An Unsung Literature

January 18, 2006 The reader should beware of this essay’s title, which refers to the current status of what might just as well – and more accurately – be called troubadour ‘song’, since all of this poetry was indeed at one time sung. Unfortunately, virtually none of the music has survived. Two manuscripts discovered in this century contain musical notation for thirteen of these poems, but this is less than one percent of the total, providing models for a very limited number of verse schemes, so that no clear notion of this particular school of troubadour music has emerged. Should further musically notated manuscripts be discovered, musicologists may eventually arrive at a reasonable understanding of the melodic structures and rhythms employed, but until then we have little choice but to appreciate the surviving texts as read or recited literature.

Leaving aside the presently unanswerable musical questions, we are confronted in every line of these poems with yet another mystery: the language. Why did Galician-Portuguese, our modern-day term for the tongue formerly spoken in northern Portugal and the Spanish region of Galicia, become the leading language of poetry for most of the Iberian Peninsula? Why did Alfonso X "the Learned", King of Castile and León, write all of his numerous prose works in Castilian Spanish and all of his poetry in Galician-Portuguese? How explain that roughly half of the surviving 1680 Galician-Portuguese troubadour poems, dating mostly from the 13th century, were written outside of the land where this language was spoken? Galician-Portuguese poetry prevailed across the Peninsula in all but the easternmost kingdoms of Aragon and Catalonia.

Some scholars contend that Galician-Portuguese had intrinsically ‘lyrical’ qualities that caused poets to prefer it over Castilian and other Spanish tongues, but this view does not square with literary history, which saw a vibrant Spanish poetry develop in succeeding centuries (with names such as Garcilaso de la Vega, John of the Cross and Góngora), while Galician-Portuguese soon died out as a written language. Already in the time of Alfonso X (1252-1284) there was Gonzalo de Berceo, whose Spanish verses in praise of the Virgin were not inferior to the King’s own Songs in Praise of Holy Mary, which had little to do with court poetry but which he nonetheless wrote in Galician-Portuguese. It is hard to understand why, particularly if we assume (though it is perhaps an erroneous assumption) that at least some of the Marian songs were meant to circulate among the general public, which was by no means bilingual. Even the elite reading public was probably not all bilingual, for one of the original Marian songbooks provides prose translations into Spanish for 24 out of the first 25 songs.

While it may be argued that Alfonso X used Galician-Portuguese for his poetry simply because it was the established norm, it is tempting to posit a secondary, ‘psychological’ or ‘existential’ motive. (I put these words in quotes because they are too heavy with the 19th and 20th centuries to be used without them.) He may have felt an active attraction to Galician-Portuguese – not for its intrinsic poetic properties but because of what it represented for him. For the King and for many others, Galician-Portuguese was after all a shared private language, a jargon particular to the universe of poetry, the special linguistic support for another dimension, one that was open only to the initiated.

We may imagine that the foreignness of the language made the world it created that much more exotic, artificial, other, and so that much more appreciated by Alfonso X, who did not fare especially well in the natural world, his reign being marked by a series of personal and military defeats which culminated in the rebellion of his own son and the defection of his subjects. Only in the literary realm could the learned King take great satisfaction or at least profound solace, transforming his setbacks into the victory of well-rendered poetry, of which his ‘Song of Discomfort’ is an outstanding example. There the narrator expresses utter disillusion with his life as a knight in arms, and he dreams of leading a simpler existence, selling oil and flour from a small boat that would ply up and down the coast. Although not directly autobiographical, the poignantly expressed feelings of weariness and dismay are surely the author’s own.

Through the supreme fiction of poetry, Alfonso X and other troubadours were able to transcend – at least for brief moments – their local world. Poetry had asserted itself as another plane of reality – conditioned by religion and feudal society, but autonomous, transforming, and in a certain way untouchable. The troubadour poetry that began in Provence and spread in all directions – northern France, Germany, Italy and Iberia – was one of the first expressions of the unrelenting individuality that was to shake the Church’s foundations via heterodox reform movements and eventually lead to the Renaissance.

The Provençal troubadours were hearty travellers, going wherever they were well received, and the generous courts of Spain were a favoured destination. Their travels intensified toward the end of the 12th century, when the popularity of court poetry had already peaked in southern France, and after 1209 they began to emigrate for political-religious reasons, being persecuted by the Church (via a crusade and then the Inquisition), which associated them with the Albigensian heresy.

Marcabrun and other Provençal troubadours began to visit Castile and León already in the time of Alfonso VII, who ruled over the two kingdoms from 1126 to 1157. During the political split that followed, the troubadours were as welcome as ever, Alfonso VIII of Castile (ruled 1158-1214) taking in twenty or more under his wing, while Alfonso IX of León (1188-1230) seems to have done some poetizing himself. But it was after reunification, in 1230, that the court of Ferdinand III became a veritable breeding ground for Galician?Portuguese poetry, thanks to the intense contact between troubadours from Provence and from the western part of the Peninsula, where this poetry first started. The Galician?Portuguese songbooks, unlike the Provençal ones, rarely provide biographical information about the authors, but the earliest identifiable troubadours were for the most part members of the Galician and Portuguese nobility.

Born in Galicia and Portugal shortly before 1200 and spending its middle years in various courts but especially in Spain, Galician-Portuguese poetry returned to its first home after the death of Alfonso X in 1284. King Dinis (reigned 1279-1325) was himself a fine and prolific poet, with 137 surviving songs, and his court – the first lavish court in Portugal – became the other great centre for the Galician-Portuguese school. After Dinis’s death, the by then old-fashioned troubadour poetry disappeared forthwith, on the Peninsula as in the rest of Europe, and Galician-Portuguese itself ceased to exist as a literary language until poet Rosalia de Castro resurrected it in the 19th century.

It was also in the 19th century that the two largest surviving cancioneiros, or songbooks, of Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry were discovered in Italy. Copied in the early 16th century, probably from the same manuscript, one of these songbooks is now kept at the Vatican Library, the other at the National Library of Lisbon. A third anthological songbook, almost surely produced in Alfonso X’s scriptorium, had already been discovered in 1759, and belongs to the Ajuda Library in Lisbon.

This ‘new’ corpus of medieval troubadour songs, known as cantigas, was the object of important studies, but it never received the international recognition of its Provençal and French counterparts. In recent years translations have been made into the various European languages, but there are still many reasonably well-informed readers who don’t even know that an Iberian troubadour poetry exists, for critics and poets themselves have not paid it much heed. This comparative neglect has to do with a comparative approach: Galician-Portuguese versus Provençal poetry. The comparison is inevitable, since the former derived in large part from the latter and sometimes, indeed, seems to be a poor copy. But in certain cantigas the foreign models were used in new ways, or new settings were provided, and other cantigas depended more on the native song tradition, with its own set of motifs, scenarios, and technical devices.

Of the three major types of cantigas, the cantiga d’amor was the most direct offspring of the Provençal canso. Highly appreciated in the Iberian courts as a novel and prestigious cultural item, it is precisely this variety of cantiga whose poetic qualities look pale to us today. Poor in strophic and metrical diversity, and with much simpler rhyme schemes, the cantigas d’amor were also thematically less convincing than the cansos. The Provençal love song was founded on the feudal relation of lord and vassal, with the troubadour assuming a subservient position vis-à-vis his aristocratic, life-giving lady and lord. But feudalism was not such a powerful or well-defined institution in western Iberia, and although the poets there addressed the lady of their cantigas d’amor as senhor (later feminized to become the modern senhora of Portuguese and señora of Spanish), they lacked a clear notion of the homage they owed this “lord” or of the benefit she owed him.

The Provençal troubadour compared the beauty of his lady (midons) to nature’s most splendid phenomena, while the Peninsular poet merely accentuated his senhor(a)’s ladylike virtues, pouring on limp adjectives like ‘fair’, ‘well-shaped’, ‘chaste’, ‘sensible’, ‘discreet’, and ‘worthy’. The Galician-Portuguese poet rarely achieves sublime projection of his lady as a perfect, god-like ideal, so that his focus turns back on himself (“Poor me!”), resulting in a poetry that is at times a self-pitying litany of love’s depressing effects. The poet loses sleep, goes insane, or (and this is the all too common trope) dies on account of his love. Still, the Iberian troubadours did introduce some original imagery. The sea, not often mentioned in Provençal poetry, makes for some of the most compelling Galician-Portuguese love songs. Roi Fernandez’s ‘Song Against the Sea’ and Pai Gomez Charinho’s ‘Song About the Pain of Love and Sea’ are certainly self-pitying, but also very moving. And a few cantigas d’amor, such as Airas Nunez’s ‘Song of Love in the Summer’, celebrate love with no less joi than we find in langue d’oc poetry.

The other type of Galician-Portuguese love song, the cantiga d’amigo, developed out of a collective, indubitably oral tradition. Even after passing through the moulds of Provençal-inspired court poetry, the overwhelming majority of these songs kept the refrain that is typical of folk music, and a number of them mention dancing. Nearly always narrated by young, unmarried girls (though the troubadours who sang them were all men), the amigo of these cantigas is usually mentioned in the opening lines and may refer to a boyfriend, a lover, a would-be boyfriend or lover, or someone the girl would like as her boyfriend or lover. The cantigas d’amigo are in a certain way ritualistic, presenting concise moments of intense drama on an open stage: the outdoor world common to all. The woods, streams, lakes, meadows, and especially the seaside are typical places where the girl longs or waits for her beloved, or perhaps actually meets him. Sometimes the setting is a local shrine in Galicia or Portugal, but there is nothing religious about the songs, which may have their roots in pre-Christian times.

Although they impress us as naïf compositions, the cantigas d’amigo have their own technical sophistication, manifested in the ingenious use of parallelism, which can be loosely defined as "repetition with a difference." Parallelism takes several forms, the most poetically effective of which is the literal or linguistic variety. Typically found in cantigaswith refrains, it is well exemplified by Pero Meogo’s ‘Song About a Girl at a Spring’, in which the even-numbered stanzas repeat the information presented in the odd-numbered stanzas, but with slight variations, end words being substituted by synonyms or else changing position. At first glance the even stanzas might appear identical to the odd ones preceding them, but the lines are never exactly the same. On the other hand, a line from each stanza is repeated verbatim two stanzas down, but with a displacement: the second lines of the first two stanzas become the first lines of stanzas three and four, whose second lines in turn become the first lines of stanzas five and six. The verbal house of mirrors is topped off by a refrain in which Leda dos amores [Happy with love] re-echoes in inverse form as dos amores leda.

The ensemble of these poetic restatements has a mesmerizing effect, heightening the listener’s (and nowadays the reader’s) sense of the girl’s rapture and innocence. It is as if the simple meeting of a girl with her lover were taking place on an otherworldly plane. This may seem an overstatement, but less so when we explore – as some critics have – the symbolic resonance of the water, hair and mountain stag occupying the stage.

Some of the cantigas d’amor (man’s point of view) employed refrains and the parallelism associated with the cantiga d’amigo (woman’s point of view, though the troubadours who sang them were all men) and deriving from a pre-existing oral female song tradition. Was there also an oral song tradition among men? Probably. A more doubtful matter is whether men before the troubadours sang songs from the woman’s point of view.

Galician-Portuguese love poetry – resulting from a cross between imported Provençal models and an indigenous song tradition about which we can only speculate – was a worthy literary achievement that deserves to be considered in its own right, but if we are going to compare and find it less brilliant than what the langue d’oc poets produced, then we must also recognize that when it came to satiric poetry the Galician-Portuguese troubadours outshone their peers from across the Pyrenees. The cantiga d’escarnho (same Germanic origin as the English scorn) was more daring, more concrete, more varied, more vindictive and more sacrilegious than its Provençal cousin.

The Provençal poets, for whom form was sacred, were more sober in their art, expressing satire in the relatively dignified sirventes, of which four types can be distinguished: moral/religious, political, literary, and personal. The last of these could be vitriolic, particularly when it mocked inept jongleurs, but this was the exception rather than the rule. The Galician-Portuguese poets, in their turn, produced an occasional moral sirventes à la Provençal, often reflecting on the worsening state of the world (Pero Gomez Barroso’s ‘Song about a Worsening World’, for example), but the majority of the cantigas d’escarnho abound with gleeful invective, sarcasm and obscenity. M. Rodrigues Lapa, organizer of the first complete edition of the cantigas d’escarnho, called their ensemble a “moral sewer”, and though his is no doubt an old-maidish judgment, many a modern reader or listener will blush at Afonso Eanes do Coton’s wonderment that a certain Marinha doesn’t explode from the impact of his sexual parts so completely filling hers. Many other, equally graphic cantigas mock homosexuals, cuckolds, exorbitant prostitutes, and unchaste nuns and priests.

But the cantigas d’escarnho were not all sex and scurrility. Dozens of songs rail against the stinginess, cowardice or uselessness of rich nobles (see Pero da Ponte’s ‘Song About a Rich Man Up for Auction’), against the late or inadequate payment of soldiers and jongleurs, and against haughty ladies. And the dozens of troubadours who frequented Alfonso X’s court loved especially to rail at one another, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Despite the large number of aristocrats and clerics among them, these troubadours were on the whole not a very decorous lot. This is no guarantee of quality, of course, but it is at least a promising sign, given that true poetry never worried about good manners.