Je vis, je meurs : je me brule et me noye.
J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure :
La
vie m’est et trop molle et trop dure.
J’ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye :
Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,
Et en
plaisir maint grief tourment j’endure :
Mon
bien s’en va, et à 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 desiré heur,
Il me
remet en mon premier malheur.
Io vivo, io muoio; io
brucio e annego.
Ho caldo estremo
sopportando il freddo;
mi è vita troppo
molle e troppo dura.
Ho gran fatica inframmezzata
a gioia;
tuttauntratto io rido
e lacrimo,
e nel piacere ho
dolore e tormento;
se ne va il mio bene,
e per sempre dura;
tuttauntratto io
secco e rinverdisco.
Così mi porta Amore
incostantemente;
e quando penso avere
più dolore,
senza pensar mi trovo
fuor di pena.
Poi quando credo
gioia esser sicura,
essere al sommo della
mia fortuna,
mi ripiomba egli
nella disgrazia.
I live, I die: I burn myself, I drown.
I'm hot
in the extreme while suffering cold.
Life is
too soft for me, too hard to hold.
My joy
and heavy ache are mixed in one
At once I laugh and smile, and weep and frown
In
pleasure, my heart finds great pangs and grief.
The good
flies off, yet stays without relief.
At once
I blossom green, and wither brown.
Thus does Love lead me on capriciously,
And when
I think my lot is but more pain
With scarce a thought I find myself
pain-free.
Then when I think my joy a certainty
And
fortune's peak is finally my domain,
He casts
me down to deep old grief again.
Note on the French text:
L13: Heur does not, as all of Labé's most prominent
English translators seem to think, have the primary meaning of
"hour." The Renaissance French word for hour was heure, with an E at
the end, just as in modern French. Heur, here being opposed to the related
malheur, meant "fortune, chance." Reading it as "hour"
makes the line in question into bathetic nonsense. Hours, being time units,
tend to pass. Why Labé would think herself at the peak of her sought-after
hour, and then expect the reader to be surprised that that hour passes away, as
is the wont of hours to do, is a mystery to me.
The mistake of translators is all the more amusing
given that plays on heur vs heure were, as one would expect, quite common. For
example there's Labé's colleague Maurice Sceve writing "Et tant me fut
l'heur, et l'heure importune..." and Labé herself lamenting l'heur passé
"past fortune" which one translator renders as "hours, gone
now" thereby allowing linguistic incompetence to riotously yet unpardonably
force Labé's subversion of a cliché to be replaced with the actual cliché
itself.
The mistake may be due to the fact that the word is
little used in modern French, with the exception of some fossilized phrases
such as Il n'y a qu'heur et malheur dans ce monde "There is but fortune
and misfortune in this world" and Je n'ai pas eu l'heur de... meaning
"I haven't had the pleasure of...", usually meant sarcastically with
the implication that the object of the phrase is something rather
unpleasurable.
*
Las! Que me sert, que si parfaitement
Louas
jadis et ma tresse doree,
Et de mes
yeus la beauté comparee
A deus
soleils, dont Amour finement
Tira les trets causez de ton tourment?
Où estes
vous, pleurs de peu de duree?
Et Mort
par qui devoit estre honoree
Ta ferme
amour et 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 et de despit et d’ire:
Mais je
m’assure, quelque part que tu sois,
Qu’autant
que moy tu soufres de martire.
Ahimè che giova che
perfettamente
lodassi già e mia treccia
dorata,
e dei miei occhi la
bellezza compari
a due soli, dove Amor
finemente
tira strali le cause
di tormento?
Dove voi, pianti di
poco momento?
E Morte in cui
dev'essere onorato
per tua costanza il
ripetuto voto?
Dunque era meta della
tua malizia
asservirmi adombrando
servizio?
Perdonami, Amico, per
questa volta,
son forsennata e di
dispetto e d'ira:
ma sicuro, ovunque
ora tu sia,
tantoquanto me soffri
il martirio.
What use to me that you sang long ago
The expert
praise of my gold flowing hair,
And eyes,
whose beauty you had to compare
To double
suns, whence Love with fine-tuned bow
Shot the bright shafts that needled you with woe?
Ah
momentary tears, where are you now?
Where now
the Death whereby you bound that vow
Of
steadfast love which you repeated so?
I see the goal behind the ruse you gave me:
Pretend to
serve, the better to enslave me.
Just this
one time, my darling, pardon me
For I'm hysterical with rage and spite,
Yet am
assured: wherever you may be,
Love
tortures you as much as me tonight.
Two notes on the French text:
L5: Trets of course means "darts, arrows (of
love)" and also "traits, features."
L9: Renaissance French Malice is not the malignity of
Modern English "malice" though almost all Labé's translators into
English seem to have taken this as the primary sense. The word has, and has had
over the history of the French language, a multitude of meanings and shades
thereof. By this word, in her time and place, Labé probably means something
like "toying" or more precisely: screwing around with someone without
due regard for their well-being, but more for your own pleasure than out of a
desire to do them harm. Yet the word also has other resonances, and polysemy is
one of Labé's best skills.
On Louise Labé:
Louise Labé was - apart from being a great poet of
16th century France - an accomplished scholar and linguist (by my reckoning,
she knew at least French, Latin, Spanish and Italian, and possibly some Greek
and Provençal), a spirited horsewoman and an outspoken defender of women's
humanity. I usually don't like to use the term "feminism" to describe
advocates of women's dignity from before the 19th century, but in Labé's case I
really think it applies. Her surviving writings (of which there are extremely
few) attest to a powerful vision of emancipation for women both in public and
private life. Her achievement was possible because Lyonnais society, relatively
speaking, offered women a considerable measure of freedom and opportunities
which would have been denied them in other parts of Europe at the time. It is
no accident that not just Labé but a few other women of letters hailed from
16th century Lyon. One might compare this to the exclusively male output of
other contemporaneous literary centers.
"Estant le tems venu, Madamoiselle, que les
severes loix des hommes n’empeschent plus les femmes de s’apliquer aus sciences
et disciplines: il me semble que celles qui ont la commodité, doivent employer
cette honneste liberté, que notre sexe ha autre fois tant desiree, à icelles
aprendre: et montrer aus hommes le tort qu’ils nous faisoient en nous privant
du bien et de l’honneur qui nous en pouvoit venir"
"Since the time has now come, Madamoiselle. when
men’s draconian laws can no longer prevent women from applying themselves to
scholarship and learning, it seems to me that those with the means should avail
themselves of this deserved freedom— which our sex so deeply desired in ages
past —to pursue them: demonstrate to men how wrong they were to deprive us of
the benefit and esteem we might have earned by achieving these things."
- Louise Labé, from an epistle written in 1555.
Labé could not have known that the growing trend of
female emancipation in her region was going to completely reverse itself a few
decades after her death, and her dream would have to wait hundreds of years
more to begin to be realized.
Which brings me to my next point: until recently none
of this has been the chief fuel for posterity's interest in her.
That she was a celebrated beauty we know because her
male contemporaries did as men often do with women who distinguish themselves
intellectually, and made much of her appearance. One wonders whether the
amatory verse of her male contemporary, the celebrated Pierre de Ronsard, would
have achieved preeminence had readership and posterity paid that kind of
attention to how very ugly he was by the standards of his time.
She was also the subject of much popular male
opprobrium in her own day (the society of Lyon may have been relatively
flexible and free, but even the Lyonnais had limits), and much male innuendo in
the centuries after her death, principally for her forays into typically male
domains. Calvin famously called her a plebeia meretrix "common whore"
(He especially disapproved of her wearing men's clothes, and of her encouraging
women to focus on cultural and intellectual development rather than on jewels
and fashion.) Mind you, there's nothing wrong with actually being a whore,
common or uncommon, but Labé clearly wasn't one.
While not always approaching Calvin's crudity, a
goodly amount of the scholarship on her until recently has focused - to put it
bluntly - on which men she did, or did not, have sex with (and if so, how
much.) I'm not even kidding. The writings about her from before the second half
of the 20th century, with the wildly overblown comparisons between her and
Sappho, sometimes read like an almost parodic refraction of male sexual
psychoses into the realm of literary criticism.
Now onto Labé's poetics:
My own interest in Labé is, as it ever is with poetry,
in her actual skill as a wielder of language. The Petrarchan poetic tradition,
imported from Italy, exerted a strong influence on the literary scene of Labé's
place and time, and she imbibed it deeply, even going so far as to write one of
her sonnets in Italian. She writes not merely within, but also against, that
universe, constantly exploring both the possibility and the difficulty of using
it as a medium to express feminine lust, and much more besides.
She is ever unflinching in claiming her own passion
for male beloveds (though that by no means makes her transparent or unambiguous
as some have claimed - her verse-passion is no less complex than that of her
male contemporaries.) At the same time she uses the Petrarchan tradition to
critique or mock the insincerity or absurdity that the male dominance of that
tradition typically suppresses.
Alongside bold statements of passion, and urgings
directed toward other women to explore their desire, the reader finds, for
example, a sonnet lamenting a desired man's sexual impotence. Elsewhere in
prose, she has an insecure Venus validating herself exclusively through Cupid's
visual assessment of her own good looks, and does so to satirize the blason (a
Renaissance poetic genre characterized by male praise of specific female body
parts. Yes, it is just as disturbing as it sounds. Heinrich Heine in the
nineteenth century was to satirize the convention quite riotously in this poem
in German, though from a masculine perspective.)
Anyway, in the poem translated above, one finds Labé
lamenting - as is her wont - a man's failure to deliver. In this case, she is
undercutting the semantic value of the poetic clichés men's verse typically
used to describe women (golden hair, eyes like suns, cupid's arrow, I would die
before I cease to love thee, etc.) and
demonstrating that that banality corresponds to
dishonesty, namely that of a man lacking the courage of his conceits.
