Regardless of what she was or wasn���Ĵ�ý�t, Labé herself is proudly conscious of her femininity in her work, and Love Sonnets & Elegies offers some rewarding insights into a pioneering female mind. In her dedicatory epistle to Clémence de Bourges, Labé expresses her desire to see women ���Ĵ�ý�surpass or equal men not only in beauty but in learning & worthiness,���Ĵ�ý� and her poetry contains nods toward a community of presumably like-minded women, whom she addresses with a charming spirit of familiarity in ���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 24���Ĵ�ý� (���Ĵ�ý�Don���Ĵ�ý�t reproach me, ladies, for having loved���Ĵ�ý�) and in ���Ĵ�ý�Elegy I,���Ĵ�ý� in which she pleads, ���Ĵ�ý�Join in my sorrows, / Ladies, when you read of my regrets. / Some day, I may do the same for you.���Ĵ�ý� Such disarming intimacy is hard to resist.

Writing in the sixteenth century, it is inevitable that Petrarchan tropes find their way into Labé���Ĵ�ý�s work from time to time. Love dominates all of her poetry, and her verse is least inspiring when it is littered with such clichés as ���Ĵ�ý�I live, I die: I flare up, & I drown / The colder I feel the hotter I burn���Ĵ�ý� (���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 8���Ĵ�ý�). Yet there is something undeniably refreshing in hearing a female voice engaging in the sort of poetic objectification usually dominated by Renaissance male writers, and Labé seems to positively relish beating them at their own game: ���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 21���Ĵ�ý� finds her wondering aloud, ���Ĵ�ý�What height places a man beyond compare? / What size? What shade of hair? What color of skin?���Ĵ�ý�; elsewhere she coos to her lover in ���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 11,���Ĵ�ý� ���Ĵ�ý�How sweet your glances, how lovely your eyes / Small gardens blooming with amorous flowers.���Ĵ�ý� Whenever she isn���Ĵ�ý�t carefully evaluating her lover piece by piece in the best blason tradition, she is occupied with calling him out for the sort of perfidious behaviour usually decried as the preserve of sly females, as when she berates him in ���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 23,���Ĵ�ý� ���Ĵ�ý�Where are those tears once shed & now no more? / Or that Death on which you solemnly swore / You would love me for the rest of your life?���Ĵ�ý� It is not often that we hear a female answering back in early modern verse, and it makes for enjoyable reading.

Yet happily for the modern reader, Labé is not a mere Renaissance novelty, for her work frequently rises above the literary constraints and conventions of her era to provide lines of genuine pathos and wit that translate well across the centuries. Her endings can be particularly strong, as when the close of ���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 5���Ĵ�ý� finds her confessing that, ���Ĵ�ý�when I���Ĵ�ý�m almost completely shattered / Lying in bed as if nothing mattered / My screams shall light up the entire night,���Ĵ�ý� or when ���Ĵ�ý�Sonnet 16���Ĵ�ý� finds her chiding her lover, ���Ĵ�ý�You���Ĵ�ý�ve doused your flame in some other sea, / Much colder than I ever claimed to be.���Ĵ�ý� If Labé really is a (literally) man-made fiction, she is certainly a very convincing one���Ĵ�ý�the voice in these verses is strong and distinctive, imbued with a warmth and charm that is consistently present.

Richard Sieburth���Ĵ�ý�s translations are elegantly concise and direct, giving Labé���Ĵ�ý�s verses a supple feel in his English renderings. Any reader with a taste for Renaissance verse will find much to enjoy in this slim volume, and even a general reader may find it well worth his or her time to make the acquaintance of the lady of Lyon.

Click here for all past and future posts in this series.

Today���Ĵ�ý�s post is by BTBA poetry judge Jennifer Kronovet.

Geometries by Guillevic, translated by Richard Sieburth

Language: French
Country: France
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Pages: 80

Why This Book Should Win: Charming yet deep; sweet and funny; stimulating, challenging, and yet approachable; private, but easy to relate to, sexy. No, I���Ĵ�ý�m not describing my perfect mate���Ĵ�ý�wait, yes I am!���Ĵ�ý�but I���Ĵ�ý�m also describing the wonderful poems in Geometries, by Guillevic, translated by Richard Sieburth and originally published in French in 1967.

Each of these poems is based on a geometrical figure���Ĵ�ý�presented in its Euclidian simplicity at the top of each piece. These poems bounce playfully, deftly, and philosophically between the unchanging fact of the simple, named form, and the nameless feelings and attitudes we have toward space, the way it shapes us, is us, and comes between us.

Some of the poems in Geometries are intimate addresses to the shapes, such as in ���Ĵ�ý�Ellipse,���Ĵ�ý� which begins, ���Ĵ�ý�Listen, I know how hard it is/To achieve this kind of balance,//With everything pressing in/On each of your outer points.���Ĵ�ý� These poems, by commiserating with forms, by sometimes chastising them, by truly conversing and engaging with them, reshape shapes from the physical to the metaphysical and back again. The condition of the body and the mind, minds that love and bodies that love���Ĵ�ý�the troubling trouble of it all, is playfully illuminated. ���Ĵ�ý�Ellipse���Ĵ�ý� ends ���Ĵ�ý�Two centers,/Either oblivious/To each other,/Or at war.���Ĵ�ý� How like our own���Ĵ�ý�my own!���Ĵ�ý�sense of a self at odds with itself. I find I can relate to this ellipse. Who knew.

Many of the poems in the collection give a voice to these shapes, which speak to us out of their self-awareness and their striking personalities. These shapes are resigned to behaving as their dimensions demand���Ĵ�ý�just as may know where the arc of our particular behavior leads us. The ���Ĵ�ý�Point���Ĵ�ý� ballsily notes:

I am no more than the fruit
bq. Of an encounter.

I have nothing.

���Ĵ�ý�Get the point.���Ĵ�ý�
bq. ���Ĵ�ý�Miss the point.���Ĵ�ý�

What do I know?

Yet who would venture
bq. To erase me?

The cover of the collection says that these poems were ���Ĵ�ý�Englished���Ĵ�ý� by Richard Sieburth. They are indeed. Sieburth captures in English the specific spokenness of the poems, their philosophical wit, their pathos (who would have thought shapes could have pathos!), without losing a sense of the inherent playfulness of the project. These shapes are foreign mirrors���Ĵ�ý�yet astounding mirrors nonetheless. These poems are part game, part serious seriousness, and Sieburth stealthily draws the poems down that line into a wonderfully pleasing feeling that something true has been discovered in the oddest of ways.