Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)
Emblems of Desire by Maurice Sceve
Add Emblems of Desire to bookshelf
Add to Bookshelf

Emblems of Desire

Best Seller
Emblems of Desire by Maurice Sceve
Paperback $15.00
May 29, 2007 | ISBN 9780977857654

Buy from Other Retailers:

  • $15.00

    May 29, 2007 | ISBN 9780977857654

    Buy from Other Retailers:

Product Details

Praise

Richard Sieburth has performed a magnificent service by translating a large selection of the book-length love poem ‘Délie’ by Maurice Scève, one of the greatest French Renaissance poets, whose work is hardly known in English. He has found a contemporary equivalent for Scève’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 Scève

The translations are tours de force, rendering Scève’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 ‘Délie’. — Rain Taxi

Recovered, rediscovered early in the twentieth century, the radically inventive and challenging poetry of Maurice Scève 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 Scève’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

Looking for More Great Reads?
21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read
Back to Top