Emblems of Desire: Selections from ”Delie” of Maurice Sceve

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 original edition) will appeal not only to students of French literature and lovers of poetry but also to the broader audience of readers drawn to the visual and verbal universe of the Renaissance.

Honorable Mention, 2003 Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Honorable Mention, 2003 PEN Poetry Translation Award

Richard Sieburth is Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University. His translations include Friedrich Hoelderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, and Gerard de Nerval’s Selected Writings.