trans. Leah Souffrant

Sonnet II

O eyes          o beautiful brown          o looking away
O black nights       o you o my o tears        o hot sighs
O in vain           I am keeping watch    o night
O In Vain         day follows day so radiant

And o sad complaints         o sad desires       and persisting
And o lost time         and o my despondent trials
A thousand deaths         a thousand times stretched
And the worst comes         fated         again         again

You laugh       o face    o hair         down arms hands fingers
You sad song           the strings the bow the voice         low         lowering
Into flames     lowering too low for me                         I’m languishing

While you      filling     swelling this    what                 Desire
This o again erupts into me                  while
You       you cool           so cool               You don’t even spark

Born in Lyon in the 16th century, Louise Labé is a renowned French poet of the Renaissance.

Leah Souffrant is the author of Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Collection Clinamen, Presses Universitaires de Liège 2017). She has recent work in Bone Bouquet, Jacket2, Poet Lore, WSQ, and elsewhere. Souffrant is on faculty at New York University. More about her work can be found at leahsouffrant.com. “Sonnet II” is a part of a cycle of re–imagined poems, “Qu’encor Amour”: Shaken Sonnets from Louise Labé, drawn from the poetry of Louise Labé.