Boutin on Siefert, ed. Paliyenko, trans. Shapiro (2023)

This modern edition of Les Stoïques combines a critical edition and translation into English under the title The Stoics, making the mature poetry of Louisa Siefert accessible for the first time to today’s readers, both bilinguals and monolinguals.

Adrianna M. Paliyenko’s substantive introduction continues the research and rediscovery of women poets begun in her Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801–1900 (2016). This edition of The Stoics benefits from being read in tandem with that examination of nineteenth-century French women poets, as well as with the critical essays in Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert (1845–1877): richesse d’une œuvre de femme à l’ère de la modernité (2024), which I co-edited with Adrianna Paliyenko and Catherine Witt. 

That Les Stoïques was published in 1870 was untimely, given the disruptions of l’Année terrible. It was Siefert's third poetry collection with Alphonse Lemerre, the leading publisher of the Parnassians. Paliyenko argues that Les Stoïques represents Siefert’s mature writing because it achieves an equilibrium between “effusion and control” (3), the poet’s characteristic dualism identified in Genius Envy. Paliyenko counters the view that Siefert was a belated Romantic, a prejudicial view based on her first volume of poems, Rayons perdus. It is common occurrence to narrow the focus to women writers’ oeuvre to one claim to fame, often their breakout novel or poetry collection (for instance George Sand’s Indiana or Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s Les Pleurs) so that any evolution of their craft is obscured in the reception history. While Alphonse Lemerre reissued Siefert’s inaugural and bestselling 1868 Rayons perdus five times between 1869 and 1878, and L’Harmattan published a modern paperback in 2022, her Stoïques languished in the archives until now. 

An impressive amount of archival research went into the introduction. By providing a detailed review of Les Stoïques’s reception from 1870 to the present, Paliyenko shows how evolving perceptions and prejudicial judgements had a lasting impact on our access to the full range of Siefert's work. Paliyenko then intervenes in that process of reception to re-establish Siefert's legacy as a “poetic thinker” (5). Editorial research on archives of letters and manuscripts of poems held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University and on the 1869 prepublication copy at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon provides new insights into Siefert's creative process. Paliyenko explains that the contents and order of Les Stoïques changed significantly between 1869 and 1870, enhancing its “philosophical tenor” (186–87) and “[evolving] toward greater detachment” (205).

As its title implies, Les Stoïques reveals Siefert as a reader of Epictetus whose Stoic philosophy, combined with Reformed Protestantism, acts as a means to explore the redemptive power of suffering. Throughout the collection, Siefert's dualistic voice modulates feeling with thinking, and the Stoic thread interweaves with personal lyricism. As Paliyenko explains, about half the collection's poems are sonnets, a poetic form that many other nineteenth-century women poets eschewed but that Siefert championed. As a poet aligned with the Parnassian school, Siefert demonstrated the range of her formal dexterity in The Stoics: the quintile of “Bonheur” / “Happiness” (57–59) or “À ce qui n’est plus” / “For what exists no more” (99–101) with their Baudelairean echoes; the long conversational, epistle-like “Au long des quais” / “Along the Embankments” (92–96); the heroic poem in terza rima “Ô morts qui ressemblez à des apothéoses” / “O you, apotheosis-like dead souls” (155–61).

Other features of this edition that make it stand out among books of poetry in translation include the facsimiles of manuscripts and copious scholarly endnotes (185–218) that guide readers through connections among letters, manuscripts of poems, and reviews. The bibliography, index of poems, and general index (names and concepts) make the volume a user-friendly tool for future Siefert enthusiasts, amateur and expert researchers alike. 

The award-winning translator Norman Shapiro (1930–2020) contributed the translations which were completed before his death in 2020. He previously published French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff and the Pen (2008) as well as translations of Jean de la Fontaine, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Anna de Noailles, among others. Paliyenko’s “Note About the Translator” (xi–xii) draws attention to the challenges of translating period-specific and gendered language even while conveying what made Siefert’s poetry fresh and modern for its day. 

Readers can gain a better feel for Shapiro's translations by comparing his version of the double sonnet “Soupir” (48–49) with Michael Bishop’s in Gretchen Schultz's An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France (2008). Shapiro’s “Sighs” respects the sonnets’ rhyme scheme and stanzas but introduces ellipses where there are none in the source-text or in Bishop's version. Shapiro increases the number of enjambments, adding them even between stanzas, which aptly conveys a sense of Siefert's modern treatment of the alexandrine and sonnet form. Compound words in English keep the expression taut. In these ways, Shapiro conveys the rhythm and remains faithful enough to the source text without producing an exact word-for-word translation. 

On se plaint, & partout on se heurte. Navré,

On a la lèvre en feu, le regard enfiévré.

Tout blesse, & pour souffrir on se fait plus sensible. (“Soupir” 48)

We face each obstacle, content to lose.

Lips passion-parched, eyes fever-glazed, we choose,

With loud complaint, to suffer willingly. (“Sighs” 49)

Paliyenko includes a manuscript facsimile of “Soupir” (180–81) and extensive notes (197) explaining the process of revision these sonnets underwent. 

One can regret that the source and translation are not set alongside each other on facing pages. The layout makes it hard to compare the source and meta-texts, forcing readers to consume the French original and the translation sequentially rather than synchronously as bilinguals read parallel-text editions. That said, with its facsimiles and extensive notes, the book was designed as an invitation for further research and will appeal to poetry lovers as well as students and scholars of French literature and women's studies.

Paliyenko’s edition does more than make The Stoics accessible to a new generation of readers; it stands as a model for how to put together a bilingual critical edition with a major American press at a time when that important task requires (to cite Siefert in “La Combe” / “The Valley”) “d’énergiques efforts, d’élans fiers & hardis” / “mind-straining leaps of spirit, proud and bold” (59, 61).