(Always) time for poetry again and again
One of the finest makers of poetry in the renaissance period is the French poetess Louise Labé. A recent study by Mireille Huchon (Louise Labé, une creature de papier - a creation on paper)states that she was invented by a number of poets of that period. For me her poetry is typical for a feministic woman of that time, a bit provocative, but that is no raison to think that a woman couldn’t have written that. I believe in the renaissance were a number of libertine women able to write in a way to excite the men, because the period allowed such a behaviour and art forms. There are a lot of mysteries round the figure of Louise, a well-loved woman by many men, with a whimsical spirit just like many men want it to be. In 1555 she published her only volume 'les oeuvres' containing 3 elegies, 24 sonnets, a long dialogue between 'folie et amour' in prose and a number of dithyrambic verses by contemporaries expressing their admiration for her. After this work nobody speaks of her again. It appears for Mireille Huchon that the circle of poets round Louise has made this 'oeuvre', she thinks in the workshop of Jean de Tournes, as a sort of farce. This was nothing special in those days for the literary interested people of Lyon as they were used to 'masquerades', allegoric and mythological figures and paradox literature, as well as debating in Neo-Platonic sense about the 'virtue' of love. So this project of 'praising' Louise is surely inspired by the 'laudare Laura' of Petrarca, adapted to the circumstances of 1555 Lyon, and so these funny poets made a cynical portrait of a straw puppet just to play with.
A poem I immediately was impressed by is:
Baise-m’encor, rebaise-moi et baise…
Baise-m’encor, rebaise-moi et baise;
Donne-m’en un de tes plus savoureux,
Donne-m’en un de tes plus amoureux :
Je t’en rendrai quatre plus chauds que braise.
The first lines reminds me every time of the movie ‘Niagara’ in which Marilyn sings one of her best songs: ‘Kiss me!’ it’s the same freely way of speech as Louise Labé:
Kiss me encore, kiss me again and kiss me…
Kiss me encore, kiss me again and kiss me;
Give me one of your most delicious,
Give me one of your most loveliest :
I will give four more warm and fury.
But Louise is at her best in expressing the fluctuating feelings of love, the same way as I feel them. One of my favourite sonnets:
Je vis, je meurs; je me brûle et me noie
Je vis, je meurs ; je me brûle et me noie ;
J’ai chaud extrême en endurant froidure ;
La vie m’est et trop molle et trop dure ;
J’ai grands ennuis entremêlés de joie.
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 sèche et je verdoye.
Ainsi Amour inconstamment me mène ;
Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser je me trouve hors de peine.
Puis quand je crois ma joie être certaine
Et être au haut de mon désiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.
I live, I die, I burn and I drown;
I feel hot while enduring the cold;
Life is for me too weak and too hard;
I am bothered while I am having fun.
Suddenly I laugh and I weep;
And in pleasure I feel pain and torment;
Things are going well and that seems to stay;
Till in a flash I dry out or go green.
So Love leads me inconstantly;
And when I think I am so much in pain;
Without thinking the grief is gone.
But when I am sure my joy is certain;
And all my desire is on the level;
It puts me back in my previous misfortune.
And that's what Eve now has become to me too: a petrarcan Laura, a lyonnese Louise, a figure of literature, a subject worth writing about. I don't need to see her in real, I see her as I saw her last, perhaps seeing her again might disappoint me because she is almost 3 years older than then.