Mistressing the Impossible Art of Translating Poetry: How I Fed the Ghost of Louise Labe

Louise Labé is a deeply, and paradoxically, passionate poet. Her elaborate metaphors and frank self-reflection in the face of intricate feelings are as heroic, in their own context, as Emily Dickinson’s. Her passion, her courage, her playfulness, and her pain reflect struggles not only of the emotions but of the spirit. The paradox in her work is that she is not a metaphysical poet or a religious poet, but solely a love poet. The searching voice Labé projects in her poetry is strengthened in its individuality, made more complex, by her focus on her feelings towards another.

Although Louise Labé has sometimes been overlooked in canonical surveys of Renaissance poetry, she was recognized as an important writer in her own time. Her poetry was circulated and read in the literary circles of her native Lyons, and she early earned the nickname of “La Sappho Lyonnaise.” In 1555 she published a book which included her own poems as well as poems written about her by male contemporaries, a collection successful enough to be republished in two subsequent editions.

Still, for several centuries after her death, Labé suffered the fate common to female love poets from Sappho to Millay; she was more famous for legends about her personal life — in Labé’s case, dressing in men’s clothing, her purported affair with King Henri II, her skill at jousting — than for her writing. She inspired novels, plays, an opera, and poems by Rilke and others. In 1887, a definitive edition of her poems was finally published. Recently, literary criticism has begun to explore with more careful attention this body of poetry that has been called “the first and most resonant and integrally feminist poetry in all of French literature.”

Labé wrote her 25 sonnets and her 3 long rhyming couplet “elegies” just after the height of the Petrarchan influence on Renaissance love-poetry, when disillusion with the Petrarchan tradition of the idealized woman and her frustrated lover had begun to set in. She used a female poetic voice both to explore the validity of the Petrarchan traditions for expressing female passion and to critique those traditions. Whether she is entreating kisses in her famous Sonnet 18, voicing classic paradoxes in sonnet 8, lamenting male impotence in sonnet 16, or casting herself in a forest encounter with Diana in sonnet 19, she plays with and off the traditional Petrarchan love sonnet, teasing and adding fresh twists to the old imagery. But always, in the role of nymph, martyr, philosopher, mocker, or seductress, she is unflinching in claiming her own passion.

The Petrarchan sonnet provided Labé with a material obdurate and resistant enough to exercise her skill and shape her emotions. Her play with the Petrarchan tradition is rendered more piercing by her skill in manipulating its conventional forms. When I set out to translate Labé’s complete poems, I decided not to use free verse or the English sonnet as her previous translators had done, but to translate each of her poems in accordance with the particular Petrarchan rhyme-scheme she had originally found for it. I felt strongly that the poems’ ceaseless, anguished struggle with love has its appropriate incarnation in the repetitive intensity of Labé’s rhymes, which involve four, six, or even eight words rhymed on a single sound. My use of the original rhyming patterns is intended to emphasize the insistent emotion of the poems; to force the syntax and the logical connections between parts into complex patterns reminiscent of those in the original; and of course to best echo Labé’s original music.

My choice to render Labé’s original forms, as it turned out, involved me in an ongoing contemporary debate over the relative places of form and spirit in the translation of poetry. As I have become familiar with this debate and the implications of my choice, I have become even more convinced that it was the right choice. As a reader of translations, I feel cheated if the translator doesn’t convey to me the physical experience of the movement of the original poem. Recently, I read a new translation of the Belgian modernist poet Maurice Maeterlink, whose poems indulge themselves in, among other things, decadent excesses of repetition. The word “swan” might appear eight times in one poem, for example. This translator, however, had toned down the wild effect by simply ignoring most of the repetition. The resulting poem was more palatable than the original by today’s standards, but what’s the point? Knowing that Maeterlink wanted to use a disgraceful amount of repetition, and experiencing something close to the physical reality of the original poem, is more important to me, and certainly more interesting, than having a palatable experience.

Today we may mock the self-satisfaction of eighteenth-century poets, such as Pope and Dryden, who were so convinced of the superiority of the heroic couplet that they used it to translate poems that were originally vastly different in form. But contemporary translations that render all poetry, no matter what its original form, into free verse are falling into the same trap. Like Pope and Dryden, we are convinced that our own dominant poetic mode is the one best suited to represent the poetic spirit of ANY great poem. Ignoring the original patterning of so many poems, we are actually imposing our own kind of physical censorship on the poets’ original impulses. Of course, there is room for all kinds of translations and imitations and “afters,” the more the merrier. And sometimes a poet makes an unfaithful translation that is better than the original. Still, as a translator, I feel that to work with the original form is the surest way for me to enter in the body of the poem.

An interviewer once asked me what I thought about the French proverb, “translations are like women; if they are faithful, they are not beautiful, and if they are beautiful, they are not faithful.” The unfaithfulness I found necessary to make Labé ‘s poems work was not adultery but a mild flirtation, moving a flicker of freedom across the beautifully faithful bones. I enjoy the challenge of bringing necessities to life, and most of the time, as in the Labé translation, I don’t feel that I have to sacrifice meaning for form at all. I started by being completely faithful to all the Renaissance conventions — every ah and oh, every odd comma, and every oft-repeated word. With later drafts, I modernized and simplified just enough to stop the diction from being too distracting, so the poems would have more of the directness and frankness they would have had to their original readers. In the last stage, I put the original away and deliberately treated the poems as originals, feeling free to loosen the syntax and word-for-word correspondence wherever the creative impulse seemed undermined. It wasn’t necessary to do much tinkering at this stage, but it was a crucial stage.

I did make a few changes that seemed essential artistic choices; in Sonnet 18, for example, I felt compelled to translate the word “folie” as “something honest.” I was concerned that these changes might be giong too far, a fear that was part of my motivation in sending the Labé translations to Deborah Baker, an esteemed Labé scholar I much admired. To my delight, she was inspired by them to make a new translation of Labé’s prose to be published in a volume with the poems by the University of Chicago Press. In her introduction, Baker discusses as creative choices the few real liberties I took. About Sonnet 18, she wrote, “If “folie” fundamentally represents desires motivated by the emotions and spirit that do not conform to the tenets of logical reason and conventional social propriety, such desires–although perhaps viewed from the outside as “mad” when voiced by a 16th-century woman–constitute the basis of what for Louise Labé is true honesty and authenticity in being. . . .” It was reassuring to know that a Labé scholar thought my creative choice a way of bringing forward Labé’s meaning in a contemporary context. Her response reaffirmed my belief that the translator and the translated serve the same art, that poetry, ultimately, has really only one language.

My experience translating Labé gave me several gifts, the most valuable being a deep sense of poetic kinship, of having shared my ear with another poet’s muse. Whether this kinship is the result of psychological projection, a shared sensibility, or simply the inevitable result of my commitment to translate a poet’s full poetic oeuvre, I have no way of knowing. But I like to think that, in some uncanny way, Labé herself played a part. At several points, I was sure I had finally found the Labé sonnet that would get the better of me and force me to fall back on the English sonnet form, with its fewer rhymed words. Each time this happened, before long a solution would come that did preserve the rhyme scheme of the original. Finally it seemed that Labé’s passionate, committed spirit, or her muse, sustained me at these moments, and I found myself in the habit of murmuring, thank you, Louise, as I worked. Thank you, Louise, for all those moments, and even more, for your passion and your poems.

SONNET 18: Kiss Me Again

Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss

me again, with your richest, most succulent

kiss; then adore me with another kiss, meant

to steam out fourfold the very hottest hiss

from my love-hot coals. Do I hear you moaning? This

is my plan to soothe you: ten more kisses, sent

just for your pleasure. Then, both sweetly bent

on love, we’ll enter joy through doubleness,

and we’ll each have two loving lives to tend:

one in our single self, one in our friend.

I’ll tell you something honest now, my Love:

it’s very bad for me to live apart.

There’s no way I can have a happy heart

without some place outside myself to move.

— Louise Labé, translated by Annie Finch

This essay was first published in The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self by Annie Finch (University of Michigan Press, 2005). It is based on the poetry translator’s preface to Complete Poetry and Prose of Louise Labé, edited and with a critical introduction by Deborah Baker, with poetry translations by Annie Finch (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Annie Finch is an award-winning poet, translator, cultural critic, and performance artist. Known for her incantatory poems and mesmerizing performances, Finch is the author of seven volumes of poetry. She has written and edited thirteen books on poetic craft, most recently How to Scan a Poem. Her work has appeared in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of World Literature and been translated into nine languages. Awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the Art and Craft of Versification, she has performed her poetry across the U.S. and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe. She lives in New York City.

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