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Duets: Sonnets: Louise Labé and Guido Cavalcanti
Duets is a translation of the sonnets of Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in 16th-century Lyon, and those of the 13th-century Florentine, Guido Cavalcanti.
In the case of Louise, the twenty-four sonnets constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the duration of an intense love relation. In Guido’s case, the sonnets are not sequential, but rather have been selected because they are the most directly philosophical, those which best illustrate his “radical Aristotelianism.” In each case, one pre-Petrarchan, one post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness, madness, or malady, and as something that gives rise to speculation regarding the relation between body and intellect.
Duets tests the borders of translation and its failure, proposing an opacity that functions as a mirror of the translated body. The translated text is brought across in fragments, like the body of the deluded Hippolytus, and reconfigured into an eternally faithful servant of its deity. Or the translator, like Actaeon, is drawn to a closed space and, as voyeur, violates a scene he has no business with, and consequently finds himself transformed and torn apart.
In the case of Louise, the twenty-four sonnets constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the duration of an intense love relation. In Guido’s case, the sonnets are not sequential, but rather have been selected because they are the most directly philosophical, those which best illustrate his “radical Aristotelianism.” In each case, one pre-Petrarchan, one post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness, madness, or malady, and as something that gives rise to speculation regarding the relation between body and intellect.
Duets tests the borders of translation and its failure, proposing an opacity that functions as a mirror of the translated body. The translated text is brought across in fragments, like the body of the deluded Hippolytus, and reconfigured into an eternally faithful servant of its deity. Or the translator, like Actaeon, is drawn to a closed space and, as voyeur, violates a scene he has no business with, and consequently finds himself transformed and torn apart.
112 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2018
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