Formal Play in a Canso by Cercamon

Though the reader without Old Occitanian may wish to consult a more literal version in connection with this essay, the finest translation is probably Ezra Pound’s which he regarded as the most successful in his “Langue d’Oc” sequence. Typically, Pound makes quite free with his original, not only placing the stanzas in a sequence different from all the manuscripts, but contributing as well a novel spelling of his author’s name, evidently with the aim of pointing toward its etymology. See “Descant on a Theme by Cerclamon” in The Little Review vol. 15, no. 1 (which bears on its cover the slogan “Making no compromise with the Public Taste”).


     Cercamon in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” (“When the sweet breeze sours”) announces his theme unambiguously at the outset as “Amor” (“love”), but what follows is more a formal unfolding of the theme in the manner of a fugue than it is an emotional outpouring. The polarity of the very first line is expressed using terms of weather, animal behavior, and then the persona’s experience in turn. The opposition implied in the rhythmic alternation of the seasons carries affective associations for the sensitive human consciousness which finds springtime delightful in the spring while the fall is unwelcome. From the start the grand, purely abstract music of the cosmos is complicated by the emotion of a human subject for whom the most emphatic form of passion is surely Amor.

     The energy of the emotional struggle for love is the dynamo that sustains the entire poem, but the turnings of amorous fortune are played out against a grand pattern unsusceptible to sentiment. Like most love songs in troubadour times and today in popular culture, this is largely a lack-of-love song, but it oscillates. Every verse contains references to the potential both of suffering and joy that desire entails. There is no progress, no narrative; the poem ends where it began. Cercamon’s focus is the tension itself rather than any fulfilment or other resolution. Rather than satisfy desire or, in the manner of the birds, fall silent, the poet makes a poem of his own frustration, turning pain into the stuff of beauty.

After establishing the polarity with a simple twist of the reverdie introduction that presents the reader with a symbolic paradox. With the coming of autumn, harbinger of the year’s death, though the birds cease their singing, his own song rises in place of theirs, but his is a radically ambivalent melody, one in which the passion of the original is transmuted into a beautiful formal pattern like his rhyme scheme.

     When considered not as sympathetic emotional states but rather as abstract signs, the alternation between the joy of love and the suffering of rejection becomes a dance, beautiful for its own sake. It is peculiarly appropriate to love, in which desire is often intensified and prolonged by denial of satisfaction. Troubadour poetry is capable of considerable coarseness, but in this poem the pressure is raised to such an extent that a single metaphor such as “joja” (“jewel”) becomes highly erotic and the poet thrills to such kinky imagery as to imagine himself “lassat e pres” (“tied up and taken”); he is excited to thinks of himself spending two or three years in her service before receiving any recognition.

     Rhymes always call attention to themselves. Often a poem may be traced through its rhyming words alone. Elaborate rhyme patterns were cultivated in the rhyme rich language of Old Occitan which can rapidly waylay the translator in this age in which poetic sound effects in the far less hospitable American English are rarely the writer's focus. Though Troubadour forms were highly demanding, they were endlessly flexible at the same time. Troubadours prided themselves on their originality and novelty and were able to freely tailor new patterns to suit the material at hand.

     Listeners were capable of perceiving even distant or subtle sound relationships, and, in the absence of the music, in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” the rhymes are the most prominent structuring device. The poem as a whole rhymes ababcd with a double tornada cd cd. The same rhyme sounds are sustained throughout the poem’s fifty-eight lines, a virtually impossible task to duplicate in English in which chiming rhymes would sound childish in any event.

     All the stanzas with the exception of seven end on a note of hope, using words such as “plazer” (“pleasure”), “lezer” (“leisure”), “ver” (“truth”), and even an image of her going to bed (“anar jazer”), thus sustaining the poet’s quest in spite of the lady’s showing no apparent receptiveness to his advances. In the double tornada the signals are balanced, reasserting uncertainty.

     In the opening stanza all the rhyme words have associations of coercion and rejection except two which have to do with singing, a negative use (the birds’ ceasing their song) and a positive one (the poet’s beginning his). Thus the problem of the poem is posed and the solution in art suggested. More subtly, in the eight remaining stanzas, the rhyme words in the quatrains are consonant in nine instances (five good and four bad), contrasting in two, and neutral in six (a neutral word is associated with a good one three times and with a word with bad connotations three times).

     This level of symmetry indicates not planning but a highly sensitive intuition about constructing a poem. The writer applies rhetorical figures like dabs of paint in an abstract composition, seeing to it that looks or sounds right without having to specify a reason. Art excels at expressing the often deeply ambivalent feelings that accumulate around themes such as love. The aim is not to say that love is this or that but most often some form of both and neither. Love may be quite different person to person or day by day.

     The texture of sound patterns with rhyme at the fore constitutes then both a formal pattern with an appeal of its own and a reinforcement of the poem’s self-contradictory investigation of the experience of love. As in tragedy the structural design of the poetry’s melody is a redemption, with its artistic control exerting a power over circumstances over which humankind has no other power. The poet sings his way melodiously through self-declared suffering and thus maintains dignity and pride in spite of helplessness. Desire becomes nearly a force of nature coming and going like the tide or the daylight, but, like Venus, rising and falling with rhythmic regularity.




Appendix: Rhyme Words

The patterns of rhyme words may be traced in this list in which b indicates a negative association, implying constraint or frustration, g means a good one, n is neutral, and s reference to song. Translations of the rhyme words themselves follow.

1-6
bs
ns
b
b

7-12
gg
bg
n
g

13-18
gg
gg
n
g

19-24
nb
ng
n
g

25-30
bb
gn
n
g

31-36
gg
gn
g
b

37-42
bb
bb
g
g

43-48
bb
bn
b
g

49-54
gg
gb
g
g

55-56
b
g

56-57
g
b







1-6
becomes bitter/ language
branch/ sing
taken
power

7-12
won/ acquire
suffering/ desire
thing
have

13-18
rejoice/ dumbfounded
so much/ desire
it [seems]
know

19-24
saw/ darkens
glove/ shines
might have
go to bed

25-30
tremble/ might die
awake/ ask
three
truth

31-36
healed/ figure out
great/ when
mercy
fall down

37-42
maddens/ mocks
mute/ behind
good
pleasure

43-48
die/ killed
command/ semblance
ought, must
to see

49-54
enjoy/ fine, true
make love/ deception
courtly
leisure

55-56
annoys
retain

56-57
court
despairs