Edward Byrne’s Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti.
In the case of Labé, 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 Labé 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 Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères. The second version of Louise Labé’s sonnet sequence was translated from Rilke’s German version, using Labé’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 Labé’s contemporaneous admirers – members of her salon, such as Maurice Scève and Clément Marot.

Edward (Ted) Byrne was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and moved to Vancouver in the late 1960s. For many years he was a researcher and later a director at the Trade Union Research Bureau. As a collective member of the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) for over fifteen years, he organized readings, led seminars, wrote grant applications, and edited several issues of the journal W. He has been an active member of the Lacan Salon and one of its directors since 2010. He has a master’s degree in comparative literature from UBC. He has translated poetry from French, Old French, German, and Italian. His books include Aporia (1989), Beautiful Lies (1995), Duets (2018), A Flea the Size of Paris: The Old French fatrasies & fatras, with Donato Mancini (2020), and, as co-editor, The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser (1999). He gave a paper at the Robert Duncan centennial conference at the Sorbonne in 2019. He recently co-edited, with Hilda Fernandez, an issue of the online journal Contours (SFU Institute for the Humanities). The issue, “In a Time of Plagues”, offered psychoanalytic reflections on the current COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently working on The Seventh Chamber, a sequel to his book Beautiful Lies, as well as papers on the early Renaissance Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti, the French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, and the poet Norma Cole.

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"That such a gem is Ted Byrne’s creation is hardly surprising."—The Capilano Review