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

An Introduction to the Troubadours

     Nearly a thousand years ago, the poets of southern France and nearby areas of Spain and Italy (including a surprising number of women) led a poetic revolution that transformed literary practice and produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in world literature. For most general readers the troubadour is a major type of the poet, visualized perhaps with a lute beneath a lady’s window. While this image has its own Romantic integrity, it provides little clue to the actual nature of the troubadours’ poetry. Few educated people (including English majors) could even name a single troubadour poet, allowing exceptions for those who are fond of Dante or Pound.
     Long before Freud the troubadours placed eros properly in the center of human concerns. Through the centuries, of course, sex and violence, which is to say love and death, are, along with god, the most perennial of themes, but the reader of the troubadours does feel intimate sympathy, from the inside as it were. Oral cultures tend to celebrate the mystery of fertility and to present sex with the clear and concrete immediacy of dream images like the Winnebago trickster sending his penis across the stream in search of a mate. True heroic poetry usually sidelines the feminine, while the poets of the Greek Anthology were grand versifiers of polymorphously perverse lust. In Heian Japan Lady Murasaki refined love very nearly beyond recognition.
     But the troubadours limn desire through the range from lascivious self-interested physicality to sublime idealization in a way that is wholly recognizable at every point. For most lovers who urgently grab after orgasms, who may even deceive or betray or otherwise act the fool, are the very same who caress with hand and word, whose time with the beloved is illuminated with mutual joy, and they are also the same who sacrifice self either in part or altogether. The tumescent ego and the extinguished ego are sides of the same coin. We honor the troubadours as poets who admitted that, though they might be Christians and warriors as well, they were most essentially lovers.
     Furthermore, as the first vernacular poets of the Middle Ages, they ended the dualism between ephemeral popular culture, songs and stories, and stage shows forever lost because unrecorded, and courtly or learned or pious works in which the emotional juice and melodic swing is often indiscernible beneath the heavy latticework of artifice. It is true that the troubadours gloried in conventions, obscurity, and stylized language, but their poetry used the words they actually spoke, often they mention people and places with the most casual and natural air, and they performed (or their joglars did) out loud, in real social settings, for the sheer delight of singing.
     Finally, like the T’ang Chinese and the Elizabethans, they deserve close attention for their excellence. Though literary value is virtually impossible to prove, their virtuoso versification, their monumental influence, and the opinion of nearly all who know them from Dante on down, give them a solid claim. Since the 18th century, though, craftsmanship has rarely been the most highly regarded quality in poetry. While the Romantics and many since aimed at inspiration and the sublime, many early twentieth century practitioners focused on the level of the image, and contemporary work in general values colloquialism, the great eras of the past – Chinese, Greek, and Elizabethan – were obsessed by technique. Craft has two goals: absolute beauty and concision. The first is self-explanatory. Of the second, I will say here only that if readers are familiar with conventions, they have expectations that may be either fulfilled of frustrated. The more dense and efficient the conventional codes, the more the author may express in the fewer words.
     The verdict can, of course, only rest in the end on one’s own reading. Those with French will be able to read quite a bit of Old Occitanian (which scholars prefer to Old Provençal as the language much exceeded the boundaries of Provençe). The pronunciation is as easy to acquire as Chaucer’s, and the poets’ lexicons are limited and repetitive. While images may be enigmatic indeed, the words only rarely are.
     A brief survey may be useful. The earliest in most accounts of troubadours is Guilhelm IX, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, one of the greatest noblemen of his day (with realms greater than those of the King of France) and an immediate ancestor of Eleanor of Aquitaine (she of the Courts of Love), Richard Coeur de Lion (no mean poet himself) and thus Henry VIII and Elizabeth. For all this worldly importance, he was regarded in his own day as rather wild. His daring brought him more than one excommunication, and he may sound rather outré even today with his announcement of his theme “dirai vos de con, cals es sa leis” (“I shall sing about cunt, what its law is.”)
     We might more decorously describe his theme as an investigation of the other in the form of woman. The small corpus of cansos by William IX Duke of Aquitaine and VII Count of Poitiers has confounded readers seeking consistency. Jeanroy arranged them in a spectrum from “les pièces badines” to “la pièce du ton le plus grave.” In fact these texts are arch-poetic in their representation of contraries, tensions, and ambiguities with precision. William seems sometimes lascivious and wholly physical, consistent with William of Malmesbury’s description of him as “fatuus” and lubricious,” yet is capable of crusading piety as well.
     One method for examining this puzzling complex of attitudes on a small scale is to follow the implications of an image like that of the horse in “Companho, faray un vers covinen” (“Comrades, I’ll make you a proper verse”). Women’s association with animals may be honorific as in the Homeric “Hymn to Aphrodite” with its beasts fawning on the goddess (or di Prima’s Loba) or pejorative as in Semonides, Juvenal, or everyday vulgarity. William’s particular image of lovers as horses whom he rides appears in blues like Charlie Patton’s “Stone Pony Blues,” Son House’s “Pony Blues,” and the widespread “Easy Rider.” Considering the erotic properties of horses, their rhythmic ride, the rider’s position astride, and the like, this is doubtless natural. In the poem William asserts his right to the horses as feudal property, parallel to his possession of citadels. Thus would seem straightforward, a brag or gab like much of today’s rap, were it not for the fact that the image continues to develop.
     In “Compaigno, non puosc mudar qu’eo no m’effrei” (“Comrades, he reverses the image, telling the husband who tries to limit his beloved that “si non pot aver caval . . . compra palafrei” (“If she can’t get a thoroughbred, she’ll purchase a nag”). In other words, if she is prevented from pursuing a worthy noble lover, she will seek one where she can, perhaps among the lower orders. It is the male who is now the horse, and the man who attempts to control his woman is an inevitable failure, less than a nag.
Other animal images complicate the picture further. In “Tant ai agutz d’avois conres” the “cons gardatz” (“guarded cunts”) are equivalent to a “gorc ses peis” (“pond without fish”). Though hints of the hunt and the social power of wealth still cling to the image, its new aspect is recalled, intensified, and elaborated: “per un albre c’om hi tailla n’I naison [ho] dos ho treis/ E quam lo bocx es taillatz nais plus espes.” Here, on the deeper level of vegetable nature, the female’s magic fecundity becomes a reward for participation in life. The reader finds himself in the realm of the neolithic Venuses rather than a medieval court.
     William’s vocabulary for describing his vision arose from gender, sexuality, and love, through feudal privilege and the complex weave of mundane reality, yet rested at last in vatic formulae. Jaufré Rudel, on the other hand, used love as a means to express something quite close to what the Bauls of Bengal mean when they sing about Krishna, what John of the Cross approximated in his verse, and what the medieval Arabic poets such as : the approach to ultimate reality, to what the thirteenth century called “the cloud of unknowing.”
     Bernart seems to me one of those who provides a classic statement of the conventions. Without particular innovation or emphasis, he covers the ideas, the verse-forms, the rhetoric of other with eloquence and grace. Bertrand de Born wrote about love, but more notoriously about war. The works of the Comtessa de Dia interrogate troubadour notions of gender from a female perspective. Arnaut Daniel, with his trobar clus,” plumbed the farther reaches of poetic technique and strained the readers of even his own era.
     Lovers of troubadour verse may well go on to survey the trouvères of northern France, the Minnesingers of Germany, the stilnovisti of Italy. Though in Germany some texts indicate a certain movement into folk settings and forms, the more dominant theme over time is toward greater spiritualization. I resist any further generalizations about any of these groups as reductive. The field branches in all directions: toward Sappho and Ovid and the Sufis, toward an aesthetics of the lyrics of the American blues, or the relation between the rhetoric of mortal love and that of mystic religion with subsections on the Song of Songs and the performances of the Bauls of Bengal. And then there is the question of the aesthetics of pornography, which is surely either the most or the least spontaneous of tastes.
     But enough – as Guilhelm says with his marvelous habit of bipolar opposition:

gu’eu sai de paraulas com van
ab on breu sermon que s’espel,
que tal se van d’amor gaban
nos n’avem la pessa e•l coutel.
From “ab la dolchor del temps novel”

[I know how words go on
from a little speech comes more and more,
some talk and talk then more of love,
while we, we have a piece of its bread, and a knife.]