from verse into a prose, english translations of louis labe (gerard sharpling)

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Journal of European Studies

DOI: 10.1177/0047244107077822 2007; 37; 117 Journal of European Studies

Gerard P. Sharpling From verse into prose: English translations of Louise Labé's sonnets

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SHARPLING: FROM VERSE INTO PROSE 117Journal of European Studies

From verse into proseEnglish translations of Louise Labé’s sonnets

GERARD P. SHARPLINGUniversity of Warwick

In recent years, Louise Labé’s sonnets have become increasingly popular, both within and outside France. This is perhaps unsurprising, given Labé’s striking position as a female writer composing within a predominantly male-defi ned poetic tradition. One means by which Labé’s writing has become more accessible is through the medium of translation. In English, well-known translators such as Dunstan Martin, Warnke and Kirkup, amongst others, have sought to convey Louise’s writing through verse renderings, with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, prose translations of Labé’s poetry remain comparatively scarce and have only recently begun to be taken more seriously. In this article, I argue that far from being inferior copies of more ‘ideal’ verse renderings, prose poems are, in fact, better able to convey the vicissitudes of love encountered by Labé. I present three new prose translations of Louise’s poetry: ‘Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise’; ‘Je vis, je meurs’ and ‘Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aimé’. These translations, it is hoped, place into sharper relief the poet’s quest for self-knowledge and self-understanding. The use of the prose form, as opposed to verse, also highlights a central premise in Labé’s writing itself, namely that human experience is made explicit not so much as a result of persuasive, categorizing statements, or through the adherence to any fi xed poetic form, but rather through a sense of debate with the self. The prose form, freed from the formal constraints of Renaissance versifi cation, provides an ideal means of exploring the dialogical structure of Louise’s sonnets. This arguably more fl exible form also reveals the personal qualities of a poet who manifestly prefers analysis to description or performance, the better to highlight and problematize

Journal of European Studies 37(2): 117–137 Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) http://jes.sagepub.com [200706] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244107077822



118 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 37(2)

the multifarious dimensions of love, and their poignant, indeed dramatic effect on the persona.

Keywords: dialogical structure, Louise Labé, prose translation, self-knowledge, self-questioning, sonnet form, vicissitudes of love

Louise Labé’s self-questioning spirit

In this study, my purpose is to examine Louise Labé’s sonnets through English translations. In doing so, I shall also argue that prose trans-lations of the sonnet form, though often seen as supplementary to verse renderings, or as a means of assisting the inexperienced reader, may be a suitable medium through which to read, and respond to Louise’s analysis of her own condition. Louise Labé’s sonnets were published in 1555, together with a prose dialogue entitled Le Débat de folie et d’amour (‘The Debate between Folly and Love’) and three elegies. Her poems are a remarkable literary enterprise, in that they mix erotic language with the language of Renaissance psychology and epistemology (Moore, 2000: 100). The teachings and customs of Louise’s day, requiring women to be chaste, modest and subservient, had generally proscribed this kind of writing, in particular where the selected genre was a high-status one, conventionally used only by men. Yet Louise’s use of the sonnet form leads to a productive tension between the requirement to maintain a sense of ‘dignity’ and the need for honesty and integrity in her personal testimony. This tension, in turn, serves as the generating impetus for a striking personal exploration of the vicissitudes of love.

Evaluations of Louise Labé’s writing remain polarized. Some commentators have sought to ‘depersonalize’ Louise by viewing her primarily as a critical, or socio-historical ‘case study’. Others have chosen to accentuate her courageous qualities and abilities, seeing them as emerging from a unique personality. In a recent study, François Rigolot sees Louise as a ‘phenomenon’, or by-product, of the cultural surroundings of Lyon at this time. He shows that Louise’s poetry coin-cides with a rediscovery and re-evaluation of writers such as Sappho (Rigolot, 1999: 105–24). The increase in popularity of Louise’s verse, Rigolot suggests, derives less from her personal viewpoint and arti-stic accomplishment than from a set of historical coincidences which allowed her reputation to be elaborated and developed (Rigolot, 1999: 123).The title of Lesko Baker’s recent book on Louise, The Subject of Desire, further serves to assign to the poet the status of a woman



SHARPLING: FROM VERSE INTO PROSE 119

shaped and moulded by her surroundings and destiny. Lesko Baker concludes, for instance, that Louise is ‘the dramatic creation and evolution of female subjectivity and its embodiment in the female speaking voice’ (Lesko Baker, 1996: 163).

In Judy Sproxton’s book The Idiom of Love (2000), the author prefers to see the poet as undertaking an ironic, self-questioning analysis of her own state of mind. The debate as to whether Louise actually wrote these poems herself, or whether the experiences she charts are autobiographically accurate, remains less relevant than the poet’s response to the impact of her personal experience. Louise, Sproxton argues, establishes a ‘point of encounter between the creation of an emotively stimulating poetry and the challenge presented by love to the human condition’ (Sproxton, 2000: 93). Sproxton’s view provides a promising starting point in arguing for the importance of prose translations of Louise’s poetry. Such translations may be criticized for their apparent rejection of conventional verse structure. However, I shall argue in this article that they are able to establish a greater focus on the thought processes of the writer by relying less on constraints of form (for instance, rhyme, metre and the use of personifi cation) imposed by poetic tradition. Whether the shift from verse to prose translation is justifi able is, of course, an insoluble argument. How-ever, as critical theorists such as Eagleton (1983) note, there can be no direct or transparent contact with the historical moment at which an ‘original’ host text was written. Louise’s poetry is undoubtedly no exception to this.

It is also useful to recall that the prose form itself, as a specifi c genre, began to gain in importance throughout the Renaissance period. Freed from the constraints of Aristotelian and Horatian poetics, the fragmented nature of the prose form, though lacking the virtuosity and prestige of verse, and generally held in lower regard, is better able to qualify certainty and to reveal the limitations of the human perspective. Prose writing of the Renaissance establishes a sense of ‘dialogue’ that reduces the formality of presentation and intensifi es the importance of the response of the reader (both Louise, initially, and also her wider audience). Regardless of her use of the sonnet form, Gray argues that Louise’s poetic writing already contains an inbuilt dialogical structure, in which the code of male seduction, derived from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, meets the poet’s reaction to this code. The two codes are frequently juxtaposed, often with ironic intent (Gray, 2000: 87). Rewriting Louise’s sonnets in prose form may, therefore, capture this sense of dialogue. The suggested prose




translations also represent a personal response to Louise’s writing, a way of ‘appropriating’ Louise’s lyrics, but in such a way that they remain true to the sense of irony initially created by the poet.

‘Baise m’encor, rebaise-moi et baise’: a comparison of verse translations

This study begins with a consideration of Louise Labé’s eighteenth sonnet, which has attracted signifi cant critical attention. The persona’s apparent purpose is to entice the lover playfully into physical relations with her, promising an ever-increasing number of kisses. The poem is, in many respects, a wish fulfi lment, whereby in exchanging an infi nite number of kisses, the lives of both persons will become entangled, and the poet will be ‘led away’ from herself on a journey. The poem is immediately at odds with the idealized view of women and the self-destructive prognosis of Petrarch’s verse. Gray indicates not only the courageousness, but the subtlety of Louise’s writing. Louise develops the theme of the ‘basia’ poems of Johannes Secundus, which were accessible across Europe to a wide audience, within a more Neoplatonic context (Murgatroyd, 2000: 187–203). As Gray argues, the fusion of lovers brings ultimate fulfi lment. Only by the ‘mad’ act of uniting herself with her lover, as expressed in the fi nal line of the poem, can the poet reach full self-realization (Gray, 2000: 102). Moore, meanwhile, sees this poem as expressing a ‘release from the bounds of the self through corporeal and poetic jouissance’ (Moore, 2000: 123). For Moore, it is the interplay between the sense of boundaries and the notion of escape embodied in the last line of the poem that ultimately provides the impetus for a quasi-Neoplatonic exchange of souls.

There are several English translations of this sonnet. Among the best known and most widely referred to is that of Dunstan Martin (Sharratt and Dunstan Martin, 1973). In his introduction, the translator indicates the diffi culties of translating Louise’s verse adequately. Whilst purposely avoiding the use of the contemporary English of the period, which would lead to mere ‘pastiche’, the translator also sees problems in attempting an equivalent in the poetry of our own time. Noting that the sonnet is not a twentieth-century form, and that the conventions of image use appear anachronistic today, the translator advocates the use of a free sonnet form, whilst seeking to ‘rejuvenate’ some of Louise’s clichés.

It is instructive, in this section, to consider Dunstan Martin’s verse translations of Louise’s eighteenth sonnet ‘Baise m’encor, rebaise-moi




et baise’ (‘Kiss me again, kiss me again and kiss me’), alongside other renderings of this well-known, indeed controversial poem. This article does not seek to devalue verse renderings. Convincing arguments surrounding their value are, for instance, provided by Shapiro (2002: xxiii–xxvii). However, this section will demonstrate the challenges faced by the translator in conveying Louise’s experience, which is questioning and exploratory, rather than performative. The French text is as follows:

Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise:Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus,Donne m’en un de tes plus amoureus:Je t’en rendray quatre plus chaus que braise.

Las, te pleins tu? Ça que ce mal j’apaise,En t’en donnant dix autres doucereus.Ainsi meslans nos baisers tant heureusJouissons nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise.

Lors double vie à chacun en suivra.Chacun en soy et son ami vivra.Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie:

Tousjours suis mal, vivant discrettement,Et ne me puis donner quelque contentement,Si hors de moy ne fay quelque saillie. (Rigolot, 1986: 131)

In seeking to remain faithful to issues of metre and versifi cation, Dunstan Martin’s verse rendering loses a sense of lightness and playfulness, and there is often a problem of scansion. For example, ‘Je t’en rendray quatre plus chaus que braise’ encompasses two lines in the translated version, rather than one, and reads as follows:

And I’ll return you four, hotter than liveCoals.

The fi fth line, ‘Las, te pleins tu? Ça que ce mal j’apaise’, meanwhile, places the sense of weariness in initial position within the line in French. However, in Dunstan Martin’s translation, this becomes embedded within the English equivalent:

Coals. Oh, are you sad? There! I’ll easeThe pain with ten more kisses, honey-sweet.

Dunstan Martin also fi nds diffi culty in locating natural-sounding, rhyming fi nal words. In the tercets, for example, the rhyming words




‘ensue’ and ‘you’ replace ‘suivra’ (line 9) and ‘vivra’ (line 10), so that the translation reads as follows:

Then double life will to us both ensue:You also live in me, as I in you.So do not chide me for this play on words.

This rendering does not fully convey Louise’s words ‘Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie’, in that Louise’s preoccupations are closely associated with the connection between love and folly. This connection is left out of account in Dunstan Martin’s rendering. Recalling both her own Débat de folie et d’amour and Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae, Louise’s lines, more so than this translation, place emphasis on the sense of the irrational side of love, of the kind discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus. As Folly herself comments in Erasmus’s work, with reference to Plato:

For anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is. (Erasmus, 1971: 132)

Dunstan Martin attempts further use of rhyme with ‘make me’ and ‘take me’ in lines 12 and 14, so that the tercet reads as follows:

Or keep me staid and stay-at-home, but make meGo on that journey best of all preferred:When out of myself, my dearest love, you take me.

Again, the structure of the French text is altered, with the lines no longer ending in words with fi nal ‘ment’ (‘discrettement’, ‘contentement’) but verbs, so that actions take priority over self-refl ection. A further diffi culty in translating this tercet is deciding whether Louise is suggesting a physical journey per se or whether ‘si hors de moy ne fay quelque saillie’ connotes folly and the irrational aspect of love. Lesko Baker’s suggested rendering, ‘If I do not go outside myself’ appears unduly stilted, and appears too rational to bring out the important link between love and folly running through the sonnet (Lesko Baker, 1996: 187).

Frank Warnke, meanwhile, has translated this poem in a way that oscillates between archaic and modern-day registers (Warnke, 1987: 37–8). In this rendering, the poem switches between a sense of lingui-stic control and excess, placing the dignity and level-headedness of the poet into question. The phrases ‘Give me one of the luscious ones you have’ and ‘I’m always ill at ease’ contrast with higher-register phrases such as ‘Unless outside myself I sometimes sally’ and ‘Allow me, love, to feign a pleasing folly’.




A third recent translation of this poem is that of the British poet James Kirkup (2001). Kirkup’s version, more so than the others, creates a rupture between Louise’s poem and the poetics of the Pléiade embodied by poets such as Ronsard and Du Bellay. Kirkup seeks to replace the refi ned linguistic quality of the Petrarchan sonnet with a more colloquial idiom, closer in nature to Johannes Secundus’s playful ‘basia’ genre, also drawn upon by Catullus. This leads to an amusing substitution of modern, banal colloquialisms such as ‘Give me one of your smackers, the juiciest kind’, or later, ‘Love, let me think up some new folly: I’m still feeling so randy’. The decisive turn of the sonnet is rendered thus by Kirkup:

Living discreetlyI can’t give myself anySatisfaction, ifI don’t get out now and startSome further hanky-panky.

Kirkup here creates a ludic, ‘tongue-in-cheek’ atmosphere. Some critics might, of course, argue that Louise’s style of expression is reduced in dignity, and the rendering remains far removed from the high status and prestige generally connoted by the fi gure of the poet in treatises such as Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549). Kirkup’s rendering more accurately refl ects the ‘basia’ poems. Kirkup’s version of the ‘kiss’ poem thus manipulates and elaborate on the persona’s intentions in the French text. Louise’s view is that she could achieve happiness as long as she allowed herself to think of the potential love that could exist with her lover – even if this love is not fully realized. However, Kirkup indicates the converse, namely that the persona would be suffi ciently content to enjoy a physical relation-ship with someone else in the event of not being able to achieve fulfi lment in this particular relationship. Kirkup’s rendering therefore stretches the poet’s desire further than is evident in Louise’s text.

Kirkup’s translation shares with that of Warnke the diffi culty of maintaining a consistent style. For instance, Kirkup translates the phrase ‘meslans nos baisers tant heureus’ as ‘mingling our happy osculations’. ‘Osculations’, deriving from a mathematical term, meaning a contact of two curves (or two surfaces), has a somewhat technical resonance, although Kirkup’s use of this Latinism is also no doubt humorous. Meanwhile, ‘Jouissons nous l’un de l’autre à noitre aise’ is rendered as ‘enjoy each other in whatever fashion we fi nd most agreeable’. This seemingly dignifi ed style contrasts with the use of ‘Give me one of your juiciest smackers’ for ‘Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus.’ This translation purposely seeks to convey the




humour and light-heartedness of Louise’s encounter with her lover, and surprises the reader through the interplay of different styles, as well as the directness of its language. In all likelihood, Louise will have been familiar to some extent with the ‘basia’ genre and will have drawn upon the tone of this intertext to convey the playful nature of her relationship. Kirkup’s version thus conveys a fi ne balance between humour and seriousness. However, there can still be no conclusive evidence that Louise modelled her poem on the ‘basia’ genre alone, or that her intentions were solely to convey the playful aspect of her experience.

The instability of the sonnet form

Few prose translations of Louise Labé’s poetry have been undertaken. Where such translations are available, they tend to serve as a supple-ment to the verse form, rather than as poems in their own right (Lesko Baker, 1996: 169–87), and are seen as a way of assisting the non-specialist reader to understand the surface meaning of the poems. At fi rst, this may seem unsurprising, given that critics see Louise’s verse as focusing primarily on form rather than meaning. Warnke, for instance, com-ments that Louise’s sonnets ‘show a complete mastery of the form’, a fact that is even more surprising, he claims, because ‘Louise had very few predecessors in the writing of the French Sonnets’ (Warnke, 1987: 28). Cameron, meanwhile, praises Labé’s ability to ‘take a lifeless rhetorical embellishment and make it into a dynamic component’ (Cameron, 1990: 68). Cameron further recalls the separation between poet and persona, stressing Louise’s strict adherence to form, possibly at the expense of sincerity.

A further reason for the tendency to translate Renaissance French poetry into verse rather than prose may derive from the history of literary criticism itself: that is, the historical dominance of formal aspects of versifi cation and prosody in French studies, and the high prestige in which such formal properties are held, well beyond the Renaissance period. Deloffre notes, for instance, how the rules of sonnet construction, developed by Marot, came to be so admired that Boileau would claim, almost a century later, that ‘Souvent un beau Sonnet vaut seul un long poème’ (Deloffre, 1969: 100). Grammont, meanwhile, concedes that the French sonnet is a poem ‘à forme fi xe’, albeit masking a lack of real ‘inspiration’ or ‘inventiveness’ (Grammont, 1962: 102). Nasta, on the other hand, observes the value placed on, and derived from rhyme in the Renaissance period. The




merits of the verse of Ronsard and Du Bellay, Nasta contends, lie not so much in their portrayal of human emotions and experience, but in their ability to ‘codify’ and ‘formalize’ language, whilst making it more supple. The poetic lines of these writers, Nasta claims, make the language fl ow more fl exibly whilst retaining faithfulness to original forms (Nasta, 1999: 185–206).

Despite these arguments, it is clear that French poets of the Renais-sance such as Du Bellay, Ronsard and Louise Labé herself, parodied, as well as imitated Petrarch’s sonnets of the Canzoniere, transforming them, as well as rejecting aspects of the form and content of these poems (Freccero, 2000: 108). Levin, moreover, sees the sonnet as re-sembling a building, depending for its solidity on the interplay of opposing forces. ‘Opposition’, Levin claims, ‘resides in its form, the way load and support contend in a great building’ (Levin, 2001: xxvii). The sense of ‘productiveness’ of this uneven structure may be seen particularly in the sonnet’s volta, or ‘turn’, which introduces a possibil-ity of transformation into the poem’s structure. The adjustment in the concluding sestet of the sonnet has been seen as providing a more compelling, intensifi ed ‘diagnosis’ of the initial premise, which depends on achieving greater ironic detachment. By using this, the poet is able to adopt a more self-questioning perspective with regard to his or her own initial predicament.

The imbalance in the sonnet form (eight lines followed by six) is further assessed by Oppenheimer (1989), who demonstrates that the sonnet was not, in fact, intended to be set to music and sung, but was designed for silent, refl ective reading. As Oppenheimer argues, the sequence of eight lines followed by six could not be adapted to the contemporary patterns of music: instead, the sestet, in changing and adapting the perspective of the initial eight lines, creates a sense of dialogue within it that refocuses the initial premise, and which presents the adjustment with equal plausibility. Seen in these terms, the sonnet is not so much ‘performative’ as a means of equipping both poet and reader with a heightened recognition of the irony of the human condition, and one’s response to it. This enables both poet and reader alike to become drawn into identifi cation with the sonnet’s initial and modifi ed premises. As we saw in the introduction to this study, Sproxton highlights the value of translating Louise’s verse into a modern, prose idiom. She shows that ‘the substitution of more familiar terminology makes the division between the lover’s initial account of her experience and the subsequent refl ection upon it stand out more clearly’ (Sproxton, 2000: 90). Indeed, a prose translation of Louise’s sonnets may come closer to what the poet may have intended to reveal




about herself in her poetic writings, insofar as a poet’s intentions can ever be fully known.

A prose rendering of the sonnet ‘Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise’, using a modern idiom, might read as follows:

Kiss me again, kiss me again and kiss me. If you give me one of those long, loving kisses of yours, I will give you four more kisses, hotter than live coals. And if you are feeling sad, I will soon ease the pain by giving you ten more sweet, gentle kisses. Our kisses will melt into another, and we will relax and enjoy being with one another. We will each lead a double life. You will live in me, and I in you. I know these are mad thoughts. But I wish, at least, that Love will give me the pleasure of holding them in my mind. And even if I am forced to lead a discreet and mundane life for a while, I take pleasure in the thought that I could be happy when you take me on a mad journey beyond myself. (My translation)

As can be seen in this rendering, an attempt is made to retain the simplicity and dignity of Louise’s text, and the processes by which Louise seeks to rationalize her own experiences in her own mind, through an internal dialogue with the self. If the rendering lacks the polish of Dunstan Martin’s version, and remains more understated than both Warnke’s and Kirkup’s attempts, the use of simple expressions from everyday parlance (‘we will enjoy being with one another’ and ‘I know these are mad thoughts’) makes Louise’s self-refl ective analysis more accessible to the reader. The prose rendering advances through a series of measured, balanced personal refl ections, and conveys a sense of hesitancy and thoughtfulness. These refl ections may be seen more as a dialogue with the self than a series of assertions or performative statements, as seems apparent in the verse renderings. In dialogue with herself as her own counsellor, Louise adopts a self-questioning approach to her experience. The truth of her condition reaches a greater moment of clarity through the crucial phrase ‘these are mad thoughts’, whereby Louise achieves an ironic distance from her own condition and connects it with the notion of folly.

The way that Louise expresses her thoughts resembles a Socratic form of argument, whereby truth is reached through dialectical refl ection, rather than any empirical statements of fact. The prose trans-lation form lends itself well to the elicitation of this form of truth, as may be particularly noted with reference to writers such as Rabelais, Montaigne and Marguerite de Navarre (Sharpling, 2003). In keeping with the principles of Humanist writing, the prose genre tends to be exploratory, rather than retrospective, encouraging the development of a spirit of self-discovery and self-questioning.




The rendering of the last line, ‘take me on a mad journey beyond myself’, further accentuates the connection that Louise draws be-tween love and folly. The link is stated more explicitly here than is the case in the verse translations previously considered. The theme of love and folly, Gray argues, resounds throughout all the sonnets, so that Louise’s work remains ‘circumscribed by the folly of love and the love of folly, a troubling paradox whose resolution is indefi nitely deferred’ (Gray, 2000: 104). At this point, having analysed her own precarious state of mind, all notion of logic is replaced by the overriding impression of the poet being transported beyond herself. Within her imagination, she literally becomes ‘beside herself’, another person, unable to recognize herself or the person she has become. Louise’s emotions emerge as being both excessive, yet restrained, and the ap-parent folly of her thoughts is countered by the restrained, self-aware approach to her own state of being in love. These words provide a female response to Mercury’s statement in Louise’s Débat, namely that love causes the male (and female) lover to be out of control: ‘Les plus grandes et hazardeuses folies suivent tousjours l’acroissement de l’Amour.’ It also recalls Folly’s assertion, in Encomium Moriae, that there is a sort of wisdom that, even if foolish in appearance, hides good sense beneath it. Erasmus’s view is derived from St Paul’s view of the ‘folly of the cross’, in which Christ’s ultimate wisdom was shrouded in a superfi cial appearance of foolishness that could easily be rejected by anyone who remained insensitive to the fundamental paradox of his teaching. This interrelationship between wisdom and folly remains central to Screech’s work on ecstasy in Erasmus (1980).

‘Je vis, je meurs’: towards a prose translation of Louise’s sonnet

Louise’s eighth sonnet, ‘Je vis, je meurs’, drawing upon the lexis of Petrarch, graphically evokes the paradoxical state of mind of the poet, beset by alternate emotions of elation and degradation. In this poem, Louise uses oxymoron to indicate a situation of unrequited love, and to chart the pathology of the (female) lover’s condition. The poem has been criticized by some as an ‘empty rhetorical exercise’ (Gray, 2000: 98) but, as Gray also emphasizes, Louise’s perspective is primarily ironic, challenging the continued appropriateness of the contemporary rhetorical practice with regard to her own experience. The poem reads as follows:

Je vis, je meurs: je me brule et me noye.J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure:




La vie m’est et trop molle et trop dure.J’ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye:

Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j’endure:Mon bien s’en va, et à jamais il dure:Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye.

Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine:Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.

Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine,Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,Il me remet en mon premier malheur. (Rigolot, 1986: 125)

In this poem, sentiments of pain and joy are simultaneously con-structed and negated. At the very moment of expressing pain, the persona is relieved from it; and just as she assumes pain to have gone away, that very pain returns. In formal terms, Sharratt has singled this poem out as being ‘very much in the Petrarchan tradition, with its antitheses of living and dying, hot and cold’ (Sharratt and Dunstan Martin, 1973: 62). As Harvey notes too, the sonnet is structured in a particular manner to embody a movement from particular to general, and back to particular (Harvey, 1962: 22–3). In the fi rst three lines, there is a shift from positive to negative, while the fourth line provides a reversal of this. In the second quatrain, there is a movement towards the original positive-to-negative shift, with line 4 reversing this order. The last fi ve lines begin and end on a negative note, leaving the reader with a sense of misery that emerges as the closing emotion of the poem. Aesthetically, this series of reversals is important because, as Harvey comments, it reinforces the sense of instability established by the alternations within individual lines of the sonnet.

The structure and versifi cation of the two tercets indicate the tran-scendence of the poet-persona into a state of joy, and her immediate and simultaneous descent into distress. In particular, the lines create a variation of pace, with the sonnet gathering momentum and then slowing down. Line 9, which reveals how the inconstant force of love leads the persona along a hazardous and uneven path, provides a succinct summary of the vicissitudes of love. Then, in line 12, a rapid ascending movement leads to a high point in the word ‘certeine’, to be followed by a falling movement. The uneven length of the sentences, ranging from short to long, appears to mirror the lack of consistency




with which love acts upon the life, and upon the state of mind of Louise as persona.

Another striking feature of the poem is the use of vowel sounds in ‘endurant froidure’, connoting coldness, hardness and duration. The reduplication of the ‘ure’ phonemes in lines 6 and 7 of the poem, places the personal ‘j’endure’ with the more impersonal ‘il dure’. Lengthy vowel sounds are also a feature of rhyming words at the end of lines 10 (‘douleur’), 13 (‘heur’) and 14 (‘froideur’), which Sharratt sees as representing a period of duration. The poem refl ects a period of longing and desire as yet unfulfi lled. To the above formal features of Louise’s sonnet may be added the accumulation and crescendo of detail (auxesis, or incrementum) without specifi c cause or effect, and without any undue or apparent psychologizing on the part of the poet-persona. Louise’s style here is paratactic: ‘vis’, ‘meure’, ‘brule’ and ‘noye’ are juxtaposed with no attempt made to relate each verb to any other with connecting particles. Rather, the persona’s predicament is stated simply and directly, without logical connectives (asyndeton): ‘J’ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye.’ The repetition of ‘coup’ (‘Tout à un coup’ in line 5 and ‘Tout en un coup’ in line 8) further reduces the distance between thought and action in the poem, and places emphasis on the immediacy of feeling and the apparent lack of psychological evaluation.

It is again instructive to consider how a possible prose rendering might convey Louise’s analysis of her own condition:

I burn, yet I drown. I’m sweltering, yet I’m freezing too. Life is too gentle and soft, yet too harsh and cruel. What joy I feel, and yet what sorrow. At once I laugh and I cry, and I am torn between pleasure and torment. Just when my happiness has left for good, it is there for all time. I shrivel up, yet begin to grow again. These are the tricks that being in love plays on me. Whenever I expect to feel pain, I’m granted an unexpected reprieve. Yet just as it seems that joy is certain, and I have scaled the heights of my long-sought happiness, this feeling of love knocks me back, and once again, unhappiness takes control. (My translation)

When compared with verse translations of the same poem, this rendering is arguably more explanatory, fi lling in some of the gaps left by the suggestive nature of the original sonnet structure. Despite such losses, this rendering is able to place Louise’s self-analysis into sharper relief. This is achieved by the addition of phrases associated with time, such as ‘At once’, ‘Just when’, ‘Yet’, ‘Whenever’ and ‘Once again’, which indicate, and reinforce, the simultaneity and co-existence of contrasting emotions. As with the prose translation in the previous




section, the sense of an internal dialogue with the self is heightened as the poem advances through measured statements. Greater use here is also made of conjunctions which reveal the way in which Louise’s self-analysis is further qualifi ed, explained and justifi ed.

A further adjustment in the prose rendering is that the personifi cation of love as ‘Amour’, a conventional feature of the Petrarchan lyric, is re-placed by ‘being in love’ and ‘the feeling of love’. In verse translations of the same poem, ‘Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine’ is rendered by Dunstan Martin as ‘Thus, constant Love is my inconstant guide’, while Alice Park, another translator of Louise, renders this as ‘That’s how it goes. Strange, ever changing love / has worn me out’ (2003). The prose translation, on the other hand, renders Louise’s words as ‘These are the tricks that Love plays on me’ (Park, 2003). I have chosen here to place greater emphasis on the simplicity and refl ective nature of Louise’s thoughts. There is no attempt, for instance, to use word play, as in Dunstan Martin’s use of ‘constant’ and ‘inconstant’. This shift from love as personifi cation to love as personal refl ection reinforces Judy Sproxton’s view that Louise is expressing here a ‘consciousness of a specifi c state of distress’ (Sproxton, 2000: 90). The pivotal phrase ‘These are the tricks that love plays on me’ suggests, in fact, that the ludic dimension of love creates a greater sense of fun, which takes Louise’s poem further away from the more gloomy constraints of Petrarchism.

In Louise’s sonnet, the last fi ve lines herald a shift in Louise’s an-alysis of her own spiritual condition. They do not enable her to resolve the contradictory experiences of love that she is seeking to explain, and provide no tangible solution for her troubled consciousness. Rather, they show that she views her condition with a degree of clear-sightedness, and a heightened sense of consciousness, and this enables her desire to be refuelled in the poem’s ‘turn’. The prime difference between this prose translation, suggested above, and Dunstan Martin’s verse rendering of the sonnet, is that in the former the poet expresses a greater sense of calmness and dignifi ed acceptance of her inner state of mind, achieved through a more self-conscious focus on her condition. In contrast, Dunstan Martin renders the tercet of Louise’s poem thus:

And when I think joy cannot be denied,And scaled the peak of happiness I sought,He casts me down into my former grief.

Given Louise’s calm, refl ective perception of her own state of mind in her sonnets, the emotions contained in the above rendering are,




perhaps, too extreme. In particular, ‘my former grief’ seems to be strongly phrased, and less suggestive than ‘mon premier malheur’. Alice Park, meanwhile, translates the last three lines using a striking contemporary idiom:

With Lady Luck. Again and yet again,Her wheel is spinning madly to produceThis wanton, wild, intense, exquisite pain.

Despite Park’s modern register, and her ability to make Louise’s contradictory feelings of love and pain more accessible to the reader, her rendering does not readily express the spatial movements of ‘highness’ and ‘lowness’ in the French version. This dichotomy be-tween high and low is perhaps better captured in the prose rendering of the same lines:

Yet just as it seems that joy is certain, and I have scaled the heights of my long-sought happiness, this feeling of love knocks me back, and once again, unhappiness takes control.

The image created here is of an individual climbing to the top of a hill or mountain and falling back down, and forced, almost in Sisyphian style, to begin their quest again. Here again, the Petrarchan use of ‘Amour’ is replaced in the prose rendering by ‘this feeling of love’. This is not to deny the importance of the role of personifi cation in the Graeco-Roman tradition. However, there is also clear evidence to suggest that the sonnet form was used by Louise, amongst others, as a way of refl ecting on the irony of the human condition. The sonnet writer is personally involved in an analysis of her own experiences and thought processes. As a result, an important shift in perspective made possible by the prose translation is that Louise does not ultimately claim to be assailed by the wiles of fate. Rather, she acknowledges her personal role in her own destiny, the better to relate her experience more directly to her own state of mind.

‘Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aimé’: from imperative to self-refl ection

I shall now focus on Louise’s last sonnet, ‘Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aimé’. This sonnet differs from the others in the collection, in that it goes beyond personal self-refl ection to address the ladies of Lyon and to give them advice should they fi nd themselves in a similar situation. Louise asks the ladies of Lyon not to reproach her for providing a candid view of her experience of love. The experience




of being in love, she argues, can strike at any time, so that no person can fully indemnify themselves against such experiences. Freccero sees this poem as an instance of ‘feminist poetics’, suggesting that the sonnet ‘creates a sense of female community in relation to the project of overcoming the obstacles that Louise, and the women of her day, encounter’ (Freccero, 2000: 112). However, it is important to emphasize that the experience of love is also personal in nature: no one else can be implicated in such strength of feeling, and each person must take ultimate responsibility for the logical corollary of their emotions. The poem reads as follows:

Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aimé:Si j’ay senti mile torches ardentes,Mile travaus, mile douleurs mordentes;Si en pleurant, j’ay mon tems consumé,

Las que mon nom n’en soit par vous blamé.Si j’ay failli, les peines sont presentes,N’aigrissez point leurs pointes violentes:Mais estimez qu’Amour, à point nommé,

Sans votre ardeur d’un Vulcan excuser,Sans la beauté d’Adonis acuser,Pourra, s’il veut, plus vous rendre amoureuses:

En ayant moins que moy d’ocasion,Et plus d’estrange et forte passion.Et gardez vous d’estre plus malheureuses. (Rigolot, 1986: 134–5)

To begin, again, with Dunstan Martin’s verse rendering, we may see that this remains very close to the original French:

No need of Vulcan to explain your fi re,Nor of Adonis to excuse desire ...

At one level, this rendering seems acceptable in that it should not be necessary to explain the references to Vulcan and Adonis to an eru-dite reader. Yet, as Dunstan Martin suggests, while the reference to Adonis is ‘perhaps simple enough’, Vulcan ‘causes some diffi culty’. He suggests, ambiguously, that Vulcan could be ‘an old, jealous husband’ as well as a connotation of the fi ery aspect of love. It would seem important, in any modern rendering of this poem, to clarify Louise’s intentions in her reference to Vulcan. Hence, in a revised prose translation of this poem, a possible rendering of the couplet might be as follows:




Love can strike at any time. If that happens, there is no chance of running away from an old, jealous husband, or blaming the irresistible beauty of your lover.

Here, Louise’s straightforward recognition of the inevitability of human fragility, and the fact that she must take full responsibility for her feelings of love, are more clearly stated.

A further adjustment in the prose translation is to avoid seeing Louise as adopting a moralizing or didactic tone, and merely provid-ing a set of instructions for others to follow. While Louise’s poem has often been seen as a feminist statement, her comments arise not so much from a desire to seek attention from others, or to claim any political standpoint, but from a more clear-sighted perception of her own condition, and an ability to further analyse and complicate such experiences. The full prose translation reads as follows:

Ladies, it would not be fair to criticize me for having loved and felt a thousand torches burn within my veins, or if I have felt sadness a thousand times, and a thousand biting pains too. Nor would I want to be criticized if I have spent much of my time reduced to tears. I do not deserve a bad name because of this. If I have failed, I am paying for it now, so I do not want this situation to be harder for me to bear than it already is. Love can strike at any time. If that happens, there is no chance of running away from an old, jealous husband, or blaming the irresistible beauty of your lover. Love might even have less reason to strike you than he had me. He could strike you with a stranger, stronger passion than I have experienced. So take precautions so that you do not suffer any more than I have done. (My translation)

The main linguistic shift in the above prose translation is to soften the directness of the impact of the imperative forms in Louise’s text. The sense of personal responsibility conveyed by ‘Ne reprenez’ has been rendered here, less personally, as ‘It would not be fair to criticize me’, while ‘Las que mon nom n’en soit par vous blamé’ is translated as ‘I do not deserve a bad name because of this’. This re-orientation from imperative to self-refl ection in the prose translation serves to show that Louise in fact demonstrates a sense of calmness and dignity in describing her experiences, despite her recognition that human beings have an inevitable vulnerability. ‘Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aimé’ is not, in fact, a strong, critical statement: rather, it heralds an embodiment of the human psyche, using the ladies of Lyon as a reference point against which to measure the fragmented and complex nature of her own personal experience. These sentiments show a heightened sense of dignity and self-awareness if allowed to exist in a form other than that in which Louise’s poetry was originally written.




Beyond Petrarchanism: the potential value of prose translation

The purpose of this article has been to investigate translations of Louise Labé’s sonnets into English, and to argue that, freed from the restrictions of the sonnet form, prose translations can be adjusted to highlight, in a more informal and refl ective manner, the poet’s refl ection on her own condition. In ‘Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise’, this sense of refl ection and internal dialogue was achieved by reducing the intensity of lexical choice, and seeking to maintain the dignity of Louise’s expression through simple, straightforward statements that avoid rhetorical embellishment, but which convey the poet’s self-questioning spirit. Adjustments were also made to the prose translation to focus more prominently on the link between love and folly, which persists despite attempts to control and pin down human experience through the slippery medium of language. ‘Je vis, je meurs’, meanwhile, is an example par excellence of a poem in the Petrarchan tradition. Yet despite its apparently trite, repetitive nature, the prose translation shows Louise’s attempt to reduce the impact of love as an ‘assailant’, thereby allowing the poem to be read more like a psychological document, in which the poet is more actively implicated in her own fate. In this way Louise is no longer seen exclu-sively as a passive recipient of love’s assault. She does not simply draw on Petrarch’s codifi ed language and his well-known trajectory of unreciprocated courtly love. Rather, Louise seems to collude more willingly with her lover. Thus, instead of seeking a resolution to the paradoxical experience of love, Louise actually expresses her de-sire more intently, through an ironic acceptance of her own condition. The third poem examined, ‘Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ay aimé’, has been seen by some as an overtly political, or indeed feminist statement. However, by adjusting the terms of Louise’s refl ection to avoid the use of the imperative form, most often used in verse translations of this poem, Louise’s writing is no longer quite so directive or dogmatic in nature, and becomes a more self-refl exive, internal dialogue between Louise and her own state of mind. This again shows how Louise seeks to gain a more ironic perspective with regard to her own state of mind.

Taken together, the three prose translations of Louise’s poetry included in this article all place emphasis on the poet’s quest for self-knowledge and self-understanding. This central notion contrasts radically with what has often been considered as the main purpose of the sonnet, namely that it should be performed, indeed ‘sung’ to




an audience, so as to provide an exhibition of sentiment, or to use Sproxton’s term, ‘poeticised plaint’ (Sproxton, 2000: 92). In Louise Labé’s poetry, truth is made explicit not so much as a result of persu-asive, categorizing statements, but is implicit in the sense of debate with the self in which the poet is continually engaged. This also confi rms Oppenheimer’s view that the sonnet form gives priority to introspection and self-questioning (Oppenheimer, 1989: 9). The dialogical structure of Louise’s sonnets enables her to analyse, rather than simply describe, different kinds of love and their effects.

As has been discussed in the introduction to this study, opinions differ widely as to the signifi cance of Louise Labé’s poetry. In a recent study, Kennedy (2003) sees the entire development of Petrarchism through the French Pléiade as being precarious and unstable in nature. This period shows a complex interweaving of rivalries and tolerance, in which Du Bellay seeks to gain rivalry over his friend Ronsard. Seen in this light, poetry of the French Renaissance often becomes a locus for personal manipulation of tradition, rather than simply a stative and trite repetition of tradition. Moore (2000), meanwhile, attributes Louise’s importance primarily to the cultural and literary climate of Renaissance Lyon itself. As a result of Louise’s association with the École Lyonnaise, which helped her to fi nd her voice in print, Moore sees Labé’s poetry principally as an ‘analysis of female selfhood’, which ‘refl ects this openness in challenging ideas of femininity that limit women’s education and confi ne them to frivolous and unproductive pursuits’ (Moore, 2000: 99). Davis also adopts a gender-specifi c read-ing of Louise’s poetry, viewing the public and independent identity of Louise as based on behaviour that was ‘unacceptable in a modest and brave Reformed woman’ (Davis, 1987: 85–6).

This paper does not, of course, set out to devalue these global, pol-itical readings of the ‘site of Petrarchism’ (Kennedy, 2003) and Louise’s role within it. However, it is hoped that the prose translations suggested here reveal the tensions between the political and personal side of Louise’s poetry, and perhaps emphasize the latter at the expense of the former. By reducing the directness and apparent didacticism of some English verse renderings of Louise’s poems, and by heightening the sense of self-refl ection inherent in her verse, I hope to have shown that Louise is able to express, through the medium of words, experiences which often lie beyond the powers of human articulation, and which are perennially problematic to pin down merely by means of the recuperating force of the written word.




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Gerard P. Sharpling lectures in English language, teacher education and language testing at the University of Warwick. Address for correspondence: English Teaching Unit, CELTE, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK [email: [email protected]]



from verse into a prose, english translations of louis labe (gerard sharpling)

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