Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition

Louise Labé, (c. 1520 or 1522, Lyon – April 25, 1566, Parcieux), also identified as La Belle Cordière, (The Beautiful Ropemaker), was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born in Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet. A recent book has argued that the poetry ascribed to her was a feminist creation of a number of French male poets of the Renaissance.

Her Œuvres include two prose works: a feminist preface, urging women to write, that is dedicated to a young noblewoman of Lyon, Clemence de Bourges; and a dramatic allegory in prose entitled Débat de Folie et d’Amour, which belongs to a long tradition with examples from antiquity through to the middle ages, a tradition that had gained contempoarary prominence due to the controversial satire, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. The Débat, the most admired of her works in the sixteenth century, was used as the source for one of the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, and was translated into English by Robert Greene in 1584.

Her poetry consists of three elegies in the style of the Heroides of Ovid, and twenty-four sonnets that draw on the traditions of Neoplatonism and Petrarchism. The great theme of her sonnets are the longings, torments and satisfactions of a passionate love which, however noble, is very much of this world, with no metaphysical concepts evoked and no references to a more perfect world than this one. A critic such as Breghot du Lut, writing for the 1824 edition of her works, found that he must apologise to the reader for her explicitness of some of her works; Saint-Beuve, in 1845, expressed something that was to become a refrain for readers and critics up to this day: despite hew work showing that she was highly learned, this does not prevent her from seeming to speak to contempoary readers in a very direct way.

Her poetry was singled out among that of her contemporaries for special praise by Rilke, with Ferdimand Brunetière, in his 1900 article on the Pléiade and Lyonnese schools, writing that her poetry was the first time in French that passion was expressed with such vehemence and naiveté. Modern critics cite her rejection of the more showy or extravagant metaphors and poetic effects employed by poets such as Scève or Pernette du Guillet as one of the key components of her originality and appeal for the modern reader, with Jerry C. Nash writing in 1980

Labé’s lyrical voice is truly one of the best expressions in literature of artful simplicity, of a consistent and masterly synthesis of fond and forme, of passion and poetry”.

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