Love Sonnets and Elegies

Louise Labe is commonly regarded as the most original woman poet of the French Renaissance. The daughter of an illiterate rope maker in Lyon, known to her contemporaries for her unusual learning as well as her skills as a singer and lutanist, Labe was in her thirties when she published her complete Works in 1555 and then disappeared from the scene, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century. Her love poetry, made famous by Rilke’s German versions, is published here with the originals en face and newly rendered into English by award-winning translator Richard Sieburth, who also includes a biographical chronology of the poet, notes, and an informative afterword to this edition. These Love Sonnets and Elegies confirm Labe’s reputation as the first modern Sappho.

Louise Labe (c. 1522–1566) was a member of the sixteenth-century Lyon school of humanist poets dominated by Maurice Sceve. Her wit, charm, and accomplishments, and the freedom she enjoyed provoked unverifiable legends, such as those claiming she rode to war, took to dressing like a man, and was a cultured courtesan known as La Belle Cordiere (the Beautiful Rope Maker). In addition to love sonnets and elegies, Labe’s works include a dedicatory letter advocating women’s education and writing, and a philosophical prose dialogue, Debat de Folie et d’Amour (The Debate Between Folly and Love).

Richard Sieburth’s translations include Friedrich Holderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Gerard de Nerval’s Selected Writings and The Salt Smugglers, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s poetry. His translation of Maurice Sceve’s Delie was a finalist for the PEN Poetry Translation Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Karin Lessing is an American poet who was born in Gorlitz, a town now split by the German/Polish border, and emigrated to the United States at an early age. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently Collected Poems. Lessing has been living in the Luberon area of Provence since 1962.