Love Sonnets and Elegies
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Louise Labé, one of the most original poets of the French Renaissance, published her complete Works around the age of thirty and then disappeared from history. Rediscovered in the nineteenth century, her incandescent love sonnets were later translated into German by Rilke and appear here in a revelatory new English version by the award-winning translator Richard Sieburth.
Louise Labé
Louise Labé (1522-1566) is the most well-known and celebrated woman writer of non-noble birth from the French Renaissance. While her published work (OEuvres, 1555) is modest in length, the variety of genres she employs (epistle, sonnet, elegy, prose dialogue), the robust evidence of her proto-feminist vocation, her strength of voice, and her mastery of Petrarchan and Neoplatonic conventions have made of her a hugely important figure in the literature of this period.
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Richard Sieburth
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Richard Sieburth is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University and an award-winning translator of works by Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris, George Büchner, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Hölderlin. His translation of Gerard de Nerval's Selected Writings won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize.
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