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 Lab's sonnets
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SHARPLING: FROM VERSE INTO PROSE 117
Journal of European Studies
From verse into prose
English translations of Louise Labs sonnets
GERARD P. SHARPLING
University of Warwick
In recent years, Louise Labs sonnets have become increasingly popular,
both within and outside France. This is perhaps unsurprising, given Labs
striking position as a female writer composing within a predominantly
male-dened poetic tradition. One means by which Labs 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 Louises writing through verse
renderings, with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, prose
translations of Labs 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
Lab. I present three new prose translations of Louises poetry: Baise
mencor, rebaise moy et baise; Je vis, je meurs and Ne reprenez, Dames,
si jay aim. These translations, it is hoped, place into sharper relief
the poets quest for self-knowledge and self-understanding. The use of
the prose form, as opposed to verse, also highlights a central premise in
Labs 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 xed poetic form, but rather through a sense of
debate with the self. The prose form, freed from the formal constraints
of Renaissance versication, provides an ideal means of exploring the
dialogical structure of Louises sonnets. This arguably more 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): 117137 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 Lab, prose translation, self-
knowledge, self-questioning, sonnet form, vicissitudes of love
Louise Labs self-questioning spirit
In this study, my purpose is to examine Louise Labs 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
Louises analysis of her own condition. Louise Labs sonnets were
published in 1555, together with a prose dialogue entitled Le Dbat
de folie et damour (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
Louises 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 Louises 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 Labs 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, Franois
Rigolot sees Louise as a phenomenon, or by-product, of the cultural
surroundings of Lyon at this time. He shows that Louises poetry coin-
cides with a rediscovery and re-evaluation of writers such as Sappho
(Rigolot, 1999: 10524). The increase in popularity of Louises 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 Bakers recent book on Louise, The Subject
of Desire, further serves to assign to the poet the status of a woman
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 Sproxtons 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 poets
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). Sproxtons view provides
a promising starting point in arguing for the importance of prose
translations of Louises 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 personication)
imposed by poetic tradition. Whether the shift from verse to prose
translation is justiable 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. Louises poetry is undoubtedly
no exception to this.
It is also useful to recall that the prose form itself, as a specic 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 intensies
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 Louises poetic writing already contains an
inbuilt dialogical structure, in which the code of male seduction,
derived from Petrarchs Canzoniere, meets the poets reaction to this
code. The two codes are frequently juxtaposed, often with ironic
intent (Gray, 2000: 87). Rewriting Louises sonnets in prose form
may, therefore, capture this sense of dialogue. The suggested prose
translations also represent a personal response to Louises writing,
a way of appropriating Louises lyrics, but in such a way that they
remain true to the sense of irony initially created by the poet.
Baise mencor, rebaise-moi et baise: a comparison of verse
translations
This study begins with a consideration of Louise Labs eighteenth
sonnet, which has attracted signicant critical attention. The personas
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 fullment, whereby in exchanging an
innite 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 Petrarchs verse. Gray indicates
not only the courageousness, but the subtlety of Louises 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: 187203). As Gray argues,
the fusion of lovers brings ultimate fullment. Only by the mad act
of uniting herself with her lover, as expressed in the 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 difculties of translating Louises 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 Louises clichs.
It is instructive, in this section, to consider Dunstan Martins verse
translations of Louises eighteenth sonnet Baise mencor, 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:
xxiiixxvii). However, this section will demonstrate the challenges
faced by the translator in conveying Louises experience, which is
questioning and exploratory, rather than performative. The French
text is as follows:
Baise mencor, rebaise moy et baise:
Donne men un de tes plus savoureus,
Donne men un de tes plus amoureus:
Je ten rendray quatre plus chaus que braise.
Las, te pleins tu? a que ce mal japaise,
En ten donnant dix autres doucereus.
Ainsi meslans nos baisers tant heureus
Jouissons nous lun de lautre notre aise.
Lors double vie chacun en suivra.
Chacun en soy et son ami vivra.
Permets mAmour 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 versication, Dunstan
Martins verse rendering loses a sense of lightness and playfulness,
and there is often a problem of scansion. For example, Je ten rendray
quatre plus chaus que braise encompasses two lines in the translated
version, rather than one, and reads as follows:
And Ill return you four, hotter than live
Coals.
The fth line, Las, te pleins tu? a que ce mal japaise, meanwhile,
places the sense of weariness in initial position within the line in
French. However, in Dunstan Martins translation, this becomes
embedded within the English equivalent:
Coals. Oh, are you sad? There! Ill ease
The pain with ten more kisses, honey-sweet.
Dunstan Martin also nds difculty in locating natural-sounding,
rhyming 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 Louises words Permets
mAmour penser quelque folie, in that Louises preoccupations are
closely associated with the connection between love and folly. This
connection is left out of account in Dunstan Martins rendering.
Recalling both her own Dbat de folie et damour and Erasmuss Encomium
Moriae, Louises lines, more so than this translation, place emphasis
on the sense of the irrational side of love, of the kind discussed in
Platos Phaedrus. As Folly herself comments in Erasmuss 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 me
Go 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 nal ment (discrettement, contentement)
but verbs, so that actions take priority over self-reection. A further
difculty 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 Bakers 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:
378). 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 Im 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). Kirkups version, more so than the others,
creates a rupture between Louises poem and the poetics of the Pliade
embodied by poets such as Ronsard and Du Bellay. Kirkup seeks to
replace the rened linguistic quality of the Petrarchan sonnet with a
more colloquial idiom, closer in nature to Johannes Secunduss 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: Im still feeling so randy. The decisive turn of the sonnet
is rendered thus by Kirkup:
Living discreetly
I cant give myself any
Satisfaction, if
I dont get out now and start
Some further hanky-panky.
Kirkup here creates a ludic, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Some critics
might, of course, argue that Louises style of expression is reduced
in dignity, and the rendering remains far removed from the high
status and prestige generally connoted by the gure of the poet in
treatises such as Du Bellays Deffence et illustration de la langue franoyse
(1549). Kirkups rendering more accurately reects the basia poems.
Kirkups version of the kiss poem thus manipulates and elaborate
on the personas intentions in the French text. Louises 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 sufciently content to enjoy a physical relation-
ship with someone else in the event of not being able to achieve
fullment in this particular relationship. Kirkups rendering therefore
stretches the poets desire further than is evident in Louises text.
Kirkups translation shares with that of Warnke the difculty 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 Kirkups use of this Latinism is also
no doubt humorous. Meanwhile, Jouissons nous lun de lautre
noitre aise is rendered as enjoy each other in whatever fashion
we nd most agreeable. This seemingly dignied style contrasts with
the use of Give me one of your juiciest smackers for Donne men un
de tes plus savoureus. This translation purposely seeks to convey the
humour and light-heartedness of Louises 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. Kirkups version thus conveys a 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 Labs 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: 16987), and are seen as a way of assisting the non-specialist
reader to understand the surface meaning of the poems. At rst, this
may seem unsurprising, given that critics see Louises verse as focusing
primarily on form rather than meaning. Warnke, for instance, com-
ments that Louises 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 Labs 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 Louises 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 versication 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 pome (Deloffre, 1969: 100). Grammont,
meanwhile, concedes that the French sonnet is a poem forme
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 ow more exibly whilst retaining faithfulness to original
forms (Nasta, 1999: 185206).
Despite these arguments, it is clear that French poets of the Renais-
sance such as Du Bellay, Ronsard and Louise Lab herself, parodied,
as well as imitated Petrarchs 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 sonnets volta, or turn, which introduces a possibil-
ity of transformation into the poems structure. The adjustment in
the concluding sestet of the sonnet has been seen as providing a
more compelling, intensied 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, reective 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 ones response to it. This enables both poet
and reader alike to become drawn into identication with the sonnets
initial and modied premises. As we saw in the introduction to this
study, Sproxton highlights the value of translating Louises verse into a
modern, prose idiom. She shows that the substitution of more familiar
terminology makes the division between the lovers initial account of
her experience and the subsequent reection upon it stand out more
clearly (Sproxton, 2000: 90). Indeed, a prose translation of Louises
sonnets may come closer to what the poet may have intended to reveal
about herself in her poetic writings, insofar as a poets intentions can
ever be fully known.
A prose rendering of the sonnet Baise mencor, 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 Louises 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 Martins version, and remains more understated than
both Warnkes and Kirkups attempts, the use of simple expressions
from everyday parlance (we will enjoy being with one another and I
know these are mad thoughts) makes Louises self-reective analysis
more accessible to the reader. The prose rendering advances through
a series of measured, balanced personal reections, and conveys a
sense of hesitancy and thoughtfulness. These reections 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
reection, 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 Louises work remains circumscribed by the folly of love and
the love of folly, a troubling paradox whose resolution is indenitely
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. Louises
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 Mercurys statement in Louises Dbat, namely
that love causes the male (and female) lover to be out of control: Les
plus grandes et hazardeuses folies suivent tousjours lacroissement
de lAmour. It also recalls Follys assertion, in Encomium Moriae, that
there is a sort of wisdom that, even if foolish in appearance, hides good
sense beneath it. Erasmuss view is derived from St Pauls view of the
folly of the cross, in which Christs ultimate wisdom was shrouded
in a supercial 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 Screechs work on ecstasy in Erasmus (1980).
Je vis, je meurs: towards a prose translation of Louises sonnet
Louises 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) lovers condition. The
poem has been criticized by some as an empty rhetorical exercise
(Gray, 2000: 98) but, as Gray also emphasizes, Louises 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.
Jay chaut estreme en endurant froidure:
La vie mest et trop molle et trop dure.
Jay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye:
Tout un coup je ris et je larmoye,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment jendure:
Mon bien sen va, et 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 desir 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: 223). In the 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 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 versication 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 jendure 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 reects a period of
longing and desire as yet unfullled. To the above formal features
of Louises sonnet may be added the accumulation and crescendo of
detail (auxesis, or incrementum) without specic cause or effect, and
without any undue or apparent psychologizing on the part of the
poet-persona. Louises 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 personas predicament
is stated simply and directly, without logical connectives (asyndeton):
Jay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye. The repetition of coup
(Tout 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 Louises analysis of her own condition:
I burn, yet I drown. Im sweltering, yet Im 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, Im 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, 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 Louises 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 Louises
self-analysis is further qualied, explained and justied.
A further adjustment in the prose rendering is that the personication
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 Thats
how it goes. Strange, ever changing love / has worn me out (2003).
The prose translation, on the other hand, renders Louises 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 reective nature of
Louises thoughts. There is no attempt, for instance, to use word play,
as in Dunstan Martins use of constant and inconstant. This shift
from love as personication to love as personal reection reinforces
Judy Sproxtons view that Louise is expressing here a consciousness
of a specic 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
Louises poem further away from the more gloomy constraints of
Petrarchism.
In Louises sonnet, the last ve lines herald a shift in Louises 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 poems turn. The prime difference
between this prose translation, suggested above, and Dunstan Martins
verse rendering of the sonnet, is that in the former the poet expresses
a greater sense of calmness and dignied 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 Louises
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 Louises calm, reective 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 produce
This wanton, wild, intense, exquisite pain.
Despite Parks modern register, and her ability to make Louises
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 personication 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 reecting 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 jay aim: from imperative to self-
reection
I shall now focus on Louises last sonnet, Ne reprenez, Dames,
si jay aim. This sonnet differs from the others in the collection,
in that it goes beyond personal self-reection to address the ladies
of Lyon and to give them advice should they 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 jay aim:
Si jay senti mile torches ardentes,
Mile travaus, mile douleurs mordentes;
Si en pleurant, jay mon tems consum,
Las que mon nom nen soit par vous blam.
Si jay failli, les peines sont presentes,
Naigrissez point leurs pointes violentes:
Mais estimez quAmour, point nomm,
Sans votre ardeur dun Vulcan excuser,
Sans la beaut dAdonis acuser,
Pourra, sil veut, plus vous rendre amoureuses:
En ayant moins que moy docasion,
Et plus destrange et forte passion.
Et gardez vous destre plus malheureuses.
(Rigolot, 1986: 1345)
To begin, again, with Dunstan Martins verse rendering, we may see
that this remains very close to the original French:
No need of Vulcan to explain your 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 difculty.
He suggests, ambiguously, that Vulcan could be an old, jealous
husband as well as a connotation of the ery aspect of love. It would
seem important, in any modern rendering of this poem, to clarify
Louises 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, Louises 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 Louises 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 Louises 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 nen soit par vous blam is translated as I do
not deserve a bad name because of this. This re-orientation from
imperative to self-reection 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 jay aim 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 Louises poetry was originally written.
Beyond Petrarchanism: the potential value of prose translation
The purpose of this article has been to investigate translations of
Louise Labs 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 reective manner, the poets
reection on her own condition. In Baise mencor, rebaise moy et
baise, this sense of reection and internal dialogue was achieved
by reducing the intensity of lexical choice, and seeking to maintain
the dignity of Louises expression through simple, straightforward
statements that avoid rhetorical embellishment, but which convey
the poets 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 Louises 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 loves assault. She does not simply
draw on Petrarchs codied 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 jay aim, has been
seen by some as an overtly political, or indeed feminist statement.
However, by adjusting the terms of Louises reection to avoid the use
of the imperative form, most often used in verse translations of this
poem, Louises writing is no longer quite so directive or dogmatic in
nature, and becomes a more self-reexive, 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 Louises poetry
included in this article all place emphasis on the poets 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
Sproxtons term, poeticised plaint (Sproxton, 2000: 92). In Louise
Labs 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
conrms Oppenheimers view that the sonnet form gives priority
to introspection and self-questioning (Oppenheimer, 1989: 9). The
dialogical structure of Louises 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 signicance of Louise Labs poetry. In a recent
study, Kennedy (2003) sees the entire development of Petrarchism
through the French Pliade 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
Louises importance primarily to the cultural and literary climate of
Renaissance Lyon itself. As a result of Louises association with the
cole Lyonnaise, which helped her to nd her voice in print, Moore
sees Labs poetry principally as an analysis of female selfhood, which
reects this openness in challenging ideas of femininity that limit
womens education and conne them to frivolous and unproductive
pursuits (Moore, 2000: 99). Davis also adopts a gender-specic read-
ing of Louises 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: 856).
This paper does not, of course, set out to devalue these global, pol-
itical readings of the site of Petrarchism (Kennedy, 2003) and Louises
role within it. However, it is hoped that the prose translations suggested
here reveal the tensions between the political and personal side of
Louises 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 Louises poems, and by heightening the
sense of self-reection 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.
References
Cameron, K. (1990) Louise Lab: Renaissance Poet and Feminist. Oxford: Berg.
Davis, N. Z. (1987) Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Deloffre, F. (1969) Le Vers franais. Paris: Socit ddition dEnseignement
Suprieur.
Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Erasmus, D. (1971) Praise of Folly, trans. B. Radice. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freccero, C. (2000) Louise Labs Feminist Poetics, in J. OBrien and M. Quainton
(eds), Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance
Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Grammont, M. (1962) Petit trait de versication franaise. Paris: Armand Colin.
Gray, F. (2000) Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, L. (1962) The Aesthetics of the Renaissance Love Sonnet: An Essay in the Art
of the Sonnet in the Poetry of Louise Lab. Droz: Geneva.
Kennedy, W. (2003) The Site of Petrarchism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Kirkup, J. (2001) Kiss me O come on, kiss. Available at: http://www.brindin.
com/pabbai.htm (accessed 28 April 2005).
Lesko Baker, D. (1996) The Subject of Desire. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University
Press.
Levin, P. (ed.) (2001) The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Moore, M. (2000) Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. Carbondale
and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Murgatroyd, P. (2000) The Amatory Elegies of Johannes Secundus. Leiden: Brill.
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paralllisme verbal, in D. Billy (ed.), Mtriques du moyen ge et de la Renaissance.
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Invention of the Sonnet. New York: Oxford University Press.
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d.haese/labe_engl.html (accessed 28 April 2005).
Rigolot, F. (ed.) (1986) Louise Lab: uvres compltes. Paris: Garnier Flammarion.
Rigolot, F. (1999) Le Phnomne Louise Lab: une invention Lyonnaise, in G.
Jondorf and P. Ford (eds), Womens Writing in the French Renaissance, pp.
10524. Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia.
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Marguerite de Navarre and Montaigne. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
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Edinburgh University Press.
Sproxton, J. (2000) The Idiom of Love. London: Gerald Duckworth.
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Bucknell University Press.
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: gerard.sharpling@btinternet.com]

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