The Stoics

An illuminating look at Louisa Siefert’s forgotten legacy that reveals her importance in French poetic history.

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 Stoïques (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 Stoïques, 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 Stoïques 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.