FOUND IN TRANSLATION

I’m excited to get to write for Mad Poets about poetry in translation. If you’ve attended a lot of the First Wednesday readings at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, you’ll have noticed that translators of poetry (often also poets themselves) present their work from time to time. It’s a task that fascinates me: the verbal texture of a poem is so important, but every language has its own, even languages as close as French and Spanish, or German and Dutch. Every language has things it does better than any other, and you can bet those things wind up in poems. How then can a translator bring the poem into a new language, keeping it a poem instead of a prose retelling?

And yet poetry has exerted huge influence through translation, from Classical Greek or Latin shaping the writing of the Renaissance—or Italian sonnets spurring Elizabethan writing—to the very spare form of haiku flowering in other languages, including American English. Look closely at any big literary movement, and you’ll find translation at its roots.

Louise Labé, Love Sonnets and Elegies. Translated by Richard Sieburth, Preface by Karin Lessing (New York: New York Review Books, 2014).Jerzy Ficowski, Everything I Don’t Know: Selected Poems, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer (Storrs, CT: World Poetry Books, 2021).

Where had I heard of Louise Labé? – Right, in George Steiner’s often wonderful, often irritating book After Babel, where he says that Rilke’s translations of Louise Labé into German have superseded the originals. Surely Rilke wouldn’t waste time translating someone who wasn’t pretty good, even if he wound up superseding her, so when I saw this little book I picked it up.

Louise Labé was a sixteenth-century poet, born between 1516 and 1522 in Lyon: she would add “Lionnoize” to her name (Lionnaise, in updated spelling). Why on earth hadn’t I heard of her before? I mean, I took French all the way through junior high and high school, went off to college thinking I might major in French, and was never allergic to poetry. I *had* heard of Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585 – almost Labé’s contemporary), probably because some of his poems were set as madrigal lyrics. And you have heard of, or at least heard, a bit of Ronsard too: Yeats’s famous poem “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” begins as very nearly a translation of Ronsard’s 1578 poem “Quand vous serez bien vielle,” though Ronsard says his addressee will remember with regret that he once wrote her love poetry, while Yeats tells the addressee that she will look back to recall how beautiful she once was. (And Yeasts doesn’t namecheck himself in his poem as Ronsard does.)

But back to Louise Labé! The book is an odd combination, giftwrapped with additional texts, perhaps to serve poetry fans and more scholarly readers (students, teachers) at once. It opens with super-brief biographies of Labé, Sieburth and poet Karin Lessing; then an artsy (rather than scholarly) introduction by Lessing, adapted from what she wrote earlier as she was translating a bit of Labé. You’re sure to get an artsy introduction when you invite a poet to introduce a poet; this one cites liberally from the book itself, a kind of appetizer from bits of the main course. It also makes me think it would be worth reading some of Lessing. Then there’s a very detailed chronology that which includes not only events (some presumed, with very approximate years) from LL’s life but also historical events in her city of Lyon, achievements by other writers of the sixteenth century (mostly Italy and France: Lyon became not just a center of trade but also a passage of Renaissance literary culture Northward into France: translations of Petrarch etc.), and then after her death, for which we do know the year (1566), some history of her posthumous reputation—up to a 2006 book that proposes that Louise Labé herself was a mystification, made up by male poets in Lyon at the time and furthered by her publisher! The editor of the book (presumably Sieburth) just leaves that there for the moment, and the translations follow.

Richard Sieburth is a very erudite professor who has also translated Maurice Scève, a Lyonnais poet of LL’s era of whom no one has proposed that he was made up. I’ll leave the question of LL’s actual love life and its relationship to her poetry (as the sonnet is a genre of love par excellence)—but the book handles it in a way that doesn’t feel quite satisfying. Women written out of the record for all sorts of reasons, and Labé seems to have been discounted for some centuries due to a reputation for immorality, not poor literary quality.

The translations open with a long and somewhat tedious introduction by Labé herself, addressing her book to a well-educated younger woman whom she urges her to make good use of her advantages in this enlightened age to pursue knowledge. So at least if Labé was a fraud, the fraudsters were advancing a feminist program. She also points out that when you reread something written before you re-feel all that inspired the poem, not a typical thought about poetry.

The first of the love sonnets looks frighteningly Italian: Labé is showing that she can write in Tuscan, just like Petrarch. Lucky for me—lacking all but madrigal Italian!—the original poems start looking very French the moment the next page turns, though the original spelling is preserved. Sieburth strives to retain meter and rhyme, but not compulsively; plenty of lines don’t scan, but perhaps that’s all for the best in an anglophone translation today, where perfect regularity might become monotonous. He’s not padding lines to make them long enough, though there are additions here and there. As always in a rhyming translation words and ideas must change: compare

Labé:           Dans le mol lit le repos desiré
(literal:        In the soft bed the repose desired)
Sieburth:    The desired rest of my downy bed

Labé:           J’ai chaut estreme en endurant froidure
(literal:        I have heat extreme while enduring cold)
Sieburth:    The colder I feel the hotter I burn

Labé:           Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine
(literal:        Then when I believe my joy is certain)
Sieburth:    Then, convinced my bliss cannot be denied

-- You’ll notice how much better Sieburth’s line sounds than my literal (though it would scan better if he lowered stylistic standards and contracted “cannot” to “can’t”), and how nice “-vinced” sounds close to “bliss.”

All the original sonnets are in the classic decasyllable form, and Sieburth stays close. French metrical verse, then and now, both gives a syllable to “mute” vowels (final -e) and takes a single syllable for adjacent vowel sounds in separate words: “mon povre ame amoureuse” has only seven beats, essentially losing the “e” of “povre” and the “e” of “ame” but counting the final -e on “amoureuse,” enunciated with a sort of schwa sound in recited poetry. Somewhere Robert Frost claimed that Anglo poetry was all loose or strict iambics, pointing to how we don’t really notice the way a line opens even if it’s a formal poem. Sieburth will shift from iambic (starting ta-PUM) to trochaic (starting PUM-ta) as he moves down a poem, versus the French line that counts syllables. I admire Sieburth for (mostly) not adding words just to make up the syllable count, and for not using archaic syntactic inversions a rhyme to enable. On the other hand, Labé’s lines are all perfect… shouldn’t we get to enjoy that in English? Every time I paused in reading I felt my own thoughts start giving in to the seductive power of the decasyllable, which the Anglo reader perceives as pentameter, meter of Shakespeare and Milton. Labé uses it throughout the book, though the twelve-beat alexandrine would be preferred in the next generation and for hundreds of years after.

But here’s one example:

Pour le retour du Soleil honorer,
Le Zephir, l’air serein lui apareille:
Et du sommeil l’eau & la terre esveille,
Qui les gardoit l’une de murmurer,

En dous coulant, l’autre de se parer
De mainte fleur de couleur nompareille.
Ja les oiseaus es arbres font merveille,
Et aus passans font l’ennui moderer:

Les Nynfes ja en mile jeus s’esbatent
Au cler de Lune, & dansans l’herbe abatent:
Veus tu Zephir de ton heur me donner,

Et que par toy toute me renouvelle?
Fay mon Soleil devers moy retourner,
Et tu verras s’il ne me rend plus belle.

To honor the Sun upon his return,
Zephyr clears the sky with a gentle breeze:
Earth & water now wake from their sleep
In which one did cease its murmurings

As it sweetly flowed, and the other slow
To clothe itself in iridescent flowers.
The birds in the trees now sing for hours,
Easing the minds of those who pass below:

Now the Nymphs do dance & play about
In the moonlight, trampling the grasses down:
Zephyr, won’t you share your joy with me,

That I too be renewed by your company?
Zephyr, make my Sun turn his face to me,
And see how beautiful he’ll make me be.

(It’s weird to be reading something in older French: you sort of translate it into modern French as you read, so this bilingual edition feels like two versions with a third ghost version between them—be it in French or in the reader’s own reflexive English. And yet if you know French it’s pretty clear despite looking odd, right?) In the last line of sonnet XV, “Et tu verras s’il ne me rend plus belle” feels just like “And just see if he didn’t make me more beautiful,” though “beautiful” is hard to rhyme (“dutiful” won’t cut it here); I can’t help feeling that “And SEE how beautiful HE’ll make me BE” overdoes the EE sound. But my proposal, “And just see…” is too contemporary, whereas Sieburth gives us “the Nymphs do dance & play about”—nice old-fashioned syntax that fits well. Notice too that every time Labé uses only two rhymes for all eight lines of her first two stanzas—more than an English poem can manage without sounding forced. (The two final tercets share three rhymes, making for more variety.)

Here’s another lovely sonnet: “XXIII” (next-to-last in the cycle of XXIV):

Las! que me sert, que si parfaitement
Louas jadis & ma tresse doree,
Et de mes yeus la beauté comparee
A deus Soleils, dont Amour finement

Tira les trets causez de ton tourment?
Ou estes vous, pleurs de peu de duree?
Et Mort par qui devoit estre honoree
Ta ferme amour & iteré serment?

Donques c’estoit le but de ta malice
De m’asservir sous ombre de service?
Pardonne moy, Ami, à cette fois,

Estant outree & de despit & d’ire:
Mais je m’assur’, quesque pat que tu sois,
Qu’autant que moy tu soufres de martire.

What good is it now, that you so perfectly
Once praised the golden tresses of my hair,
Or that the beauty of my eyes you compared
To two Suns, from which Love so expertly

Drew the darts that into your heart did fly?
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?

Or was it all a cruel ruse on your part
To pretend to serve me, enslaving my heart?
Forgive me, Love, if I speak so free,

For I’m beside myself with rage & grief:
But I’d like to think, wherever you may be,
You’re every bit as miserable as me.

That nifty enjambment at the end between Labé’s first and second stanza feels very modern. The final line in Sieburth’s translation is good: the longer word “miserable” avoids the chunk-a-chunk of a too-regular iambic meter of too-short English words, and flickers between four and three syllables in length, further turning the metrics subtle.

Labé’s three Elegies follow the sonnets, and they’re enjoyable too, though more to chew than the poems of fourteen lines—each elegy goes on for three-plus pages.

Sieburth follows the translations with ten pages of notes, and then a 25-page Translator’s Afterward. Like Lessing in her Preface, Sieburth enjoys playing with language, and if you don’t mind that the afterward is both informative and enjoyable. referring again to the fact that Labé’s very existence had been doubted in a recent book, Sieburth declares that he does not disbelieve in Labé—both because it’s hardly plausible that a large number of people would have collaborated in a fraud without SOMEONE spilling the beans at some point, and more significantly because he finds no other poets in that era capable of writing what Labé has written: her personal approach comes through in the otherwise standard turns of the genre. He amusingly calls Labé, in her late twenties when her work was published, “an older woman.” On the whole, however, the book worth a read, especially if you are interested in French poetry, women’s poetry, or translation of metrical poetry.

Poet and translator Sibelan Forrester has been hosting the Mad Poets Society's First Wednesday reading series since 2016. She has published translations of fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, and has co-translated poetry from Ukrainian; books include a selection of fairy tales about Baba Yaga and a bilingual edition of poetry by Serbian poet Marija Knezevic. She is fascinated by the way translation follows the inspirational paths of the original work. Her own book of poems, Second Hand Fates, was published by Parnilis Media. In her day job, she teaches at Swarthmore College.