Louise Labe

The work of Louise Labe is good to read in times of heartbreak, to which I am hardly a stranger. Yet I didn't re-discover this fact until somewhat recently, and completely by accident.

Louise Labe brings first to mind my undergraduate education, and then pre-Renaissance France. I recall reading a few of her poems as a bit of token "female French historical" works thrown my way during a survey course, and I felt quite underwhelmed by them. This would be the classic LL:

VIII
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.

Look, undergrad, observe the amazing contrast! Her use of obvious, binary pairs to express sorrow at love lost! I have in mind not so much a professor as an over-excited zookeeper, showing off a dried out specimen. This being the only poem I was given quickly extinguished any interest I may have had in her work. That's why presentation matters, people!

I gave her another shot a few months ago, and to my surprise, she made me cry. Not Louise herself, of course. Maybe I was having a bad day which rendered me overly receptive to her work, but -- the real point is that her words were powerful, were solace, and were really beautiful. I felt for a moment comforted by the fact that someone else had not only felt just as I felt then, but had done so more than 500 years ago - and hell, she not only survived, but made something beautiful out of all that pain.

Maybe she's premodern Chick Lit, but I'm okay with that.

As a female writer, I feel I perpetually wrestle with a "need to prove myself as a serious writer." Things core to my existence, to my worldview, tend to locate themselves in emotion, passion, ambiguity, flux. Those aren't feminine characteristics, of course, but I locate these universal themes in personal experiences - I can't just "get away from myself" and write about politics, like Yeats, or trees, like Wordsworth. There's something unmistakeably feminine in my voice and my subjects, and somewhere along the cultural line I feel it's often derided as whining, as stereotypical, as banal. I know I've heard one too many wisecracks in the press about "teenage girl angst poetry;" my ears prick up anytime I hear it on the telly (leading me to watch very little telly). But really - what's wrong with teenage girls writing poetry? Teenage girls grow up to be adult women, after all (well, many of us). I wonder why American media is driven to ridicule those who only want to articulate primal emotions and definitive life experiences - how the hell else do we contemplate and channel the meaning within our lives? It - I mean any sort of artistic expression, really - strikes me as a normal, healthy, human impulse, which is strangely and unfortunately sequestered off from the mainstream. I wonder what the teenage boys hear, absorb, and live out - it can't be much better. In fact, the silence could be worse.

The artifice adopted by so many medieval/Renaissance "greats" is so tiresome. But so is a stupid modern media rhetoric that teaches boys to be bread-winning robots and girls to be rhinestone soccer moms. My point: I do not believe that heartbreak is a trivial or self-indulgent topic, although it can be handled with varying degrees of success. I love Louise Labe for being one of the first - and very few - women who wrote about it with absolutely no qualms. Every poem bursts with love and sorrow. There is no compromise, and no idealization of her lover - who is in fact less of interest, seemingly, then her emotions about the lover's desertion.

VII (English translation)

All that draws breath must die; the soul, astray,
flies from teh body, quite the human state:
the body, I; you, its most perfect mate.
Where are you, soul beloved? Tell me, pray.

Leave me not long a-swoon, for well you may,
coming to succor me, arrive too late.
Let not this body - yours - suffer that fate,
but give it back its better half straightaway.

Yet, Friend, let danger not accompany
that sweet reunion; let love, rather, be
its boon companion, neither pitiless

nor harsh; but gracious, and of gentle air,
to grant me once again your loveliness,
and all its erstwhile cruelty forswear.

Oh maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. Even just typing that out broke my heart - my favorite bit being in the first stanza, "the body, I; you" -- even the words are straining to be closer, to couple with the ever elusive "you," but that damn semi-colon separates them (not present in the French version, though). Longing for that which is long gone - the poet ends by trying to cut a deal, by offering unconditional forgiveness -but we know it's too late. The poem ends so hopefully, and yet is completely doomed.

Or, just a nice piece from # V:

The human spirit, bowed beneath its woes,
eagerly years for sleep and sweet repose.
Ill do I bear the Sun's clear-shining light.

A bit of seasonal depression, eh, Louise?

I'm all thought out now. I'll fix this later.