Edward Byrne's Duets consists of interpretative translations of
sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon,
and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti.
In the case of Labé, the twenty-four sonnets - twenty-three in French,
one in Italian - constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the
duration of an intense love affair. In the case of Cavalcanti, the
sonnets are not sequential, but have been selected from the most
explicitly philosophical of his sonnets - those which demonstrate his
"radical Aristotelianism." In both cases, one of a pre-Petrarchan poet,
the other post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness,
madness, or malady and as something that gives rise to speculation
regarding the relationship between body and intellect.
The reader will find herein ninety poems, equally "translations" of Labé
and Cavalcanti and "versions" authored by Byrne. Each sonnet is made up
of nine lines, each line, in turn, made up of nine syllables. The work's
main body is written in the manner of the serial poem, a practice
whereby the composing mind passes from room to room - and from stanza to
stanza - in a kind of trance, forgetting and remembering. A distant but
undeniable antecedent to this practice, in the context of translation,
can be found in Robin Blaser's masterful translation of Gérard de
Nerval's Les Chimères. The second version of Louise Labé's sonnet
sequence was translated from Rilke's German version, using Labé's Middle
French text as a 'pony.' Interspersed within, or intervening in, the
translations are "sonnets" by Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Marcel
Proust, and Jacques Lacan. Between the main translations, readers will
discover a sequence of wild sonnets, or nonets, taken from a separate
collaboration of Byrne's with Kim Minkus, and a handful of sonnets by
Labé's contemporaneous admirers - members of her salon, such as Maurice
Scève and Clément Marot.
