Though I was inspired to return to Provençal verse by a game—one run by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert—I’ve been interested in Occitan culture and literature for a long time. Honestly, it was kind of dumb luck, because reading Pound had reawakened in my a craving to return to old Occitanian song and verse, and when I realized I hadn’t read any a decade or so, I decided to get my hands on some. Fortunately for my bank account, a request for a branch loan at school worked out and I got both of the books I asked for: Meg Bogin’s collection of translations of work by trobaritz (female troubadours), and Robert Kehew’s well-reviewed general anthology of troubadour songs. This means that I’ve been reading the books discussed below over a period of a few months—I started in on the former in late 2018, in fact.  

But first, some listening for this post. My favorite CD of troubadour music is definitely the one by the Clemencic Consort. I still remember buying it, brand new, from an HMV Music store in Montreal years ago as part of a double-CD set, with the other disc containing the (equally fascinating) northern Spanish Cantigas de Santa Maria… and if the point of packaging the pair of discs together was to drive home the point that the Occitanians shared as much (linguistically and musically) in common with their neighbors south of the Pyrenees as they did with the northern French, it was an excellent decision.

That said, I think that there’s also some benefit to be gotten from listening to this second video—especially the first track, which absolutely sounds like something Spanish, and with clearly unmistakeable Moorish influence.

My reason for highlighting that will be clearer in my comments to the first book.

The Woman Troubadours by Meg Bogin

This book is valuable not only because of the translations it includes, and for the insight into what made the trobaritz (the female troubadours of Occitania) different, and indeed possible in a Europe where female poets were otherwise uncommon to the point of being essentially unheard of; the other value is Bogin’s overview of Occitanian culture. She mentions the “Cathar heresy” briefly, but perhaps because this book was first published in 1980, Bogin doesn’t really the tackle the evident chicken-and-egg question of where the greater inclusion of women began, which we can see in the poetry and the religious movement, as well as in the laws of the region at that time.  

That said, the overview is fascinating. One tantalizing detail I’d not seen mentioned anywhere else in my readings about Occitania, chosen at random: the courts of Languedoc tended, by the time of the troubadours, to have a contingent of Moorish singers as part of their official retinue.

It’s not that I was unaware of the Islamic influence on Medieval Western European culture: hell, one of my favorite books is Lovesickness in the Middle Ages by Mary Frances Wack, which explores how a passage in a North African book of travel medicine reintroduced the ancient Greco-Roman idea of lovesickness into European culture and launched a familiar set of literary tropes, as well as a bizarre subdomain of European psychological medicine. But there’s always been something in the surviving melodies of the troubadours, and in the instrumentation used to perform them today, that has struck me as… well, vaguely “oriental” in the traditional sense, that is, having some features of the music of the Near East.

I’d long wondered whether this was historical inaccuracy, or perhaps an affectation of modern performers, though I know the bigger names (Clemencic and Binchois, above) take performance practice of the time seriously. I also wondered whether it perhaps had to do with the prolonged cultural exposure of the Crusades, though it didn’t seem likely to me that much would have been transmitted back to Western Europe in terms of melodies from the Holy Land. But with Moorish singers in Occitanian courts, well… transmission becomes much more immediate: the troubadours heard these singers, presumably singing their exotic-sounding melodies, firsthand! Even so, the question of how much influence their lyric tradition had on the Occitanian one is apparently considered rather fraught. 

This is, of course, something mentioned only briefly in Bogin’s book, as part of a more thorough overview of the culture and setting in which the trobairitz—the female troubadours—operated. Still, it should give you some indication as to the richness of the historical background she provides, while trying to answer the question why Occitania was so unusual in its flowering of songwriting women, compared to its neighboring cultures. (It seems to come down to a combination of local customary laws, oddities of culture, perhaps the heretical faith that existed in the region, and the privileges that pretty much all trobairitz enjoyed as noblewomen.)

In any case, Bogin’s introductory essay is almost 80 pages, and definitely not to be skipped. But the poems were what I came looking for, and I wasn’t disappointed by them, though I was surprised. As Bogin notes, the things that the troubadours were famous for—intricate (if also fundamentally misogynistic) woman-worship, and the treatment of fin’ amors (courtly love) as some kind of metaphor for spiritual transcendence—are not mirrored in the songs of the trobairitz: the women troubadours seemed to eschew the extravagancies of their male peers, to exult in love itself rather than in love-as-metaphor, and neither to worship men, nor to desire to be worshipped by them.

Whenever I read work this old, it’s always a bit humbling: many of the troubadours and trobairitz lived and worked in a world that was overwhelmingly oral, a world where songs were composed the way many songs in popular music still are today—without a pen and paper involved in the process. The challenges of thwarting mouvance—the natural, inevitable shifts and alterations that text undergo when transmitted orally—or the grace to accept and invite it of others, means that what survives today may not be quite what the composer intended or created… but some impetus of that original creation survives, almost a thousand years later, preserved like ancient flowers pressed between pages and somehow kept from falling apart over the centuries.

As for the verse itself: Bogin makes an argument that the women troubadours’ work is an instance of resistance to the work of their male contemporaries. That is, she argues that its comparative straightforwardness and relatively prosaic approach is purposive, rather than just a symptom of different circumstances under which the trobairitz labored. I’m willing to buy that, though I’d be more convinced if she’d put some effort into demonstrating that. I don’t know enough about medieval verse across Europe to know how to take her claim that the trobairitz were unique in expressing an authentic, particularized first-person voice. (She argues that the first-person voice employed by the male troubadours was only nominally first person, not conceived of as an expression of the “self” so much as an expression of the male collective, and while that’s probably true for a lot of it, I would have to be convinced that it’s universally true of male troubadours’ verse: Can vei la lauzeta mover, for example, feels pretty particularized-first-person to me, albeit probably employing a fictionalized first-person. So maybe what Bogin’s really talking about is the advent of creative nonfiction—the beginnings of creative, literary life-writing, of autobiographical verse? Not that I want to assume the trobairitz never used fictionalized personae, or assume “authenticity” where perhaps there is fiction, but… well, anyway, whatever interpretation we follow, it’s obvious that the trobairitz were working in a form connected to, but distinct from, that of the male troubadours.      

One thing that I appreciated was the “Biographies” that close the book. Following the tradition of the “Vidas” and “Razos” of the troubadours—life-stories composed years after the poets’ deaths—it’s hard to know what’s authentic and what isn’t. Bogin spent many, many hours in research, looking at “charters, deeds, wills, and insurance policies” to glean individual facts about the women she discusses, and compares these facts to the biographies composed about these women after the fact. Definitely worth a look. 

As for the poems themselves, I’ll say this: the trobairitz were skilled both at “banter” and “burns”—things we like to pretend were invented in our time. Their culture was alien to ours today, but their concerns were evergreen, and that makes for a fascinating tension. Take this unusual tenson—a kind of “dialogue” verse—that Bogin titles after the three women involved in the exchange, “Alais, Iselda, and Carenza”:

Lady Carenza of the lovely, gracious body
give some advice to us two sisters,
and since you know best how to tell what’s best,
counsel me according to your experience:
shall I marry someone we both know?
or shall I stay unwed ? that would please me,
for making babies doesn’t seem so good,
and it’s too anguishing to be a wife.

Lady Carenza, I’d like to have a husband,
but making babies is a huge penitence:
your breasts hang way down
and it’s too anguishing to be a wife.

Lady Alais and Lady Iselda,
you have learning, merit, beauty, youth, fresh
colour, courtly manners and distinction
more than all the other women I know;
I therefore advise you, if you want to plant good seed,
to take as a husband Coronat de Scienza,
from whom you shall bear as fruit glorious sons:
saved is the chastity of her who marries him.

Lady Alais and Lady Iselda, may memory
of me shine as your protection:
and when you get there, pray the King of Glory
that when I leave he place me by your side.

We’ve all heard 21st century women express the same misgivings about having kids—right down to complaints about the long-term effects on one’s body, and what a pain it is to make babies, both figuratively (parenthood was no easier then than now, and cramped a lady’s style even with plenty of help) and literally (because all childbirth was “natural” in this era, and death in childbirth was not terribly unusual). Hell, even the idea of foregoing marriage because having kids doesn’t appeal is something we run into in the 21st century, in more conservative places where procreation is a default expected part of (or, even, purpose of) marriage. I have heard countless young South Koreans, especially women, predicate their rejection of the idea of marriage on their disinclination to have children, and I’ve heard at least a few North American women say the same. 

But there’s also some truly alien stuff: if Alais and Iseult’s question could (character length aside) be ripped straight from Twitter, Lady Carenza’s solution is both alien and somewhat mysterious. Coronat de Scienza, after all, means “Crowned with Knowledge,” and as Bogin points out, it’s probably a reference to Jesus. In other words, this sounds like a married woman telling two unmarried, younger women to seek refuge in a religious role rather than marry as they were conventionally expected to do. This is echoed, later on, by things written and reportedly said by other religious women in other periods of the Middle Ages—Julian of Norwich, Margery of Kempe, and Christine da Pizan all come to mind. Funny thing, for a world where church doesn’t necessarily provide such a refuge… though I’ve heard foreign women here in Korea say that they’ve met female Buddhist monks here who explicitly told them the monastery was a refuge from the obligation of marriage and childbirth, so… maybe not so alien to the 21st century, then?

Even more mysterious, Bogin speculates about whether Coronat de Scienza might be a some sort of half-veiled reference to (or in-group title for) Jesus as used by the followers of the Cathar “heresy” (more about which I’ve written here). That makes sense, given the Gnostic undercurrent of a lot of Cathar beliefs” “Crowned With Knowledge” is about as Gnostic a name for Jesus as one could devise, really. Then there’s the stuff at the end: why does Lady Carenza imply she will die after these younger women? If the King of Glory is God, why will they be visiting him, rather than just hunkering down in roles as (celibate) Cathar Perfecti? Was there, in the time when this poem was composed, already some mortal risk to Cathars? Or is it just euphemism, likening life in the arms of the church to the afterlife in heaven? 

Whatever the case, it’s easy to relate to these women, easy to imagine them composing these works and even singing them, but that tension is what makes the poems fascinating. Look closely enough, and you see someone you know… at least, as she might have been had she lived in Medieval Occitania. 

Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours (A Bilingual Edition), edited by Robert Kehew, translated by Ezra Pound, W.D. Snodgrass & Robert Kehew

This was a book I obtained through a branch loan from the library where I work.1

It’s a nice-looking book and it doesn’t hurt that, though I’ve never heard of Kehew, I do like Pound’s work (even as tendentious as it sometimes can be, especially when he’s translating) and Snodgrass is a familiar name, as well as someone whose musical training seems to have come into play in his translations (as Kehew notes in his introduction). That said, I wish the library system I’m dealing with had a copy of Paul Blackburn’s Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Verse (edited by George Economou), as I think that (at the very least) the contrast would be interesting, and because I’m slightly  dubious about some of the translations. 

Still, that’s not to complain: Lark in the Morning is an interesting read. The big surprise for me was how modern some of the lyrics feel. Consider Raimbaut d’Aurenga, during his lifetime the so-called “Master of Troubadours.” His “Escotatz, mas no say que s’es”—a song title that contains the name he ultimately gives the song form, no-say-que-s’es, or what I’d translate as the “whatchamacallit”—gets compared to a talking blues, because it has a verse of metered rhyme, followed by this weird tailpiece of “talky” prose at end the of each verse, like this (the second verse, as translated by W. D. Snodgrass):

I mean, that last line feels absolutely modern, even if you are reading the Occitan original, and note that the name of the currency deniers (the “cents” in the Snodgrass translation) are etymologically linked to the ancient currency of the “denari.” I mean, “a thousand suns in the sky”? 

That’s not the only verse by d’Aurenga that seized my attention, either: “Er resplan la flors enversa” (“Splendid Are the Flowers Reversed,” translated by Kehew himself) has a fascinating song form a bit like a proto-sestina, except each verse has 8 lines, and the formulaic end-words of each line don’t rotate but rather remain consistent throughout. (In other words, the first line of each verse ends with “enversa” (“reversed”), the second line of each verse ends with “tertres” (“hills”), and so on. Here’s a chunk that really got my attention as I read it, starting with the end of the second stanza and proceeding throughout the third:

The translation is, of course, necessary if you don’t speak Occitan, but just pause and go back and read the last line of the Occitan original:

“Quan fan so don hom los clam croys.” 

That line alone boggles my mind: do you hear it, the way he sets up a kind of forward propelling rhythm by the repeating vowels, by the almost sculptural shift of the shape of your mouth’s position as you (reading it aloud) work your way through the line, from a sustained “ah” of “Quan fan” through “don” to “hom” to “los” to “cram”, and then the little surprise at the end, where he half-alliterates “cram” with “cloys”? This is spectacular stuff… if you pause to read the Occitan version aloud, anyway. 

So, ultimately, this book drove home something I’d already known since first encountering Bernart da Ventadorn’s “Can vei la lauzeta mover” as a music undergraduate: that the Occitan lyrics are a massively important part of why this verse matters, why these songs deserve a place in our cultural memory. 

Other highlights included, of course, Bernart da Ventadorn (I’m a longtime fan of one or two of his songs), as well as:

• the insanely bawdy “Farai un vers, pos mi somelh” (“I’ll make a verse while I slumber,” translated title “The Ladies with the Cat”) by early troubadour Guilleme de Peiteus, who wins the contest for troubadour with whom I’d most like to have a beer. 
• Comtessa de Dia turns up in both the books I’m discussing today, but it was the translation in the Kehew of “A chantar m’er de so q’ieu no volria” (“I’m Forced to Sing [of What I’d Have Preferred Not To]”) that really grabbed me and made me seek it out for the first time in a few decades. Here’s a gorgeously clear rendition, with what sound like flourishes from near-eastern musical tradition—probably quite appropriate, given the apparent Moorish influence on Medieval Occitan music noted above—by a singer named Azam Ali:

• Bertran de Born was just as bellicose as Paul Auster suggested he was (in his novel Invisible, which I discussed last year), but not as interesting to me somehow. To be fair, I really didn’t much care for Ezra Pound’s archaic-styled and turgid translations of his lyrics, and that probably had a lot to do with it. 
• Monge de Montaudon (“The Monk of Montaudon”), on the other hand? Definitely the troubadour I’d want at my transtemporal dinner party. His two poems in this collection are in obscure forms I’d never heard of before: the plazer and the eneug, which respectively list off things the lyricist finds pleasant, and the things he finds unpleasant. The second list is more than twice as long as the first, and far more ribald… and to be honest, these are the most laugh-out-loud funny things I’ve read in a while.
  
  Oh, also, Monge de Montaudon’s scathing summary of his contemporaries in a satirical song (sirventes) not included in the collection (but mentioned in his biography) nonetheless deserves quoting. Among the various composers whom he skewers are Arnaut Daniel (who has “never sung well except for some foolish words that no one understands”), Arnaut de Marueill (“with a bad disposition, as his lady has no compassion on him”), Gaucelm Faidit (“who from a lover became the husband of the one he used to follow around”), Peire Vidal (that “peasant who used to be a fur merchant”), and Peirol (“who has worn the same suit for thirty years”)… He has a few great songs in this collection, the best of which for me was “Pos tornatz sui en Proensa” (“To Provence I Can Return Now”), which tells of his feelings about returning to his homeland whilst apparently away with a crusade to the holy land. 
• Raimbaut de Vaqueiras only makes one contribution to this collection, the famous “Kalenda Maya,” but since I’m posting this in May, this old favorite is a fitting one (even if Raimbaut’s May was our June, and he’s actually singing about summer). The rhyme scheme on this thing is pure obsessive fixation, with basically every line line rhyming with “ya” in some way. (There’s some equally hyperconsistent internal rhymes for split lines along the way.)

• I was excited to read Arnaut Daniel, so oft-praised by Dante and others, but Ezra Pound’s translations, unfortunately, again turn out to be a massive disappointment. I can even see strong arguments for translating medieval Occitan verse to a semi-contemporary form of English… but compared with Snodgrass, Jense, and Kehew’s translations, Pound’s feel leaden and kind of forced. Arnaut Daniel’s verse does not feel that way when I read the original Occitan lines, so… I think Kehew should have gotten new translations of those verses done. 

Toward the end of the book, the samplings of work got much shorter, often including only one lyric per figure, which left me wanting more, because especially Peire Cardenal’s and Sordel’s verses—especially the sirventes or “protest songs”—were so fascinating:

• Peire Cardenal’s “Una ciutatz for, no sai cals” (“There Was a Town”) is utterly fresh, and sings out as if it were penned today, lamenting the horrors of, say, recent elections or how it feels sometimes to log into Twitter: a rain falls upon a town and turns everyone stark, raving mad… save one man who, indoors, slept through the shower. He emerges to discover his neighbours all out of their minds, and of course, they assume that it is he who is mad. Peire Cardenal’s summation, at the end, feels almost like something close to Kurt Vonnegut’s “… and so it goes…” There is also a rousing sirventes that pretty much attacks the Church, and, sort-of, the idea of a loving God who would consign human beings to eternal torment, even. Fun stuff.  
• Sordel’s (Sordello’s, in Italian), “Planher vuelh En Blacatz en aquest leugier so” (“I Want to Mourn Blacatz”) is basically a poem mourning the passing of Blacatz, a feudal lord whom Sordel praises by basically spitting in the face of every other ruler in Western and Central Europe: the poem suggests every other ruler is lacking in heart, and ought to eat some of Balcatz so that they will gain some human feeling and sympathy. (This metaphorical cannibalism recalls the famous tale of Cabestan, the troubadour who was slain by the husband of his lover, who cut out his heart and served it to his wife in a dish—a tale recounted elsewhere in the book.) 

Having finished the book, I now want to get my hands on the New York Review of Books reprint of Paul Blackburn’s Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry, to see how a contemporary of Pound did with Provencal verse. (By all the accounts I’ve read, Blackburn’s reading and treatment of this material was infinitely more natural and musical than Pound’s.) 

Also, this song is the subject of a really great post exploring the difficulties of resurrecting troubadour melodic rhythm from historical manuscripts.