French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff & the Pen (review)

Originally conceived, in the translator's words, as a "pleasant little volume," French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff & the Pen evolved into a singularly monumental achievement in the literary rediscovery of female-authored poetry. Award-winning translator Norman R. Shapiro has selected and translated over 600 poems penned by 56 French-speaking women poets spanning the Middle Ages to the present, breathing new life into a diverse corpus of verse and making much of it accessible for the first time to Anglophone readers. Accompanied by Shapiro's own preface and his biographies, literary appreciations, notes, and source guides for each poet, this anthology also features a foreword by American poet Rosanna Warren, a selected bibliography, and three critical introductions by disciplinary specialists Roberta Kreuger, Catherine Lafarge, and Catherine Perry to each of its three main chronological subsections: the Middle Ages & Renaissance, the 17th & 18th Centuries, and the 19th & 20th Centuries. The volume thus provides the literary and sociohistorical background, as well as the linguistic supports, that make it well suited for scholarly and pedagogical contexts, as well as for pure enjoyment.

As Warren's foreword underlines, as fascinating as are the lives of many women authors, until very recently, "the lives have often stood in for the writing." And although the introductions and biographies provide ample discussion of the poets as historical figures, as well as of the challenges they faced in a social fabric and literary canon dominated by men, Shapiro's translations refocus the reader's attention squarely on their artistry. This refocusing emerges through Shapiro's approach to translation itself, which privileges a "fidelity" to communicating not only message, but tone, and to incorporating the rhythms, rhyme schemes, and poetic devices of the original works. His sustained capacity, from medieval to contemporary verse, to reproduce the integral voice of each poet is nothing short of remarkable.

As Kreuger's introduction points out, the works of Marie de France, the first known woman poet writing in French, establishes three key registers adopted in female medieval and Renaissance verse: the didactic (in the Fables), the courtly or lyric (in the Lais), and the devotional (in Saint Patrick's Purgatory). Shapiro conveys the earthy humor of her Fables, as in "The Peasant and the Beetle," where he hilariously describes the opening plight of the commoner protagonist: "A loutish lummox lay a-dozing,/Flat on his face, his arse exposing/Unto the sun, with cheeks spread wide;/When lo! A beetle crawled inside." Although Christine de Pizan, France's first "professional" woman of letters, is best known for her inaugural role in the "Querelle des femmes," Shapiro's attention to her short courtly lyrics accentuates their startling compactness. Christine's following "Rondeau" suggests the haunting repetitive terseness of Emily Dickinson's "Wild Nights": "My love, come yet again this night,/At that same hour I said before./To frolic to our hearts' delight,/My love come yet again this night."

French Renaissance women's poetry has enjoyed a vibrant revival since the 1990's, with numerous modern and bilingual editions produced in large part thanks to the assiduous publishing of Droz Press in Geneva and "The Other Voice" series at the University of Chicago Press. Shapiro provides substantial examples from the key female Petrarchan and Neoplatonic poets of 16th-century Lyon, Pernette du Guillet and, most famously, Louise Labé, whose works currently enjoy a particular notoriety in a debate over their authorship. Although Shapiro translates fifteen of Labé's twenty-four sonnets, he interestingly opts not to include her most famous piece, Sonnet 18—"Baise m'encor, rebaise moy, et baise"—perhaps because of its many already existing translations. He does, however, capture an implicit element in the lesser-known Sonnet 19 that I have not found noted in any previous translation. Here, Diana, goddess of chastity and the hunt, encounters the dazed female...