Description

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Edward Byrne's Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Lab , who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti.

In the case of Lab , 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 Lab 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 G rard de Nerval's Les Chim res. The second version of Louise Lab 's sonnet sequence was translated from Rilke's German version, using Lab '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 Lab 's contemporaneous admirers - members of her salon, such as Maurice Sc ve and Cl ment Marot.

About the Author

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Edward Byrne was born in Hamilton Ontario, and moved to Vancouver in the late sixties. His earlier writing appeared in publications like Canadian Forum and Fiddlehead. He earned Masters in Comparative Literature at UBC where he still teaches one class each term in the Humanities 101 Program. Byrne was the Director of the Trade Union Research Bureau for many years. He was also a board member of the Kootenay School of Writing for ten years. Currently he is a member and Treasurer of the Lacan Salon and a member of the Meschonnic Study Group. He is working on various writing projects, including: a sequel to his novel Beautiful Lies; a book of short poems.