a hapless female heterosexual.
The story of Sappho and Phaon is told in Ovid’s Heroides (Heroines), one of the most popular and widely translated books of the Renaissance. A series of fifteen fictional letters written by various mythological or legendary women of antiquity to their lost or absent lovers, Sappho’s amatory epistle to Phaon stands out as the only one penned by an actual historical personage—and poet. In her second elegy, written to her errant (and never-named) “Ami” abroad in Italy, and from whom she is desperately awaiting news, Labé not only also adopts the persona of Ovid’s jilted Sappho, but also masters Ovid’s fluid command of the possibilities offered by extended (female) dramatic monologue—the voice of the speaker, as she addresses her lover from afar, ranging from regret to hope, from grief to gaiety, from lamentation to imprecation, lucidly self-aware, yet blindly self-destructive.
The Sappho of Ovid’s Heroides speaks in an elegiac meter whose Latin distichs observe the two-step gait of a hexameter alternating with a pentameter line—hence the ancient allegorical representation of Elegy as a beautiful young woman with one foot longer than another. In 1533, Marot would transform this meter into French as a rhymed decasyllabic and equal-footed couplet, while trying to retain some of its off-kilter (male/female) Latin grace. This is the couplet form that Labé inherits in her elegies, stately in its forward motion, yet available to subtle side steps in tone. Rather than systematically try to reproduce her couplets throughout—monotonous to the contemporary ear—I have instead preferred to slip in and out of their rhyme in an English tetrameter line that carefully observes her idiosyncratic placement of colons—perhaps the work of Tournes’ brilliant in-house editor, Jacques Peletier du Mans.
While Marot’s elegies and epistles—du Bellay was right in this respect—remain caught up in the fading medieval tradition of courtly love, Labé instead hearkens back to the earlier, and far more psychologically complex, corpus of Roman elegy: Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid. Historians of the genre observe that with the shift from the manly virtues of Republican Rome to the more sophisticated sensibilities of the Augustan era, there is a concomitant mutation in its literature from the figure of the miles, or virile soldier, into the amator, or emotive lover. The earlier military valor of the warrior is now interiorized in Augustan elegy, for it is against the god of Love—and hence against himself—that the amator must now do battle. But, in the process, the amator also becomes feminized, his body subject to sighs, tears, and ungovernable fits of passion and jealousy, prey to that sickness or furor which now reduces him into a condition no longer recognizably male, haunted as it is by the elegiac awareness of something always lost, always missing. In her elegies, Labé follows this Roman tradition by casting herself as a man whom Love has henceforth “estranged” into a female figure of furor or Folly. But even as she engages in this act of self-mourning, even as she willingly embraces her state of loss and lack (defined by Leone Ebreo, well before Lacan, as il mancamento), she by the same token allows herself to move into a maze of desire—and music—where the laws of gender no longer apply. Louise Labé, Labyrinth.
A NOTE ON THIS EDITION
The French text of this edition follows François Rigolot’s Oeuvres complètes de Louise Labé (Garnier Flammarion, 2004)—save that the graceful ampersands of its 1555 printing have been restored. In the original Lyon edition, Labé’s poetry is given in italics—a common convention of the day that typographically signals the heightened (and handwritten) voice of verse. Her sonnets, like Scève’s dizains, are printed as single blocks, the divisions between stanzas simply indicated paragraphically by underslung lines. In this modern bilingual edition, the sonnets are instead laid out in a spacing that more clearly articulates the architectonics of the quatrains and tercets.
All translation is cumulative. In preparing these versions, I was first and foremost drawn to the example of Rilke, who (as an Orpheus translating himself into Eurydice’s labyrinthine ear) published his Umdichtungen of Labé’s sonnets in 1917, in the wake of his versions of two other women writers—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Mariana Alcoforado’s Portuguese Letters. Like Rilke, I felt that Labé’s dedicatory epistle to Clémence de Bourges belonged with her poetic works, not only as a proto-feminist manifesto but, more importantly, for its Proustian insistence that all poetry, like memory, emerges from the après coup of translation. As Karin Lessing makes eloquently clear in her lovely preface to this edition (first published in Sulfur in 1993 as a preamble to her own free versions of a few of the sonnets), Labé’s poetry is all about Time—mislaid in love and regained in writing.
I am also inevitably indebted to the previous translations of Labé into English that I consulted: Prokosch (1947), Martin (1972), Farrell (1986), and Finch (2006). All of them showed me roads to follow—and to avoid. In these new versions, I have above all tried to articulate the interknottings of La Cordière’s lines, their rhymed cordage as twined and tensile as rope. There is no closer (or more transferential) mode of reading than translation. Having microscopically attended to Labé’s every prosodic brushstroke and quirky daub of punctuation, I remain convinced that these poems are indeed hers, whoever she may be. Yet as a (male) translator having fallen in love with her four and half centuries later, I have been ever mindful of Lacan’s devastating observation on the psychoanalytic economy of Uebertragung, or transference: “To love is to give something you do not have to somebody who doesn’t want it.”
The field of Labé scholarship is wide and thriving, on both sides of the Atlantic. I am particularly grateful to the work of Madeleine Lazard, Chiara Siboni, Deborah Lesko Baker, and Ann Rosalind Jones. François Rigolot will I hope recognize how much this entire project (down to its chronology) is indebted to his scholarship. Jeffrey Yang was a necessary angel. But only Peter Cole, my miglior lettore, knows what these versions owe to his unerringly generous acts of listening.
—Richard Sieburth
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Louise Labe, Love Sonnets and Elegies