Skip to product information
1 of 1

Love Sonnets and Elegies

Love Sonnets and Elegies

by Louise Labé, preface by Karin Lessing, edited and translated from the French by Richard Sieburth

Regular price $12.95
Regular price $0.00 Sale price $12.95
Format

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.

labe

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781590177310
Pages: 120
Publication Date:

Praise

The deeply learned Louise Labé knew well the love poetry of Sappho, Propertius, Ovid, and Petrarch, but she herself joined the ranks of these great Western tossers and turners by breaking with convention. Across five centuries, thanks to Richard Sieburth's beautiful translations, her urgent voice, her embodied images, and her rapid, somehow breathless, lines come to us as if they were spoken yesterday.
—Susan Stewart

Richard Sieburth has captured the vigor, intensity, and vernacular tang of Louise Labé's startling poems. He has turned the 'rhymed cordage as twined and tensile as rope' of the fabled Belle Cordiere, daughter of a ropemaker, into spirited poems in English.
—Rosanna Warren

[Labé] laments for one alone, but the whole of nature unites with them: it is the lament for one who is eternal.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

A great poet, perhaps one of the greatest of all time.
—The Polar Bear, a character in Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it