Louisa Siefert was a prolific poet, critic, playwright, and novelist who published many works that were bestsellers in nineteenth-century France. This bilingual critical edition of Siefert's Les Stoiques (1870) aims to restore Louisa Siefert's intellectual legacy while providing ample material for further scholarship on her unique poetic voice. Siefert's intellectual power and aesthetic originality are especially pronounced in her Les Stoiques, a volume that exemplifies her transdisciplinary mind and rich sonnet practice. The more than forty poems collected here are presented in the original French with masterful translations into English by Norman R. Shapiro, one of the most highly regarded English translators of French poetry. Shapiro's inspired translations of Siefert's texts give readers gain a sense of her prosodic mastery and flair as well as the way she uses poetry to think about the relation between mind and body. In her introduction, Adrianna M. Paliyenko reconstructs from original archival research the reception of Les Stoiques from May 1870 to the present, describing how many nineteenth-century readers considered Siefert's philosophical verse to be central to her contribution to French poetic history and, in turn, how the gendering of poetic expression and the canon sidelined Siefert's intellectual accomplishment. A monumental achievement, this book brings the work of a major French poet to a broader audience. Siefert's poetic primer on the Stoic way of thinking about why humans suffer or find serenity and joy, and other big questions of life, will strike a chord with modern readers.
Adrianna M. Paliyenko is Arnold Bernhard Professor in Arts and Humanities at Colby College. She is the author of Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801-1900 and the editor of volumes on nineteenth-century French women writers Madame A. Cashin, Anais Segalas, Marie Krysinska, and Louisa Siefert.
"Paliyenko and Shapiro provide readers with the opportunity to discover an underrated yet gifted nineteenth-century French poet in a bilingual edition that is powerfully supported by the introduction, notes, and bibliography. The Stoics situates itself within a vibrant movement to rediscover and reassess female writers, and the case is eloquently made for a revision of Siefert's position in the canon." -Rosemary Lloyd, Emerita Fellow, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
