Emblems of Desire

"The translations are tours de force, rendering Scève's concentrated phrases into accessible, often charming English verse."—Margaret M. McGowan, Times Literary Supplement

"Formally exacting, dense with puns and cryptic wordplay, sublime in their passion for ambiguity, Maurice Scève's dizains would seem to resist all attempts at translation. Or so I thought until I opened this new version of the Délie. Richard Sieburth has performed a miracle of literary invention. He has made these poems sing."—Paul Auster

"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. Sieburth's long introduction does much to clarify the difficulties that Scève presents even to a French reader. But what is truly amazing is how 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

"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