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Although her literary output was small, Louise Labe's reputation is great. Her name is associated with the literary and intellectual forces in Lyons in the 16th century and with that of the growing role of women in society. Her poetry appealed to late Elizabethan England, and a translation of her work by Robert Greene was published in 1584 and again in 1587, 1593 and 1604. Is her celebrity to be attributed to the fact that she was a woman? Was she an intellectual, or a courtesan, or both? What is it that enables her work to trascend the changing tastes of the centuries? This volume explores these questions in depth and provides a most readable account of the life and work of this fascinating poet.
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.
Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé's elegies in their entirety.
The love sonnets of Louise Labé of Lyons and the gilded legend of her life in the early years of the French Renaissance have appealed to the imagination of four centuries. Printed here beside the text of the 1556 edition, the translations of the sonnets by Alta Lind Cook follow closely the original version and admirably retain its sweep and movement, its simplicity and melody. The rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet has been preserved with variations and corresponding to those of the French. With the poems, the translator presents a sketch of the circumstances and background of this unique literary figure of the Sixteenth Century, known in France and outside of France as La Belle Cordière. These translations by Alta Lind Cook are fine poetry; in English as in French the reader finds "present reality in their hope and their despair, their independence and their impertinence, their tears and their sparkle."
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"Many fictional works have real, historical authors as characters. Great national literary icons like Virgil and Shakespeare have been fictionalized in novels, plays, poems, movies, and operas. This fashion might seem typically postmodern, the reverse side of the contention that the Author is Dead; but this collection of essays shows that the representation of historical authors as characters can boast of a considerable history, and may well constitute a genre in its own right. This volume brings together a collection of articles on appropriations of historical authors, written by experts in a wide range of major Western literatures."--BOOK JACKET.
The French Renaissance poet Louise Labe is one of the most striking and influential women writers of early modern Europe. In her broad-ranging volume of prose and poetic works (1555), Labe transforms the position of woman in Renaissance discourse from an object to a subject of erotic and artistic desire and privileges the notion of desire itself as a central issue for literary and psychic exploration. Deborah Lesko Baker presents the dramatic creation and evolution of female subjectivity in Labe as a passionate quest for internal selfhood made possible through both authentic self-expression and interaction with others. In so doing she analyzes how the development of the female subject coincides with an ongoing interrogation of the inherited models of the Petrarchan lyric tradition.