Emblems of Desire

Richard Sieburth has performed a magnificent service by translating a large selection of the book-length love poem 'DElie' by Maurice ScEve, one of the greatest French Renaissance poets, whose work is hardly known in English. He has found a contemporary equivalent for ScEve's extremely compact music and enabled it to breathe in English, while still retaining the tension of the original. -- John Ashbery Richard Sieburth has performed a miracle of literary invention. He has made these poems sing. -- Paul Auster The most intense and tightly controlled verse written in the French Renaissance. -- Jerry C. Nash, author of Love Aesthetics of Maurice ScEve The translations are tours de force, rendering ScEve's concentrated phrases into accessible, often charming English verse. -- Margaret M. McGowan, Times Literary Supplement A true credit to both an exacting and inventive work, Sieburth's translations remain the highlight of this handsome collection of scorned love, an impressive English introduction to the 'DElie'. -- Rain Taxi Recovered, rediscovered early in the twentieth century, the radically inventive and challenging poetry of Maurice ScEve forms an important link in the history of European lyric from the Renaissance to the present. Its complexly erotic silences and harmonies speak as vividly to our own deeply unsettled moment as they must have to that vital circle of poets and humanists of Lyons, who were among the first in France to explore the Petrarchan field of desire. What a great gift, to receive these virtuosic renditions in English from one of our finest living scholars and translators, Richard Sieburth. -- Michael Palmer It is rare to see a book so perfectly equipped to both befriend the non-specialist reader and aid the scholar. If ScEve's work is finally to enter the mainstream, this is the book that will make it possible. -- Jennifer Grotz, Boston Review An exquisite version, a marvelous contribution. -- Harold Bloom