Emblems of Desire · Default Product

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This is the first large-scale English translation of Maurice Scève's poem cycle Délie , originally published in Lyons in 1544 and only rediscovered in the early twentieth century as one of the great forgotten masterpieces of French poetry. A contemporary of Sir Thomas Wyatt in England, Sceve occupies a crucial place in the history of French verse between the late medieval tradition of Marot and the more self-consciously Renaissance poetics of the Pléiade. Powerfully registering the early impact of Petrarch's Rime in France, Scève's canzoniere nonetheless establishes itself as a strongly independent and fiercely idiosyncratic series of 449 love poems addressed to the poet's mysterious object of desire, Delie. Often considered a sixteenth-century Mallarmé because of the radiant obscurity of his verse, Sceve emerges in these English translations as a poet whose passionate ironies can be compared to such English metaphysicals as Donne while at the same time evoking the oblique self-portraiture of John Ashbery. Introduced and annotated by the prize-winning translator Richard Sieburth, this bilingual selection from Scève's Délie (which also includes the fifty emblems illustrating the ori

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