PART THREE—
POETICS AND THE MEDIUM
Six—
Nature Enclosed:
The "Closed" Style and the "Natural" Poetics
I have shown in Part One that leu, as a stylistic term, often stands as an abbreviation for leu ad aprendre, "easy to learn." Long believed to be the master categories from which all other troubadour styles formed, trobar leu and trobar clus have remained an enigmatic pair, so that specific knowledge about one term demands application to the supposed antonym. Can trobar clus, then, also take one of its meanings from the process of memorization and transmission? Is vers clus "hard to learn"? One of Raimbaut d'Aurenga's most complex songs announces itself as chanson leu, and the poet apologizes for his choice of style as a concession to his audience. Greu (heavy, difficult) is the usual antonym for leu, but in a variant the term clus appears:
IKNN2 d and y : pos vers plus greu
son fer al faz
since more difficult poems are hard for the fool
A: pos vers clus greu
fan sorz dels fatz
(R d'Aur 18, 5–6)[1]
since difficult, closed poems make deaf men of fools
Fools are deaf to "hard" verses, and especially to "closed" ones. What they do not hear, they can neither understand nor memorize; thus, al-
though the passage does situate the opposition leu/clus within the context of performance, it specifies the most fundamental level of "closure," precluding reception itself.
When we think of "closed poetry" in the context of transmission, we might expect something that "excludes" part of its potential audience by restricting who may hear it, who can understand it, or who can learn and retransmit it. Or a poem might "close itself" by "drawing to a close," declaring itself "entire" or "complete" and admitting no further lines of verse, no new strophes. Its lines might interlock, shutting out revisions: in this case, poems whose stanzas are linked would be more "closed" than coblas unissonans, since linked stanzas restrict transposition. And yet, because they serve as a mnemonic aid, linked stanzas make a song plus leu ad aprendre, "easier to learn."
Without the tenso between Giraut de Bornelh and Raimbaut d'Aurenga, the most famous discussion of the term trobar clus, scholars would never have supposed that there was, around 1170, an important "controversy" on the subject. The term is much rarer than other stylistic terms such as ric, car, prim, and plan ; even the tenso itself appears to abandon the subject, ending apparently with trobar natural and trobar ric .[2] Yet if we follow where the concept of "closure" leads Giraut and "Linhaure" (Rambaut's nickname, "Golden Line") as they circle around the concept and apply it in various ways, their dialogue shows that it can stand for some of the major obsessions and unsolved problems of their developing art.[3] The tenso does not debate trobar clus as a technical "style"; rather, it debates the value of closure, and its stylistic implications, within the system of "publication" available in 1170.
The word prezatz (valued, prized) occupies the same pivotal position in each poet's opening statement (vv. 5 and 12); the poets concur in choosing as their issue the question of where poetry gets its value. Does its worth come from the poem's making or from what the public makes of it? Is aesthetic valor inherent, or can it be acquired? The poets first set the issue in a political context (strs. 1–2); the resulting opposition forms the basis for their dispute about the rewards of song (strs. 3–4) and the poet's right to restrict transmission (strs. 5–6); each poet then proposes a standard for the legitimation of style (strs. 7–8). Raimbaut plays the reactionary. Trobar clus, the feudal style, must defend its birthright of hierarchical value against the rising threat of a style that Raimbaut calls "comunal": when all are equal, there will be no "good" poems because no poems will be called "bad":
aisso·m digatz
si tan prezatz
so que es a totz comunal
car adonc tut seran egual.
(R d'Aur 31, 4–7)
Tell me why, if you value so highly that which is common to
all—for then all will be equal.
For Raimbaut, communality meant abolishing the stratification that creates value by comparison. The structure he attacks in these first lines bears some resemblance to the communes, the beginning of organization among bourgeois tradesmen: "In feudal society the oath of aid and 'friendship' had figured from the beginning as one of the main elements of the system. But it was an engagement between inferior and superior, which made one the subject of the other. The distinctive feature of the communal oath, on the other hand, was that it united equals " (M. Bloch 1961, 355). Raimbaut—who had been paying homage to the count of Toulouse since the age of ten (1154), receiving homage since the age of thirteen (1157), and pawning castles since the age of seventeen (1161) for the cash he needed to fulfill his lordly obligations—was in no position to approve of anything "communal," whether in property or in poetry.[4] Pattison indicates the communes as a probable source of stress to Raimbaut, citing more than a dozen of these "independent city corporations" organized between 1109 and 1157 in Avignon, Arles, Nice, the region of Béziers, and, closest of all to home, in Montpellier, near Raimbaut's cloth-producing domains of Miraval and Omelas: "The commune of Montpellier revolted against its lord in 1142 and sustained a two years' war," according to Pattison (1952, 16–17).[5] Raimbaut's titles and responsibilities commit him to social inequality; in poetry, recognizing a parallel inequality, he distinguishes between those "good at" judging poetry and those who trample it underfoot.[6] This inequality of good sense, independent of social rank, favors "good people, both great and small":
Giraut, non voill q'en tal trepeil
Torn mos trobars, que ja oguan
Lo lauzo·l bo e·l pauc e·l gran.
(R d'Aur 31, 15–17)
Giraut, I do not want my poetry turned to such noise, for
never again would good people, both great and small, praise it.
Guilhem IX was able to joke about such "equality," attributing it to his rhymes, as if the "goods" he manufactured had a social order of their own; in this way he converted the guildsman's "fighting words" into the literary man's harmless metrical terms:
Del vers vos dic que mais ne vau
qui be l'enten ni plus l'esgau
que·l mot son faitz tug per egau
comunalmens .
(Gm IX 7, 37–40)
Concerning the poem, I tell you that it is worth more to him
who understands it well and enjoys it better, for the rhymes
are all created equal, communally.
Guilhem confidently entrusts his poem to performers and audiences who will "increase its value" by "understanding" and "enjoying" it; both entendre and esgauzir may describe the activity of a recreating performer as well as of an appreciative public.[7] Guilhem's confidence in his song derives from its structure. Its strength in organization, the words formed like a community unto themselves, will ensure that its worth improves in proportion to the abilities of its hearers.
Although Raimbaut values an understanding audience, he sees the worth of the poem as independent from its reception. Audiences are either "good" or "foolish," without intermediate ratings; "the good" would withdraw their praise if the poet made any concession to los fatz (the fools), who will never praise his poems or, if poetry were subject to common vote, "approve them."[8]
Giraut sees the absurdity in making laws for poetry, and denies any wish for a uniform aesthetics that effaces individual style:
. . . no·m coreill
si qecs s'i trob' a son talan.
(R d'Aur 31, 8–9)
I do not object if each man composes according to his wish.
Giraut argues, then, that his aesthetic democracy does not prescribe equality among poets, or sameness in composition; it merely places all audiences on an equal footing. Giraut's own judgment cedes to the public evaluation:
Mas eu son jujaire d'aitan
Qu'es mais amatz
E plus prezatz
Qui·l fa levet e venarsal.
(R d'Aur 31, 10–13)
But I am a judge to this extent: that it is better loved and more
highly valued if one composes it to be light and popular.
To enforce the contrast in their views, Giraut describes the style he favors with a word that would in many contexts condemn it: venarsal, usually translated as "low, common," is a drawn-out form of venal and suggests availability in the marketplace as well as, perhaps, indiscreet loquacity.[9] Taking the stance of the bourgeois artisan or merchant to counter Rimbaut's advocacy of poetic feudalism, Giraut affirms that poetry "must have a market." The poet may compose as he washes, but the value of his work is determined by public acclaim.
What is more, according to Giraut, poetry must be available indiscriminately both to distributors and to their "market" of willing audiences, if it is to be "rewarding." Riquer glosses captal as "remuneration" in this passage:
A que trobatz
si non vos platz
c'ades o sapchon tal e cal?
Que chans non port'altre cabtal.
(R d'Aur 31, 25–28)
Why do you compose if it does not please you that any So-and-
so can learn it quickly? For song carries no other reward.
Giraut, sol que·l miels appareil
e·l dig'ades e·l trag'enan,
mi non cal sitot no s'espan.
C'anc granz viutatz
non fon denhtatz
per so prez'om plus aur que sal
e de tot chant es atretal.
(R d'Aur 31, 29–35)
Giraut, as long as I prepare it as well as possible, and recite it
without hesitation and bring it forward [to public attention], I
do not care if it does not spread. For great baseness was never
deemed valuable: for this reason people value gold more than
salt, and it is the same with all songs.
The poet's "reward" is the sole possession of a song that he has prepared to the best of his ability (miels aparelhar ) and has performed before an audience (dir, tragar enan ). When Raimbaut claims to be indifferent "if the song does not spread," he takes an extreme stance advocating "closed" performance; a song that "non s'espan" (literally, "does not spread") may never be heard again. "Expansion" refers to the widening influence of a song in public circulation and to its "amplification" by other performers. According to Raimbaut, these effects of popularity can never increase the original quality of composition. Raimbaut deprecates the term amatz (loved) with which Giraut had set the standard for pretz (value), by making viutatz (commonness) its abstract counterpart; Giraut's aesthetics, he implies, depends on the subjective judgment of the vilain rather than on intrinsic excellence. He replaces Giraut's equation of amatz and prezatz with the equation of prezatz (valued) and denhtatz (dignified): to "judge a song worthwhile" is better praise than "to love" it.
Giraut's reply, in the sixth strophe, has been read as an "admission of defeat," which might be paraphrased, "Linhaure, you are the expert; my own songs are fit only for hoarse singers and not for noblemen." In fact, Giraut continues to defend amor as the criterion of aesthetic value and mocks the "dignity" of Raimbaut's closed circuit. He exaggerates his alarm: "Etz tis amans contrarian, / e per o si n'ai mals d'affan" (You are an argumentative perfect lover, and for that reason I am even more shocked; vv. 37–38). In calling Raimbaut "fis amans contrarian," he compliments his opponent as a "debating theoretician of lyric poetry"; at the same time, he draws attention to Raimbaut's disavowal of amor, the first premise of their genre. Giraut insists: given a choice between making his songs amatz and having them appreciated as denhtatz, he prefers indignity—as long as everyone may sing them:
Mos sos levatz
c'us enraumatz
lo·m deissazec e·l diga mal
que no·l deing ad home sesal.
(R d'Aur 31, 39–42)
Lift up my song: let a stager with a cold garble it and sing it
badly, for I do not deem it worthy of the tax collector.[10 ]
Hearing the distorted rendition of the ordinary man, even one who sounds as if he had a bad cold, is preferable, for Giraut, to reserving the song for "the taxable man" (home sesal ). Worth, Giraut implies, is not synonymous with wealth.
Trobar Natural
The last exchange of the tenso (strs. 7–8) appears to evade the issue of trobar clus, each poet reluctant to upset the cordial relation of guest and host by carrying his argument to the point of offending the other. Yet in these last stanzas, each poet again aligns himself with a particular kind of poetry. It is not immediately obvious whether in these stanzas the poets are extending the ideas they have expressed up to this point or are now reversing their original positions. What is clear is that they are attempting to define the relation between trobar clus and the "closure" implied by other stylistic terms—trobar natural and trobar ric .
That Raimbaut appeals to the authority of Guilhem IX, in lines 43–49, is easy to see; what he means by connecting the vers de dreyt nien with trobar natural (and both with trobar clus ), is not. Perhaps the key is in the term natural itself, in the associations it calls up here and in other contexts of the time. Both Raimbaut and Guilhem claim ignorance of their "birth":
Raimbaut: Non sai de que·ns anam parlan,
ni don fui natz
si soi torbatz
tan pes d'un fin joi natural.
(R d'Aur 31, 45ndash;48)
I don't know what we were talking about, nor from whence I
was born, I am so confused, since I think so much about a per-
fect, natural joi .
Guilhem: Non sai en qual hora·m fui natz . . .
(Gm IX 4, 7)
I don't know in what hour I was born . . .
Raimbaut's and Guilhem's "forgetfulness of their birth" indicates extreme disorientation. Raimbaut has forgotten who his parents were, and Guilhem does not know how old he is. To "forget one's birth" is to renounce one's orientation in time, place, and the social order, as well as all
one's possessions. Natura, in the charters, meant family and referred to birthright; when title to a castle was transferred, so were the "men and women who were natural to it"—that is, the bondsmen born there. A formula for donations to the Templars was to give "tot quant eu devia aver per paire ni per maire ni per natura" (all that I should have had through [my] father or through mother or through nature), and one young man, whose father had disinherited him by such a donation, and who had attempted to recapture a castle by force, had to swear that neither he "ne nuls om de sa natura" (nor anyone of his family) would force the castle again.[11] Even when natura refers simply to species (e.g., Mcb 2, 28: "seguon la natura del ca," according to the nature of a dog) it insists on origin and lineage, on the privileges and obligations one has been born to rather than deserved or learned. Natura, then, is the essence of "history, narration, genealogy."[12] Yet fin joi natural, as Raimbaut d'Aurenga uses the term in the tenso, disrupts the sense of the past that natura stands for:
Non sai de que·ns anam parlan
ni don fui natz
si soi torbatz
tan pes d'un fin joi natural
can d'als cossir, no m'es coral.
(R d'Aur 31, 45–49)
I don't know what we were talking about, nor from whence I
was born, I am so confused. I think so much about a perfect
natural joi that when I think about something else, my heart
isn't in it.
Thus fin joi natural, obliterating memory, is the antithetical substitute for natura, rather than nature's counterpart in poetry.
One might question Raimbaut's seriousness in alleging fin joi natural as an excuse for discontinuity, either in genealogy or in discourse. This is not the voice of the fis amans contrarian —the good debater of lyric theory—who has just criticized "equality" and expressed the wish that his song "no torn' en trepeil" (not be stampeded). Raimbaut may be mimicking some poets who, in the name of "natural" inspiration or "song that moves from the heart" ("can d'als cossir, no m'es coral "), compose songs in which there is no necessary continuity in the razo, no "memory" of what was said in preceding stanzas, and thus no sequence. Raimbaut, as a practitioner of what Ghil (1979) calls "tropeic development," could be
pretending to yield (or default in) the debate by adopting the more common "topic development," where it makes no difference which of the conventions one has already activated and there is no need to remember (see discussion in Chapter 4 above).
L. T. Topsfield came to the conclusion that two types of poets, the "reflective poets such as Marcabru and Peire d'Alvernhe and courtly poets such as Bernart de Ventadorn," interpret the word naturals in nearly opposite ways (1974, 1157). His synopsis of the many meanings of natura and the adjective derived from it does not attempt to explore denotations the troubadours might have borrowed from Latin rhetorics: "The two primary meanings of naturals in medieval Provençal are 'conforming to the order which exists in nature' or 'conforming to the particular character of each species, including the human race and its subdivisions, e.g. the feudal ruler, the loyal lover, the good and the wicked.' Since naturals refers to the innate individual quality of a person, it has many nuances of meaning" (p. 1154n. 11). But after Roncaglia's study of the term, especially in " 'Trobar clus'—discussione aperta" (1969b), it is no longer satisfactory to associate Marcabru's trobar natural primarily with "the moral symbolism of colours and natural objects, trees, plants, animals, insects and birds" (Topsfield 1974, 1155). Of special interest for understanding the term naturals are Roncaglia's citations from medieval Latin rhetorical theory, where the "natural" and the "artificial" are two types of word order or narrative sequence:
Naturalis ordo est, si quis narret rem ordine quo gesta est; artificialis ordo
est, si quis non incipit a principio rei geste, sed a medio, ut Vergilius in
Aeneide.
(Roncaglia 1969b, 46, quoting Scolia Vindobonensia ad Horatii artem
poeticam, ed. J. Zechmeister [Vienna, 1877])
The natural order is when someone narrates a thing in the order in which it
was done; the artificial order is when someone does not begin at the begin-
ning of the thing done, but in the middle, as Vergil did in the Aeneid.
The "natural order," then, is historical—structured by the idea that an event to be told has a beginning, an order, and an end. Neither the "topic" nor the "tropeic" development, described by Ghil, qualifies as this type of ordo naturalis . Further, most troubadours' joi natural persistently shows itself to be the opposite of the "natural" in this sense, for it is anti-historical.
The "man with no memory," whose sen is natural, is the hero of the no-say-que-s'es . Peire Rogier introduces himself as such a man and then holds a debate with his own conscience. The result is a contest between the "timeless" or "lyrical" impulse of natural sen (which makes events inconsequential and thus neutralizes emotional response to them) and the sen that is aware of time and place, of beginnings and ends:
No sai don chant, e chantars plagra·m fort
si saubes don, mas de re no·m sent be
et es greus chans, quant hom non sap de que.
Mas adoncx par qu'om a natural sen
quan sap son dan ab gen passar suffrir
quar no·s deu hom per ben trop s'esjauzir
ni ia per mal hom trop no·s desesper.
(P Rog 4, 1–7)
I do not know what I am singing about, and singing would
please me very much if I knew what [I sing] of, but I do not feel
good about anything, and song is difficult when one does not
know what it is about. But now it becomes apparent that one
has "natural sense" when he knows how to suffer his loss by
nobly enduring it, for one should not be too delighted about
good fortune, nor ever too much despair about bad fortune.
The exordium may in fact be satirical: the "stalling" in the first three lines, the unconvincing and wordy platitude in the last three. The whole song explains natural sen as self-deception (vv. 40–41: "Am mai lo sieu mentir / qu'autra vertat," I prefer her lies to another woman's truth), when it confronts the voice of "true" conscience, much like the kindly moralistic voice of Peire d'Alvernhe's religious lyrics (vv. 13–14: "Aisso dic ieu que no·s deu hom giquir / aissi del tot qui·l segle vol tener," I say that a man should not thus abandon everything if he wishes to hold on to the world).
Peire Rogier lets his "conscience" remind him that composing in this "natural" style is a way of renouncing the world, insofar as fin joi natural works only from within, drawing on an inherent motivation to compose poetry, and allows the speaker to remain indifferent to actual joy and pain. Creating an inner landscape that bears no relation to sensed experience, Peire Rogier's natural sen cultivates a world-upside-down within the speaker. It is no wonder, then, that natural is so often associated with
madness. Here, Peire speaks as if he were rebelling against a rule that speech should correspond to experience; the dictates of weather (vv. 1 and 3) are overruled by the impulse to sing (vv. 2 and 4):
Tan no plou ni venta
qu'ieu de chan non cossire
frei'aura dolenta
no·m tolh chantar ni rire
qu'amors me capdelh' e·m te
mon cor en fin joy natural
e·m pais e·m guid' e·m soste
qu'ieu non sui alegres per al
ni alres no·m fai vivre.
(P Rog 2, 1–9)
Neither the ram falls nor the wind blows so hard that I do not
think about song; the chill, mournful wind does not take from
me my singing and laughter, for love controls me and holds my
heart in perfect natural joi, and feeds me and guides me and
sustains me, so that I am not cheerful for any other reason, nor
does any other thing make me live.
The treatment of amors as the lord from whom one holds one's fief, and on whom one depends for sustenance, makes of fin joi natural a self-sufficient realm, independent of lo segles (the secular world). Peire's choice of verbs suggests the Psalms, with fin joi natural as the "green pastures" and "still waters" where Amors leads him, maintains him, and "restores his soul." The "second nature" created by Amors is a verbal one: statement reforms perception. Again, love acts as a metaphor for song. Just as the lover is advised to believe what the lady says rather than what she does, so the poet proposes to give greater value to statements (powered by joi, the impulse to compose) than to experience.
Bernart de Ventadorn calls desnaturar (denaturing) the same effect that Peire Rogier ascribed to joi natural:
Tant ai mo cot pie de joya,
tot me desnatura.
Flor blancha, vermelh' e groya
me par la frejura,
c'ab lo yen et ab la ploya
me creis l'aventura,
per que mos pretz mont' e poya
e mos chans melhura.
(B Vent 44, 1–8)
My heart is so full of joy that it completely denatures me.
Flowers white, red, and yellow to me look like frost, for with
the wind and with the rain my fortune increases, so that my
worth rises and climbs, and my song improves.
Peire d'Alvernhe recognizes that some poets have distorted the meaning of the word natural . Those who criticize Marcabru for madness have in fact identified their own error; it is easy to see his criticism aimed at Peire Rogier's views of fin joi natural and at the "man with no memory":
Marcabrus per gran dreitura
trobet d'altretal semblansa,
e tengon lo tug per fol
qui no conoissa natura
e no·ill membre per que·s nais.
(P d'Alv 13, 38–42)
Marcabru, with great justice, composed in similar fashion—
and they all take him for a fool who does not know [his] na-
ture and does not remember why he is born.
Marcabru had upheld a form of trobar natural but never played the "natural fool." Peire d'Alvernhe, in his own work, emphasizes the genealogical aspect of natura; he denounces as "illegitimate" those whose joi, supposedly fin and natural, induces them to compose poems bearing no relation to reality. Once "history, narration, genealogy" are removed, action is "inconsequential" and noncura prevails, as Peire warns in this passage from "Bel m'es quan la roza floris":
Sel que·l ioi del setgle delis
vei que son pretz dezenansa;
fils es d'avol criatura
que fai avol demonstransa:
e per tan non baisa·l col!
Quar gitatz es a noncura
estai mais entre·ls savais.
(P d'Alv 13, 22–28)
He who destroys the joi of the secular world, I see that his
worth diminishes; he is the son of a base creature, for he makes
a base showing, and yet does not bow his head. Because he is
cast into indifference, let him remain longer among the lowly.
What Peire Rogier had called natural sen ("when one knows how to suffer his loss by nobly enduring it"), Peire d'Alvernhe calls noncura: it is disengagement from the world, both from dan and from the joi del setgle; it divides words from their referents, lets them fall from their original meanings—even the word natural . "Bel m'es quan la roza" insists that poetry should correspond to politics: when Peire urges Sancho III of Castile to follow the example of his father, Alfonso, in going to battle against the Moors, he makes a point of showing that he, too, is following the example of his poetic forebear, Marcabru, who had stirred Alfonso against the Muslims (Riquer 1975, 321). Peire's song descends from Marcabru's just as Sancho descends from Alfonso. Peire d'Alvernhe supports a notion of trobar natural best suited to the sirventes. The poet as castiador, who advises men of the world to fight for the traditions and rights of their natura, must use a language that "remembers" its source.
Thus—to return to the tenso between Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Bornelh—it is doubly in opposition to Raimbaut's amnesiac fin joi natural that, for his last parry, Giraut "remembers" his promotion in rank: "Don't I remember how she appointed me comtal? " As a poet and as a debater, at least, Giraut is the equal of the Count of Orange—and in affirming it he accuses himself (with an ironical wink) of "forgetting" gratitude toward his superiors, of stepping out of rank:
Lingnaura, si·m gira·l vermeil
de l'escut cella cui reblan
qu'eu voill dir "a Deu mi coman."
Cals fols pensatz
outracuidatz!
M'a mes doptansa deslial!
No·m soven com me fes comtal?
(R d'Aur 31, 50–56)
Linhaure, if she whom I praise should turn the red side of her
shield toward me, then I will say, "I place myself in God's
hands." What a mad, outrageous thought—it has given me
disloyal doubt. Do I not remember how she made me a comtal?
Giraut has earned this title by merit and not by birth, yet he is more mindful of this feudal bond than Raimbaut is of his "birthright."
Giraut's Shield and the Heraldry of Style
Earlier Giraut had called Raimbaut a "fis amans contrarian," clearly using the word amans to designate a "theoretician of lyric poetry"; having once substituted amor for trobar in the debate, he lets his last contribution to it carry forward the idea that to win the argument is to succeed in love. If "virar lo vermeil de l'escut" is a sign of rejection, then Giraut concedes failure. Yet in calling to mind the heraldic "shield" of his patroness, Giraut replies to Raimbaut's evocation of trobar natural and the "man with no memory." He remembers "com me fes comtal"; he is "accountable," and he "recounts."[13] A comtal, according to Marc Bloch, was a local chief who organized others under his lord's "banner."
When Marcabru declares himself a follower of trobar natural, he describes himself as if carrying its blazon:
E segon trobar naturau
port la peire e l'esc'e·l fozill
mas menut trobador bergau
entrebesquill,
mi tornon mon chant en badau
e·n fant gratill.
(Mcb 33, 5–10)
And in accordance with "natural composition" I carry the flint
and tinder and steel, but insignificant rhyme-weaving hornet
troubadours turn my song into gaping and scraping.
The three emblems on Marcabru's "shield" are offered as a trademark—of the arsonist's trade, apparently, unless Prometheus used "flint and tinder and steel" (trans. Paterson 1975, 29). The "original" poet, equipped with the tools to make something from nothing wherever he goes, can strike up a blaze from cold stone; the "small-time" troubadours merely "do a lot of scratching" (fant gratill ). R. Howard Bloch has pointed out the interdependence of "semantic discontinuity and genealogical discontinuity" in similar passages of Marcabru's poetry (1981, 958–960) and, against a broader backdrop of medieval thought, in a trend to "the nomi-
nalizing lyric" in Old Provençal (1983, 126; see 108–127, "The Poetics of Disruption"); here morality illustrates poetics. The "trobador bergau" only flirt with his style ("tornon . . . en badau"), while Marcabru makes it conceive: songs as "natural" offspring. The legitimizing coat of arms, then, stands for the creative intelligence of a poet who, at least according to his vida, may not qualify for other kinds of "legitimacy."
There are at least two ways to make a fire: one can blow on the old coals in hope that they will flare up again (as the bufa-tizo of Marcabru's vers del lavador might do), or one can start "from scratch." To "remember"—and this includes history, narration, and genealogy, as well as the transmission and adaptation of other men's songs—is to "blow on the old coals." Marcabru is attempting to reverse our habits of legitimation: his shield proclaims the rise of a "natural" lineage of poetry conceived "from scratch."
Viewed as a statement about mouvance, Marcabru's lines on trobar natural tend to validate only the "original" version. The "menut trobador bergau" would, then, represent unskilled players who perform the song without authorization in diluted and insipid versions.
Peire d'Alvernhe also uses the metaphor of the heraldic shield, fancying his own style blazoned in gold and azure against a background of other styles in "rusty iron":
Que cum l'aurs resplan e l'azurs
contra·l fer ros
desobre los escutz
mi det do, tro lai ont es Surs,
qu'ieu sobriers fos
als grans et als menutz
dels esciens
de trobar ses fenhs fatz,
don sui grazens
ad aquilh don m'es datz.
(P d'Alv 5, 61–70)
For just as gold and azure gleam against red iron, on shields, I
was given the gift that I would be, as far as Syria, superior
among wise men both great and small in composing without
foolish imaginings, for which I am grateful to the one by whom
it was given to me.
These lines close a poem that has made no secret of its style, that in fact has overdescribed itself: senatz, segurs, francs e ferms, Peire gives his approval to "obscure verses" (ditz escurs ) recited "without broken words" (ses motz romputz, vv. 31–33).
Not all poets aspire to trobar ses fenhs (compose without imaginings), however, nor would describe fenhs as fatz (foolish). Raimbaut d'Aurenga, who in probably his earliest important poem praised the song of the wren as cars, dous, e fenhz (rare, sweet, and imagined; R d'Aur 1, 1–2), may have taken offense at Peire d'Alvernhe's condemnation of the imaginative (fenhs ) in poetry; at least, he composes an emphatic recusatio of the image of the "shining shield" Peire had upheld:
E qar no·i trop pro, en orda,
lais—car sent paraulas rancas.
No·m eslag l'amar e·l mel
d'amor, e non dig parlan
l'escut, e so que·i resplan.
(R d'Aur 34, 36–40)
And because I find no advantage in invention, I give up—for I
smell rancid words. I do not distinguish the bitter part from
the honey of love, and I do not describe in speech the shield,
and that which glitters upon it.[14]
According to Pattison (1952), this song addresses itself mainly to the vilania involved in Alfonso II of Aragon's change in marriage plans. The description of the shield announces a style allied with the lineage it serves to praise. Raimbaut's refusal to use the metaphor of the shield, then, is a protest against what he perceives both as a disruption of lineage (through the irregularity in Alfonso's broken engagement) and as a disruption of discourse (since praise, which Alfonso usually earns, is not now possible): he breaks off, offended by words not yet spoken.
The shield that has been turned against Giraut de Bornelh in the tenso belongs to a patroness, "cella cui reblan." Peire d'Alvernhe would have us think Giraut's flattery was directed mainly toward "old water carriers" and other vilanas . But Pattison directs our attention to the tornada of Giraut's song 27, where the poet thanks the Glove Lady for appointing him comtal (although here he seems to regret the appointment). As in the tenso, the motif of the poet's recollection accompanies the acknowledgment of his duty as spokesman:
Amia, d'aisso·m sove
C'anc, depos que'm fis comtals,
No m'avenc pois tan grans mals.
(Gr Bor 27, 73–75)
My friend, this much I remember: that never, since the time
when you made me comtal, has anything so bad happened to
me again.
This is the same poem in which Giraut earlier sought
. . . bos motz en fre
que son tuch chargat e ple
d'us estranhs sens naturals,
e non sabon tuch de cals.
(Gr Bor 27, 51–54)
. . . good rhymes reined in, which are all charged and filled
with an unfamiliar "natural" meaning, and not everybody
knows what kind.
In evoking this poem (which was an important stylistic manifesto) as an answer to the feigned "forgetfulness" induced by Raimbaut's fin joi natural, Giraut contests the other poet's interpretation of the term natural on a fundamental level.
Not remembering, in the vers de dreyt nien, tended to empty the meaning from bos motz (good rhymes), for "I don't remember" signals a song of madness and apathy: of noncura, foudatz . Giraut remembers, and fills his words with sen, though of a paradoxical kind. Estranh and natural are opposites: the first connotes all that is foreign, alien, outside the range of local experience—exogenous and "unfamiliar" in every sense. Guilhem IX, in the poem that Raimbaut d'Aurenga linked with joi natural, would not "locate himself" either in the distance or in close range:
no say en qual hora·m fuy natz:
no soi alegres ni iratz
no suy estranhs ni soi privatz
ni no·n puesc au.
(Gm IX 4, 7–10)
I do not know in what hour I was born, I am neither cheerful
nor morose, I am neither a stranger nor an intimate, nor can I
be otherwise.
Giraut's estranhs sens naturals directly opposes the foudatz . It includes both the foreign and the native; his bos motz are "harnessed" (en fre ) and loaded (chargat e ple ) like a wagon bearing exotic merchandise (estranhs sens ). "Not everyone knows what kind" of sens naturals Giraut means, since for some poets, like Peire Rogier, sen natural meant the foudatz that allows mere assertion to prevail over what the eyes see.
It is worthwhile to entertain the possibility that Giraut's estranhs sens naturals might combine quoted or adapted (exogenous, another's) material with original compositions. The term natural has already appeared in other contexts where it meant "original" poetry, as opposed to adaptations. Giraut has accepted and even welcomed the idea that others would adapt his songs to their own use. The opposition estranh/natural has also been developed by Marcabru, who from all evidence disapproves of adaptation; the context in which Marcabru places this opposition—the closed garden that requires constant vigilance against poachers—sheds further light on the debate over trobar clus .
Trobar Natural and the Enclosed Garden
Marcabru speaks of an amors whose "native place" is enclosed and therefore safe from the estranhs . Substituting trobars for amors in this passage yields an interesting view of the relationship between trobar clus and the opposition natural/estranh:
L'amor don ieu sui mostraire
nasquet en un gentil aire,
e·il luocs on ill es creguda
es claus de rama branchuda
e de chaut e de gelada,
qu'estrains no l'en puesca traire.
(Mcb 5, 49–54)
The love to which I point the way was born in a noble lineage
[pun: "air, climate"], and the place where it grew up is en-
closed by branching boughs, [closed off] both from heat and
from cold, so that a stranger may not take it away from there.
Roncaglia discounts the contention of Scheludko and Robertson that this passage may allude to the hortus conclusus, "Symbol of the Blessed Mary, her eternal virginity," by identifying the Desirat of the tornada with a
historical figure, Sancho III, called desiderabilis Sancius (1969b, 25). Marcabru is quite capable, however, of reconciling doas cuidas in one statement. The above passage is the last stanza before the tornada, and this is the normal position for dedications explaining why the song and the addressee are worthy of each other.
Much has been said about Marcabru's distinctions between fin'amors and fals'amors, so that discussions of his poetics usually turn to his ethics. Yet Marcabru himself appears to be conscious of the structural congruity between amors and trobars: he attempts to match his subject (fals'amistatz ) with an appropriate song—a vers desviatz sung to a son desviatz . His familiar reproval of husbands who cuckold one another:
Tals cuid' esser ben gardaire
de la so' e de l'altrui laire
(Mcb 5, 25–26)
So-and-so thinks he is a good guard of his own belongings, and
the robber of another's
is punctuated with a comment on the progress of the vers desviat itself
Si l'us musa, l'autre bada
E ieu sui del dich pechaire.
(Mcb 5, 29–30)
If one gawks, the other gapes, and I am a sinner against the
poem.
In all the manuscripts (AIK ), as Dejeanne (1909) notes, line 26 is hypermetric; that is, the poet has "sinned against" his dich, and it is probably wrong to correct the line as Dejeanne suggests ("De la so'e d'altrui laire"). Further, the verse is deliberately unspecific about what these men believe they are guarding. Dejeanne's translation begins, "Tel pense être bien le gardien de sa femme. . . ," and already he has supplied a detail that was not in the Provençal original: the femme . Perhaps Marcabru intended a broader meaning. One is reminded of Giraut de Bornelh's application of the same terms to a problem specific to poetry: "c'us s'en fezes clamaire / dels dichs don altre era laire / corn fes de la gralha·1 paus" (one makes himself the claimant [screamer] of poems whose thief [barker] was another man, just as the cricket does [complains] against the peacock; Gr Bor 62, 33–35).
The major part of Marcabru's vers desviatz, then, develops a parallel
between fals'amistatz (improper love) and improper verse: it is continually being stolen by someone who hypocritically "guards his own"; it is "easy to pick up or drop," and it is "marketable," like Giraut de Bornelh's vers levet e venarsal:
C'aissi' leu pren e refuda
puois sal ven e lai mercada.
(Mcb 5, 4–5)
For it is so easily picked up and then set aside, since it is sold
here and purchased there.
In the last strophe, however, Marcabru changes his subject from the amors (and the trobars ) he must censure to the amors he would recommend ("don eu sui mostraire"). Line 54 echoes the more explicit stylistic statement of "Aujatz de chan":
vers desviatz, v. 54: Qu'estrains no l'en puesca traire.
So that a stranger cannot take it away from there.
"Aujatz," v. 4: Si que autr'om no l'en pot un mot traire.
(Roncaglia 1957, 23)
So that another man cannot take away one word from it.
The last stanza of Marcabru's vers desviatz does propound an ideal for trobar as well as for amor; it thus helps to explain the connection the troubadours perceive between closure and vers naturals . "Original" poetry, worthy of its attribution to an "author" and fully "pedigreed" ("nasquet en un gentil aire"), requires for its growth and maintenance an impossibly sheltered place, where there is neither heat nor cold, where no "stranger" can reach it ("the place where it grew up is enclosed by branching boughs, closed off both from heat and from cold"). Marcabru only claims to point the way to this ideal, to be its mostraire . For him it is the verbal counterpart of love in the terrenal paredis, where things went by the names Adam gave them, and there were no "strangers."
The connection between "closed rhymes" and "closed gardens" becomes still more apparent in a song of Peire d'Alvernhe that explicitly favors motz clus . The motif of the hortus conclusus recurs; rather than deny the biblical allusion altogether, we might learn from it how clus po-
etry situated itself within a complex of images that had come to stand for a theory of interpretation.
Be m'es plazen
e cossezen
que om s'ayzina de chantar
ab motz alqus
serratz e clus
qu'om no·ls tem ja de vergognar.
(P d'Alv 8, 1–6)
It pleases me well and suits me fine that one should undertake
to sing with few words, locked and closed so that one may never
be afraid of spoiling them.
Mais am un ort
serrat e fort
qu'hom ren no m'en puesca emblar
que cent parras
sus en puegz plas:
qu'autre las tenh ez ieu las guar.
(P d'Alv 8, 25–30)
I like better one garden, locked and strong so that no one can
steal anything from me, than a hundred gardens up on a plateau
such that another man owns them and I watch them.
The parallelism of the two strophes sets up the garden as the analogue of the poem: motz serratz, like the ort serrat, are safe from those who might invade and dishonor it. Trobar plan, through its geographical counterpart puegz plans (flat peak, plateau) is also being set in contrast to the more desirable "closed" and "tight" writing of the closed garden.
Ulrich Mölk interprets the first of these two strophes in the context of mouvance, working with the assumption that Peire intends to influence the transmission of his song by installing formal safeguards. According to his translation, Peire expects his "closed and dark" style to intimidate the performer: "words which one does not hesitate to respect" inspire reverence for the original, precluding unauthorized revision, especially at the rhyme word (Mölk 1979, 5). Mölk compares the passage to the opening of Marcabru's "Aujatz de chan," where the poet claims that he "knows how
to bind up the razo and the vers so that another man cannot remove one mot from it": "Peire d'Alvernhe argues in similar fashion that it is precisely the bizarre and obscure words—motz meaning primarily rhyme word here as well—which will function as protectors of the integrity of the song" (p. 5).
Paterson also links Peire's closed garden of verses with this "stylistic ideal" of Marcabru: "Peire . . . himself prefers such poetry, which is strong and tightly locked so that each word is strong and necessary to the whole, to 'a hundred parcels of land up on the open plain' which another might own" (1975, 81). This raises the question of "textual integrity," discussed in the next chapter: can Peire have expected a poem in which "each word is necessary to the whole" to survive the relay of transmission? More important, is it accurate to attribute to the troubadours such a modern ideal of "the text"? Serrat may have been meant more as a guarantee of the position of a rhyme word within a "closed" stanza than as a guarantee that the entire stanza will not drop out of the poem. If Peire had written "Be m'es plazen" as a song "in which each word is necessary to the whole," then available texts fall too far short of "necessity" for the modern reader to recapture "the whole" and to comment on it.
A related issue, that of the "ownership" of poetry, also arises in Peire's and Marcabru's metaphor of the closed garden. Emblar (to steal) has no meaning except in the context of property, whether fief or allodium, movable or immovable goods, and insofar as the garden stands for the song, this means literary property. Marcabru calls his garden an alos, a freehold. This is consonant with my interpretation of his remarks on trobar natural: the original maker of the poem owns it free and clear, without obligation to any higher senher on earth. Peire d'Alvernhe's dislike of the hundred plateau gardens, "c'altre las tenh e ieu las guar," also implies a preference for the role of proprietor over that of spectator (perhaps "watchman") in poetry. Translated into the terms of poet and audience, Peire's lines favor the unique "original creation" and seem rather hostile to its dozens of circulating versions—more so even than Raimbaut d'Aurenga's "mi non cal sitot non s'espan" (I don't care if it does not circulate).
The "closed garden" as a metaphor for "closed poetry" is an interesting one: it not only implies an effort on the poets' part to control mouvance (since "no one can remove a single word" and "no one can steal anything" from such a closed poem), but it also situates this kind of "closure" within a well-known area of medieval theory of interpretation:
Dolce, tu ies jardins enclos
ou ge sovent gis en repos,
tu ies fontaine soz gelee
ki deseur totes bien m'agree.
Li soiels guarde les secretz
qe nuls n'en soit avant mostrez
s'a celui no cui om velt faire
consachable de son afaire.
Tels est tis cuers, quar ben conois
A cui tu descovrir le dois.
(Song of Songs, 12th-cent. O.F. version,
2302–2312; Pickford 1974)
Sweet one, you are a closed garden where I often he at rest;
you are a fountain frozen on top which is pleasant to me above
all else. The seal protects the secrets of which not one may be
revealed, except to someone whom one wishes to make the
confidant of his doings. Such is your heart, for you know well
to whom you should uncover it.
The author of this popular interpretive "translation" has thus made the maiden of the Canticus a symbol of the hermetic text, "sealed" to those who should not be consachable .[15] The "sealing of the heart" becomes the "sealing of a message." Raimbaut d'Aurenga has borrowed this image: the injunction of the Canticus —"pone me ut sigunaculum cor tuum" (8, 6)—is answered by Raimbaut:
Car s'eu dic so que·s cove
de leis que mon cor sagel,
totz lo mons sap, per ma fe,
cals es; car tota gen cria
e sap, et es pron devis
cals es la meiller que sia!
Per qu'eu la laus et enquis.
(R d'Aur 29, 29–35)
For if I say what is fitting about her whom my heart seals, all
the world knows, by my faith, what she is like; for everyone
shouts it, and knows, and is fully informed who is the best
woman in existence. Therefore I praise and petition her.
The "seal" on this particular lady is not very hermetic, since the "message" she embodies ("cals es") is common knowledge, and is transmitted by everyone ("car tota gen cria"). The lady of this poem is in the same situation as Raimbaut's trobars plans, a style (again contrasted with the "closed" style) in which Raimbaut believes he can excel because a poet capable of truly original work surely can surpass the common singers in their "bleating," everyday style of rhyming:
Qi tals motz fai
c'anc mais non foron dig cantan,
qe cels c'om totz jorns ditz e brai
sapcha, si·s vol, autra vez dir.
(R d'Aur 16, 5–8)
Anyone who composes such rhymes as have never before been
recited in song, can also at other times, if he wishes, recite
those [rhymes] that are sung and bleated every day.
Raimbaut lets us know that he cannot specify "her whom my heart seals" because she consists of pure convention: ironically, "the best woman in the world" (la meiller que sia ) was also, in Raimbaut's time, the most talked about woman in the world, and had as many lovers among the troubadours as "Anonymous" has titles to his credit.
The analogy, then, works three ways: the song is a garden, the lady is a song, and the garden is a lady. Any of the three can be either "serratz e clus / qu'hom no·ls tem ja de vergonhar" (locked and closed so that one never fears that they may cause disgrace) or shared (envazit, parsonat, comunal —"invaded, divided, communal"). Erich Köhler (1970) has argued that the gilos in troubadour poetry represents a growing ideal of private property that had begun to extend its claim to the domna herself and that therefore found fin'amors inimical; the proponents of fin'amors themselves eventually absorbed some of this attitude toward property, and the amador too became gilos . This theory can be applied metaphorically to the concept of literary property: the "jealous poet" would see in his verse a potential source of dishonor—"temer de vergognar," in Peire d'Alvernhe's phrase. Thus, rival poets might "corrupt" a song, produce in it a "change of heart" (represented by such phrases as "virar lo cor") that alters the intended form or meaning and leads to the creation of "illegitimate" versions.
Vernacular literary convention of the twelfth century is more familiar
with ladies who are locked inside gardens than with ladies who are locked gardens: we might cite Chrétien de Troyes's Fenice and the lady of Marie de France's "Guigemar," among others. Yet the locus amoenus is often identified with the lady herself. The troubadours often designate an "implied lady" as a place, a loc "over there" (lai ); Rigaut de Berbezilh addresses a song to his "Bels Paradis." Guilhem IX's "bosc en un deveis" (3, 14) stands for a lady, and her situation is apparently the same as that of the domna esserrada of song 2, who complains to Guilhem about her gardadors .
If we follow the isomorphism ort serrat/motz serratz/domna esserrada (locked-up garden, words, lady), then Guilhem's resentment of gardadors amounts to skepticism about the value of keeping poetry as a "private preserve." The manuscript tradition attests that in many cases, for every line that is "pruned out" from a poem, "two or three more crop up": "E quam lo bocx es taillatz nais plus espes" (And when the wood is trimmed, it comes forth thicker). Moreover, even the best-guarded poem sooner or later yields to its natural inclination for "infidelity" and escapes its owner, like the resourceful woman of whom Guilhem predicts, "If she can't have a horse, she'll buy a pony." The poet soon finds attributed to him numerous songs not of his own making, though they bear a family resemblance to his own wayward poem. Guilhem's comical "remedy," that one may as well agree peaceably to the unexpected "increase," take credit for the "abundance," and call it "profit," proposes a cheerful response to the hazards of transmission not only in families but in songs. if anyone should accept Guilhem's argument, the joke would be on him.
That "pruning stimulates new growth" applies equally well to polysemic texts: to remove one specifying detail may cause the range of possible meanings to multiply. Guilhem may actually have been alluding parodically to the exegetical tradition, specifically to that of the ending of the Song of Solomon: the "closed garden" is the Virgin Mary, but it is also the divine Word of the Scripture, whose meanings multiply according to the interpretive ingenuity of its commentators (see Minnis 1984, 42–58). When Guilhem adds that there is no loss of profit to the senher, he may have had in mind the mille argenteos of Solomon's final parable (Song of Solomon 8: 11):
e·l senher no·n pert son comte ni sos ses;
a revers planh hom la tala . . .
(Gm IX 3, 17–18)
And the lord does not lose his account from it, nor his taxes. A
man is wrong to complain about the harvesting . . .
For the Scriptures, a single text in the hands of its temporary caretakers produces a great abundance of sermones —the equivalent, according to Rupert of Duize, of the thousand coins paid for fruit cut from Solomon's orchard after it was entrusted to gardadors:
"Tradidit eam custodibus," commisit earn rectoribus; "vir affert pro
fructu ejus mille argenteos," id est quivis operarius fidehs ac virtuosus,
Scripturarum peritus et ore facundus, cunctas fidelis sermonis copias im-
pendit praedicando, ut percipiat tempore suo quidpiam de fructu ejus.
Omnes argentei eius mille, id est omnes sermones ejus consonant in una
fide, quia sicut jam supradictus est, qued arithmeticis non incognitum est.
(Rupert of Duize, Patrologia Latina, sec. 426, vol. 168, col. 959)
"He gave it over to guardians," he entrusted it to leaders; "a man brings
for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver," that is to say, anyone who is in-
dustrious, faithful and virtuous, experienced in the Scriptures and fertile
of tongue, is inevitably going to produce publicly a great abundance of
faithful discourses, so that in his time something of its fruit may be
picked [understood]. All his thousand pieces of silver, that is to say, all
its discourses, resound together in a single faith, for the same reason
mentioned above, which is something not unknown to those who make
accountings.
The parallel among the lady, the poem, and the garden (or hunting ground, borrowing the Ovidian motif of "love as a chase") may be presented from the point of view of the poacher as well as of the jealous proprietor. Guilhem IX took the poacher's stance. Marcabru's gap plays up the interchangeability of drutz and gilos in their relation to various dompnas; by analogy, the jealous holder of the "rights" to one poem might seek to "poach" from another man's repertory to increase his own, "adulterating" the song and recreating it in his own image:
En l'altrui broill
chatz cora·m voill
e fatz mos dos canetz glatir
e·l tertz sahus
eis de rahus
bautz e ficatz senes mentir.
(Mcb 16, 37–42; in Roncaglia 1951a)
In another man's woods I go hunting whenever I wish, and
make my two dogs bark, and the third hound leaps forward,
bold and tense, toward the prey—it is no lie.
Marcabru hints that his repertory is not limited to songs that "anc mais non foron dig cantan" (were never before recited in song), even though his own songs are "claus . . . que nuills no lo·m pot envazir" (closed . . . such that no man can invade it against me): he plays the gilos with his own works, but makes the private preserves of others resound with the barking of raiding hounds. Peire d'Alvernhe's "ort / serrat e fort" (garden locked and strong), which he equates with "motz alqus / serratz e clus" (few words locked and closed), certainly derives from Marcabru's deves claus . Both set up the poem as a "closed garden" and, to the extent that they refer to amors at all, speak from the point of view of the gilos drutz keeping close guard over a domna esserrada —a lady quite opposite to the biblical sponsa . She represents a thoroughly secular kind of discourse; the "private place"—ort, cambra, aizi, deves[16] —is in troubadour poetry the site of just the kind of love, earthly, not divine, that one might find if one failed to read the Song of Solomon allegorically.
It is not surprising that the troubadours should give some thought to the greater-than-usual need of this part of the Bible, so popular in the twelfth century, for exegesis to bring it into conformity with divine charity.[17] Surely they were aware of its resemblance to many of their own lyric conventions:
Iam enim hiems transiit:
imber abiit, et recessit.
flores apparuerunt in terra nostra.
(Cant. Cant. Salomoms 2: 11–12;
Colunga and Turrado 1959, 642)
Now the winter has passed; the rain has gone away, and has
retreated; flowers have appeared in our land.
No doubt their works reflect an effort to set themselves in some clear relation to this text. They do so, apparently, with playful contrariety. First, their songs are not Scrichura but contemporary airs designed to entertain audiences rather than enlighten souls. Second, the love-languishing they sing of concerns not the love of the Church for Christ but "amor jauzida / de don'e de cavalier" (love enjoyed by a lady and a knight; B Mar 7, 59–60). Only a very few troubadour poems, such as those framed as the
poet's interpretation of his patron's symbolic dream, are allegorical in the sense of using imagery to refer to abstractions (although another type of allegory, in which personified abstractions like Jovens, Largueza, and Proeza refer to specific political events and persons, is more common). At least, insofar as they employ this type of allegory, they remain strictly on secular ground. Marcabru, as much as his invasion of l'autrul broill with his "two dogs" evokes the role of the "little foxes that spoil the vine," flaunts a sexual implication that would discourage the exegete and that may not have been intended for mixed company.
Drawing the Honey from the Wax
The literal level of meaning vanishes, or is transformed, when scriptural commentary applies its principles of interpretation to passages whose literal meaning seems unacceptable for moral instruction, and this phenomenon is exaggerated with the Song of Solomon. Its Old French translator explains patiently to his reader how the actual "letter of the text," sacred though it may be, serves as a mere container—disposable and, in itself, not spiritually "nourishing"—for the "honey of meaning" that it is the commentator's duty to extract:
Molt a de miel en ceste ree
que nos avoms ici trovee.
Or covenroit fors le miel traire.
Deus le nos doinst dignement faire.
(Song of Songs, 12th-cent. O.F. version,
2535–2548; Pickford 1974)
There is much honey in this honeycomb which we have found
here. Now it would be fitting to draw out the honey: may God
grant that we do it worthily.
When the Occitan poets adapt this image to their poetry, they observe that with amors the wax at times becomes as important as the honey, just as trobar values form as highly as meaning. In Marcabru's "Dirai vos senes duptansa," amors reverses the normal interpretive procedure: she extracts the wax from the honey. After this action, it will be difficult for her to be "true" in the future:
Greu sera mais Amors vera
pos del mel triet la cera
anz sap si pelar la pera;
—Escoutatz!—
Doussa·us er corn chans de lera
Si sol la coa·l troncatz.
(Mcb 18, 31–36)
With difficulty will Love be true hereafter, since she drew out
the wax from the honey; but she does know how to peel the
pear—Listen! She will be as sweet to you as the song of a lyre,
if only you cut off her tail.
Raimbaut d'Aurenga, much less resistant to the appeal of amors than Marcabru was, is intrigued by the geometric form of the honeycomb; he uses the image in conjunction with that of the chain, since the bresca (honeycomb) consists of interlocking compartments and expands the linear structure of the cadena (chain) to three dimensions. His thought (pessars )—which will become the sens and ric'entendensa for his song—takes like form, proceeding from one "link" inevitably to another:
Qu'Amors m'a mes tal cadena
plus doussa que mel de bresca;
quan mos pessars en comensa
pus pes que·l dezirs m'en vensa.
(R d'Aur 5, 29–32)
Because love has contrived for me such a chain, sweeter than
honey from the honeycomb, that once my thinking begins,
then thought more than desire overcomes me.
Raimbaut's "meaning," then, is the counterpart not merely of the mel, but also of the "interlocking" structure that holds it:
Ben ai ma voluntat plena
de tal sen que s'entrebesca.
(R d'Aur 5, 36–37)
My will is full of a meaning of such kind that it intertwines
itself.
In a song that "conceals its meaning" yet can be "easily understood"—
li mot seran descubert
Al quec de razon deviza
(R d'Aur 3, 7–8)
The words will be revealed to one who divides [interprets]
them properly
—Raimbaut uses both triar and devezir to describe aesthetic discrimination:
Ben saup lo mel de la cera
triar, e·l miels devezir
lo iorn que·m fes lieys ayzir;
pus, cazen clardat d'estela,
sa par no·s fay ad contendre ( CR: ad entendre)
beutatz d'autra, si be·s lima,
ni aya cor tan asert
de be s'aribar en Piza.
(R d'Aur 3, 25–32)
He knew well how to separate the honey from the wax, and to
discern the best, that day when he introduced me to her; since,
when light is falling from the stars, she has no peer to compete
with [CR: understand] her, no matter how well polished is the
beauty of another woman, nor may anyone's heart be so
certain of having actually arrived in Pisa.
The lady surpasses others in beauty as honey is sweeter than wax. She is the "pure meaning," extractable by wise men, from the general form of womankind. Raimbaut, however, uses the terms of carefully shaped poetry to describe her beutatz: the phrase "si be·s lima" (if it is well polished) belongs to trobar plan and applies the metaphor of sculpture to song. The "starlight" by which she looks best, along with Raimbaut's "cor asert," recall the combination of clar and ferm that distinguish the songs of Arnaut Daniel. In embodying an ideal she is "essential," as honey is the essence of honeycomb, but it is her forma that interests Raimbaut and not some more specifically interpretable message underlying beutatz .
A striking feature of the passage is its comparison, by the choice of terms of praise, between the Creator and the poet. Raimbaut does not praise God so much for having made so many beautiful ladies, but rather for being able to discern what is finest among all his creations: "He knew well how to separate the honey from the wax, and to discern the best" (R d'Aur 3, 25–26). This metaphor of "trying out the honey from the wax" (in the terms triar and devezir ) appears to function like entendre: it
serves to designate both interpretation and composition, that task of "making distinctions" that all parties to the message must undertake— the "original" poet, the performer (who recomposes), and the auditor, who reconstructs the message in his mind.
We have thus distinguished two concepts of the "text" in the lyrics of the troubadours: one is a distinctly "open" text that is made for the pleasure of the retransmitter—permutable, conventional, additive, and with movable parts in the style of Bernart de Ventadorn and Jaufre Rudel. The second, the "closed" text, admits the possibility of literary property that traces the "lineage" of a song to its creator, of a text intricately shaped like a honeycomb, such that its honey can be extracted only by the worthy. Poets who speak of the closed text are not incapable of comparing divine Creation with poetic creation: the poet is elevated to Author. The task of interpretation inherent in reception is also viewed as an act of poetic creation, since it is an act of aesthetic discernment. For those advocating "closed" poetry (here represented by Marcabru and Raimbaut d'Aurenga), only a select audience deserves a share in this privilege of recreating discernment. In the tenso with Raimbaut, Giraut de Bornelh plays on both sides of the net: he understands Raimbaut's concern with "legitimacy" and "lineage" for song, but he favors a classless aesthetics that makes song openly available to even the poorest of singers and listeners.
It will become more and more apparent, as we trace the metaphorical vocabulary of "open" and "closed" poetry in the works of the troubadours, that with the twelfth-century troubadours we are in the presence of massive ambivalence surrounding their medium. On the one hand a successful song is innately beautiful; on the other hand a successful song circulates widely and in the process adds some shady characters to its lineage. Exclusive, limited circulation could prevent tarnish or shame to a song's "legitimacy," yet it could also doom the song to oblivion. It is the rare poet who takes a fixed, immobile stance; the others uphold now exclusivity, now commonality. But a great many of them, even those who change their minds, are aware that their songs are to be judged. They therefore ask themselves who holds the aesthetic standard by which songs are to be judged: small, select court audiences, or large indiscriminate "marketplace" audiences.
Seven—
The Metaphorical Vocabulary of Mouvance and Textual Integrity
Texts that confer editorial license on their performers do not, as a rule, confer it unconditionally. In such cases, the recipient is invited to "melhurar lo vers" (improve the poem) as befits its flaws and virtues. The pun vers/ver(s) (poem/truth) discourages departures from the poem's metrical, logical, and thematic decorum as well as from publicly held belief, for any mot fals would disqualify its context as "true" poetry by excepting it from an equivalency built into the language itself. "Melhurar lo vers" is to enhance the poem's approximation to lo ver, the truth.[1]
In "Bel m'es lo dous chans per la faia" (323,6), fals motz would provide the one condition under which the poet asks of the addressee "q·el melhur . . . / los vers." The uncertainty of the poem's authorship may be the result of how little proprietary control its original poet claimed:
Lo vescoms que gran ben aja
vuelh que lo·m melhur, si·l plai
lo vers, si fals motz lo sec.
(Zenker 1901, 798, vv. 56–58)[2]
I would like the viscount—may he have great good—to im-
prove the poem, if he likes, if false words follow it.
The liberty offered at first only to one trusted nobleman, the addressee, might easily have been taken by jongleurs who, in adding the poem to their repertories, "improved" a few lines and, in time, took credit for its creation. This may explain its attribution to Bernart de Venzac, a poet
named only in manuscript C, whose entire corpus (as reconstructed by Rudolf Zenker) consists of songs more defensibly attributed to Peire d'Alvernhe and Marcabru. Whether or not he foresaw the effacement of his individual claim to authorship, however, the poet repeats his invitation, using the same deferential qualifying phrase si·l plai; he shows more interest in the appropriateness that his words maintain, and in their future as a song to be sung over and over, than in attaching his name to a fixed text:
Lo vers vas la fin s'atraja
e·lh mot sion entendut
per N'lsart, cui Dieus aiut,
quez el ama en autum;
se i a mot que non s'eschaia,
volh que l'en mova, si·l plai
e que no·i l'en teigna nec.
(Zenker 1901, 798, vv. 50–56)
The poem draws to an end, and may the words be understood
by Lord Isart—may God help him—for he loves in eminence,
and if there is a word which is not appropriate, I would like
him to alter it, if he likes, and may he not keep it silent.
Clear evidence that mover can mean "to alter a poem" as well as "to begin singing" appears in Jaufre Rudel's "No sap chantar qui so no di," where in one version he uses the verb mover as an amplifying synonym for camjar, with lo vers as its object: "E cel que de mi l'apenra / gard si non mueva ni camgi" (And he who learns it from me, let him take care neither to alter nor to change it; J Rud 6/1A, 21–22). Jaufre's prohibition of change asserts that the poem, as composed, contains no mot fals (c.f. falhir ): "Bos es lo vers s'ieu no·y falhi / Ni tot so que·y es, ben esta" (The poem is good if I am not mistaken, and everything in it well suffices; J Rud 6/1, 37–40). The only version to forbid change without exception ("Gard si non mueva ni camgi," 6/1A) is also the only version to omit the tornada foretelling that its hearers in Toulouse and Limoges or Quercy will make new words for the song: "Bons er lo vers e faran y / Calsque motz que hom chantara" (The poem will be good and they will make there whatever words someone will sing; 6/1B).
Ulrich Mölk demonstrates that in many instances, the word motz seems to refer specifically to the rhyme words and thus to entire metrical
schemes (1979, 3–5). If this meaning is intended in "Bel m'es lo dous chans per la faia," then the phrase "mot que non s'eschaia" refers not to a breach of decorum in diction but rather to a possible defect in the rhyme scheme. We should perceive here a distinction between transmitters' changes that alter a poem's form and changes that preserve it. Mölk follows Rupert T. Pickens in identifying certain words as belonging to the lexical field of poets' reference to transmission and performance: "Franher, pessar, mudar, peiurar, desfaissonar : the troubadours use these and other terms to express their concern for the integrity of the metrical structure. This concern can rightfully be seen less as a topos than as an obviously significant moment in literature" (Mölk 1979, 5). Yet "Bel m'es lo dous chans per la faia" teaches us that a poet could believe in the stability of the rhyme scheme even if he left further revisions to the hearer's discretion; it also shows that even the "integrity of the metrical structure," the motz or rhyme scheme, could be fair game for emendation if it were defective, fals . "Integrity" was something that could be restored, or even conferred for the first time, by a new performer.
References to future singers are often linked to the polarity "deterioration/improvement" and to a boast about the poem's structure. Guilhem IX affirms the enrichment of a poem well understood; the construction mais . . . qui suggests repeated performance ("the more . . . the more"), and the song's "equal rhymes" are supposed to guarantee appreciation rather than depreciation:
Del vers vos dic que mais ne vau
qui be l'enten, e n'a plus lau:
que·ls motz son faitz tug per egau.
(Gm IX 7, 37–39)
Of the poem I tell you that it is worth more, the better one
understands it, and gets more praise for it: for the rhymes are
all created equal.
Jaufre Rudel's "Quon plus l'auziretz, mais valra" (The more you will hear it, the more it will be worth; 6, 6) is colored by the ambiguity of Jaufre's previous line, "pero mos chans comens' aissi " (but [therefore] my song begins thus); is this "only the beginning of the song" because Jaufre has sung only the first stanza or because the song has yet to undergo all the transformations that will realize its full potential value? A less ambiguous version of this topos occurs near the end of a song by Bernart de
Ventadorn: "Lo vers, aissi com om plus l'au / vai melhuran tota via" (The more the poem is heard, the more it continually improves; B Vent 21, 57–58). Literally, his song improves "all along the road" (tota via ). Not just one hearer, whose understanding deepens, but many hearers and many performers enhance the song.
"Rust" and "Splinters"
In Peire d'Alvernhe's "Belh m'es qu'ieu fass' huey mays un vers," the boast about the durable structure takes the form of a metaphorical description:
On plus horn mos vers favelha
fe que·us deg, on reals valon elh
e no·y a motz fals que y rovelh
ni sobredolat d'astelha.
(P d'Alv 15, 65–68)
The more my song is repeated, I swear to you, the more it is
worth; and there are no false words that might rust in it, nor
[words] too smoothly filed free of splinters.
"Rust" suggests a song made of metal; "splinters," of wood. Both metaphors express Peire's confidence in the future of his song: its rhymes are neither prone to rust nor sobredolat d'astelha, "polished too smooth of splinters." Whether sobredolat connotes excessive or merely superficial smoothness, Peire is content that the "barbs" remain. Astelha can refer to sharp sticks as large as war spears, and Peire's invective against those who abuse language is intended to prick the conscience. "Splinters" might be viewed as flaws in fine woodworking, but Peire has already disavowed artistic roughness (mot fals ); he ends with a paradox, transferring a metaphor from the poet's technical craft (dolar, "polish") to his moralistic intention.
Marcabru first linked mot fals with "rust" and transferred the moral term into the lexical field of poetry. In the last strophe of "Lo vers comens quan vei del fau," a song composed "segon trobar naturau" (v. 7), Marcabru defies future stagers in a passage that compares his song to a miner's lode, an archaeologist's dig, or a vandal's buried treasure:
Marcabrus ditz que no·ill en cau
qui quer ben lo vers'al foïll
que no·i pot hom trobar a frau
mot de roïll
intrar pot hom de lonc jornau
en breu doïll.
(Mcb 33; Roncaglia 1951b, 31, vv. 49–64)
Marcabru says he does not care if someone searches the poem
well with a ransacker's tool, for one cannot find there hidden a
word of rust; one can enter after a long day's work through a
small hole.
The medieval Latin equivalency rubigo:malitia (Roncaglia 1951b, 45n. 52) is expanded here to accommodate Marcabru's artistic "morality"; "a word of rust" would make way for the chipping and chiseling of the vandal's foïll ("fodiculum, to designate the instrument used to fodiculare "; Roncaglia 1951b, 45n. 50). As it is, they merely "scratch the surface" (fant gratill ):
Mas menut trobador bergau
entrebesquill
mi tornon mon chant en badau
e·n fant gratill.
(Mcb 33: Roncaglia 1951b, 31, vv. 9–12)
But petty troubadours, drones, fabricators, turn my song into
gaping and scratching.
This portrait of a "droning" performance (bergau, "hornet, fool"; Roncaglia 1951b, 37n. 9), where the singer "scrapes" at his lyre and "stands with his mouth open" instead of singing meaningful sounds ("tornar chant en badau"), catches the cantador overacting his rôle of amador at the expense of poetry, gaping with feigned desire (badar ) and "tickling" (gratillar ) the imagination of other men's wives.
But these enemies of Marcabru, who profane his song, are not merely performers but trobador who compose, or recompose it: the designation entrebesquill (interweavers) alludes to the creation of rhymed lines. Thus, Marcabru's reference to his song's "freedom from rust" as a safeguard against "ransacker's tools" suggests, like Peire d'Alvernhe's "there are no false words that might rust in it," that its structure is "impenetrable." Indeed, Marcabru has found twenty-seven different words in each of his two rhymes, so that it might be difficult to replace a line without telltale repetition.
Because it does not rust or tarnish, and because it is "rare" and valuable, gold becomes a favorite metal for poets who use the metaphor of sculpture to describe poetic composition. Although Peire Vidal once compares the "tempering" of a love song to the goldsmith's method of purifying a lump of gold by "breaking" it in the fire, Peire more often alludes to a nonstructural, decorative exterior of gold:
Qu'era que sui malmenatz
fas meravelhatz
motz ab us sonetz dauratz .
(P Vid 4, 12–16)
For now that I am ill treated, I make marvelous rhymes with a
gilded little tune.
Senher N'Agout, no·us sai lauzar
mas de vos dauri mon chantar.
(P Vid 7, 81–82)
Sir Agout, I know not how to praise you, but with you I gild
my song.
In both of these instances, the context indicates that Peire has reason not to produce a "solid gold" song: in the first passage, he has been mistreated, and in the second, a man unworthy of Peire's praise provides the "gilt" with which he adorns his song. Peire gives a comic twist to the familiar idea that a poem should be worth the price paid for it and worthy of its addressee.
The combination of noble and base metals or of metal and wood as materials for "sculpture in words" reappears in Peire Vidal's "En una terra estranha," where Peire points to the futility of "gilding and filing" with words. He observes that whoever applies the gold leaf first and then shapes his words with a file destroys his own work, revealing his "illschooled" heart. Such a man's work, the amors he fabricates in words, can last no longer than a spider's web:
Quar pus qu'obra d'aranha
no pot aver durada
amors, pus es proada,
qu'ab ditz daur'ez aplana
tals qu'al cot de vilan escuelh.
(P Vid 25, 49–53)
For no more than a spider's web can love have duration, since
it has come to the test [been proven] that such a man as gilds
with words, and [then] files, gets his intention [heart] from an
ignoble school.
Taken together, Peire's uses of the verb daurar to describe poetic ornamentation disapprove the thin film of glitter, applied to conceal an unsound structure.
The troubadour who best reconciles the constructive metaphors for poetry—sculpture, building, and metallurgy—is Raimbaut d'Aurenga. In his rimeta prima that he "built without rule or line" (2,3) as well as in "Cars, dous e fenhz' (I ), Raimbaut associates the process of filing (limar ) with the removal of rust. More descriptively than in Marcabru's trobar naturau, the search for "rust" takes the form of a probing inspection; Marcabru's ransacker ("qui quer ben lo vers'al foïll") has his counterpart in Raimbaut's falsa genz:
De la falsa genz qe lima
e dech'e ditz (don quec lim)
ez estreinh e mostr'e guinha
(so don Joi frainh e esfila),
per q'ieu sec e pols e guinh;
Mas ieu no·m part del dreg fil,
quar mos talenz no·s roïlha
q'en Joi nos ferm ses roïlh.
(R d'Aur 2, 9–16)
[I complain] about the false people who file and dictate and
speak (wherefore I file each of them) and squeeze and point
and stare at that which causes Joi to break and unravel; be-
cause of them I follow [or "dry out"] and pound and squint,
but I do not leave the straight wire, for my intention does not
rust, because it encloses us in Joi without rust.
Like Marcabru, Raimbaut regards the critical scrutiny of his enemies ("estreinh e mostr'e guinha") as something closely related to vandalism. The two poets' enemies use comparable tools in their destruction: the lima and the foïll have in common the fact that both wear away their object and risk breaking it ("frainh e esfila"). One is reminded of Bernart Amoros's caution against overediting, to illustrate which he quotes "a wise man":
Blasmat venon per frachura
d'entendimen obra pura
maintas vetz de razon prima
per maintz fols qe·s tenon lima.
(Stengel 1898, 350)
Pure works come to be blamed through breakage of under-
standing, very often [works] with outstanding arguments, be-
cause of many fools with files ["erasers"] in their hands.
Bernart too speaks of "breakage" (frachura ) as the result of emendation by "fools with files in their hands."[3]
Raimbaut criticizes the falsa genz for actions that he and other poets associate with the making of legitimate vers . The least of it is the parallelism between Raimbaut's attentiveness ("ieu sec e pols e guinh," v. 13) and that of his enemies, who "estreinh e mostr'e guinha" (v. 11). Their "filing," which Raimbaut deprecates, is part of the work that goes on in a poet's obrador; Raimbaut himself admits to doing it:
Cars, bruns e tenhz motz entrebesc
pensius-pensanz enquier e serc
(com si liman pogues roire
l'estraing roill ni'l fer tiure)
don mon escur cor esclaire.
(R d'Aur 1, 19–23)
Rare, dark, and colored words I intertwine; pensively ponder-
ing I search and seek (as if by filing I could rub off the incon-
gruous rust or the hard calcifications) how I might clarify my
obscure intention.[4]
The skepticism expressed by "com si" admits that "filing" will not really remove "rust" from "dark words": it is only a simile. Cor can mean intention or will, and Raimbaut seeks to clarify his intention despite the "darkness" of his rhymes. The impurities that obscure his words—rust and calcium deposits—create a context in which Raimbaut's intention resembles a vein of gold surrounded by a mineral crust foreign to it, or a statue that has been left out in the rain for years and needs cleaning and restoration. The former image, "intention as a vein of gold," is consistent with the lines in Raimbaut's rimeta prima, where his "intention does not rust" because he "does not depart from the straight wire": "mas ieu no·m
part del dreg fil, / quar mos talenz no·s roïlha" (R d'Aur 2, 14–15). The excellent poet does not need to "file" because he works in rustproof materials. Raimbaut's implication of this "straight wire of gold" may be a sort of signature, a play on his nickname, Linhaure, "Golden Line."[5] Raimbaut identifies with this noble metal in several poems. In his view, anyone who "mistakes copper for gold" is courting danger: "Que vau doptan / aur per coire / cor al perill / on ie·m liure" (Because I go mistaking gold for copper, I run toward the peril to which I surrender myself; R d'Aur 1, 48–49). In the tenso with Giraut de Bornelh, he compares the rarest and best of songs to the rare metal: "Per so prez'om mais aur que sal / e de tot chant es atretal" (That is why one values gold more than salt, and it is the same way with every song; R d'Aur 31, 34–35).
Arnaut Daniel recalls Raimbaut's criticism of "la falsa genz que lima" (the false people who file) when he describes the art of his "Chansson do·ill mot son plan e prim," defending himself against anticipated objections like Raimbaut's:
Pel bruoill aug lo chan e·l refrim
e per c'om no men fassa crim
obre e lim
motz de valor
ab art d'Amor.
(Arn D 2, 10–14)
Through the grove I hear the song and I echo it, and in order
that this not be made an accusation against me, I work and file
words of value by the art of love.
To what crim might Arnaut be referring? Through the woods he hears the song e·l refrim, and to avoid being accused of error for this, he applies his poetic craft. My solution to the question is that refrim is a verb: refrimar, "retentir, résonner" (Levy 1961). Arnaut echoes the song he hears in the woods and "polishes it up." As he did in the famous razo, he adapts the song of another to his own art—but this time it is the song of a bird, and he jokingly suggests that he might be accused of plagiarism. Arnaut justifies using the lima by asserting the value of his results ("motz de valor") and the worthiness of the guiding aesthetics ("ab art d'Amor"). Like Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Arnaut combines the workshop metaphors with the idea of "following a (straight) line" and alludes to the possibility of "digression," inadvertent separation from the "right way": "ans si be·m
faill, / la sec a traill" (vv. 16–17). It is worth noting that although there is a tradition associating "filing" with "rust," the obvious rhyme ruoilla does not appear in extant copies of Arnaut's poem, although it meets the requirements of the leonine rhyme fuoilla/bruoilla/tuoilla .[6]
Arnaut also flouts Peire Vidal's criticism of "Amors, pus es proada / qu'ab ditz daur'ez aplana" (Love, since it has been proven that with speeches she gilds and [then] polishes; P Vid 25, 51–52), except that he does his "filing and gilding" in the more sensible order:
En cest sonet coind'e leri
fauc motz e capuig e doli
que serant verai e cert
qan n'aurai passat la lima
q'Amors marves plan'e daura
mon chantar, que de liei mou
qui pretz manten e governa.
(Arn D 10, 1–6)
In this graceful and gay little melody, I construct rhymes and
hone them and file them so that they will be true and sure
when I have passed the file over them, for Love without hesita-
tion planes and gilds my song, which originates in her who
supports and controls worth.
He defends love and his craft in one breath, declaring that love is not the creation of poetic artifice, but its creator. He counters Peire's taunt that the gilded works of Amor "can last no longer than a spider's web" by weighting his "graceful and frivolous little tune" with the sense of substantial, reliable carpentry that, he claims, will make his words "true and sure."
Level, Plumb, and True: Songs as Buildings
Architectural metaphors, for us, suggest the creation of a permanent edifice, perfected on a blueprint before the first board is cut. Some troubadours do speak of "building" their poems, likening the work of composition to a great stronghold made of wood and stone. It is the motif of the artisan working in his obrador, but on the largest scale. Raimbaut d'Aurenga draws on the idea that the master craftsman no longer needs the crude tools on which his apprentices must rely; his great skill and experience allow him to measure and level his work by sight. Raimbaut's
equivalent of the carpenter's skill is the sureness of his poetic intention (volers ):
En aital rimeta prima
M'agradon lieu mot e prim
Bastit ses regl'e ses linha,
Pos mos volers s'i apila.
(R d'Aur 2, 1–4)
In such a first-quality little rhyme, I am pleased by light and
fresh words, built without rule or [plumb] line, since my will
inclines toward it.
Like Arnaut, Raimbaut contrasts the delicacy of his project ("lieu mot e prim") with the heavy tools of construction, as if the lightest of these tools (regla,linha ) could damage the finely finished work.
Guilhem de Berguedà makes the same claim, but his mastery exempts him from using even grosser tools. In lines reminiscent of Arnaut Daniel's sonet coind'e leri, Guilhem satirizes the metaphor of the love poet as builder and of poets whose "hearts have wings" yet who carve their words with blunt instruments. Being the "master of the school," Guilhem has no need of the adz and hatchet; in implying that other poets do use these, he compares them not to architects but to clumsy woodcutters who bring rough lumber to the building site:
Cel so qui capol'e dola:
tant soi cuynde e avinen
si que destral ni exola
no·y deman ni ferramen
qu'esters n'a bastidas cen
que maestre de l'escola
so, e am tan finamen
que per pauc lo cor no·m vola.
(Gm Berg 15, 1–8)
I am the one who planes and trims: I am so gracious and pleas-
ing that I do not require an adz or a hatchet, nor other tools,
for I have built a hundred [songs] without them, because I am
the master of the school, and I love in such a refined way that
my heart nearly flies away.
Elsewhere Guilhem de Berguedà develops the expression "sirventes bastir" into a full conceit; the poem as "building" becomes a stronghold, a battle station, that not only protects itself but also shelters the poet during his fight for revenge on its attackers:
Ara voill un sirventes far
tal que, quan l'aurai, bastit
non hai negun tant ardit
enemic no·s posca pensar
que si m'offen qe ja mais fi in patz
aia de me tro qe·n sia venjatz.
(Gm Berg 24, 1–6)
Now I wish to compose a sirventes such that, when I have built
it, there will be no enemy so bold as to be able to think that he
will ever have an end [to war] or peace from me, if he offends
me, until I am avenged.
By 1190, "bastir sirventes" was a cliché for Guilhem de Berguedà: in song 21, Guilhem scarcely pauses to comment on this "building," so intent is he on obtaining patronage "hastily" (astivamen, v. 9):
Un sirventes ai en cor a bastir
que trametrai a·N Sanchon en Espaigna.
(Gm Berg 21, 1–2)
I have it in my heart [mind] to build a sirventes, which I will
transmit to Sir Sancho in Spain.
Already bastir means nothing more than "compose": one cannot "send" a fortress. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras uses the same verb to signal the completion of his "Kalenda maia":
Bastida, finida, N'Engles,
ai l'estampida.
(P.-C. 392, vv. 71–72; cited from Riquer 1975, 839)
Mr. Englishman, I have built, I have finished the estampida .
Although Raimbaut probably chose the verb bastir to draw attention to the artful "construction" of his poem, he is content to leave the term in the realm of the dead metaphor. Estampida is a dance and cannot be "built."
The lasting monuments of the Middle Ages—cathedrals, castles, and towers—were the work of many, sometimes of generations, and there would be no Frank Lloyd Wright to credit with designing the whole and seeing it completed according to his original plans. The metaphor of the poet as builder, too, must be in harmony with medieval ideas on building. Giraut de Bornelh develops the metaphor at length. He first compares the poem to a friendship, then likens both poem and friendship to a tower, built stone by stone until it finally reaches a defensible height. Then battlements can be built, and it can be armed, and the tower—or poem, or friendship—is safe from attack:
E pois auziretz chantador
E chansos anar e venir!
Q'era, can re no sai m'assor,
Me volh un pauc plus enardir
D'enviar no messatge
Que·ns porte nostras amistatz
Que sai n'es facha la meitatz,
Mas de leis no n'ai gatge
E ja no cut si'achabatz
Nuls afars, tro qu'es comensatz.
Qu'eu ai vist acomensar tor
D'una sola peir'al bastir
E cada pauc levar alsor
Tan josca c'om la poc garnir.
Per qu'eu tenh vassalatge
D'aitan, si m'o aconselhatz.
E·l vers, pos er ben assonatz,
Trametrai el viatge,
Si trop qui lai lo·m guit viatz
Ab que·s deport e·s do solatz.
(Gr Bor 40, 41– 60)
And then you will hear singers and songs come and go! For
now, when nothing uplifts me here, I wish to become a little
more courageous to send my messenger, that he might carry
for us our friendship, for here only half of it is made—though I
have no token [down payment] from her, and never, I think,
can any business be completed until it is begun.
For I have seen a tower begun from one single building
block and little by little rise higher until it can be armed.
Therefore I keep this much of chivalry, if you advise it; and the
verse, when it will be well set to music, I will send on the jour-
ney, if I find someone who will guide it there for me quickly,
whom it will amuse and provide with conversation.
If Giraut de Bornelh sends a messenger to "carry for us our friendship," he will surely have it conveyed in the form of a song. But now Giraut is so distressed (nothing "raises" him, v. 43) that he cannot dignify the work in progress with the name of chanso . In better times, he promises, "you will hear the singers and songs come and go." Now it will take more courage to send off his work, for it, like the friendship, is only half-made "here" (i.e., by Giraut): "Que sai n'es facha la meitatz" (v. 47).
The implication is that the other half (meitatz ) will be made lai, there where the addressee is.[7] Since the lady has sent no gatge (surety), no first word as "earnest money" on the song, Giraut can feel justified in sending a mere beginning: someone must lay the first stone. A song, like a friendship, is the work of more than one person. Contrasting the stationary, upward growth of the tower with the song's travel by long relay over time and space, Giraut sends his provisional song as the foundation of a great tower of amistatz, hoping that it will grow higher cada pauc (gradually) until the verse and the friendship together have become as unassailable as the best-armed fortress. Ben assonatz, well fitted with its music, the future poem will be provided with a solid foundation, but its ultimate height has not been limited by its architect.
Poetic "Wholeness": Vers Entiers
The controversy over vers entiers ("entire" or "whole poetry") among Peire d'Alvernhe, Bernart Marti, and other poets of the period bears a close relation to Jaufre Rudel's admonition, "Take care not to break it." The poets discuss "integrity" as a property of poetry itself, of its content, of the jongleur, and even of the poet; they invoke it, disclaim it, accuse others of destroying it, or deny that it can exist. The poems that tell us most about vers entiers and vers frach emphasize the dangers of performance to a song's "wholeness," and they hint at methods by which the poets could, or believed they could, protect it.
When Peire d'Alvernhe claims to be the first to make vers entiers, he also boasts that his song will be understood by posterity.
qu'entendon be aquels c'a venir son
c'anc tro per me no fo faitz vers entiers.
(P d'Alv 11, 3–4; in Paterson 1975, 60)[8]
. . . so that those who are yet to come may fully realize that a
truly whole song was never composed until by me.
(trans. Paterson)
We cannot be sure that he is referring to the "obviously significant moment in literature" announced by Mölk, but we can expect the poem to try to exemplify (and thus help us to define) "whole poetry"—despite an irony of transmission that breaks the poem with a one-line lacuna. Peire "steals from" (Levy 1961, apanar 2) those who practice the trade of poet or jongleur "without an accord that does not get broken along the roadside"; because he has "the bread of poetry" which they lack, other performers must content themselves to be his mere hirelings (apanar 1; cf. apanat ):
Q'ieu tenc l'us e·l pan e·l coutel
de que·m platz apanar las gens
que d'est mestier s'an levat un pairon
ses acordier que no·s rompa·l semdiers.
(P d'Alv 11, 7–10; in Paterson 1975, 60)
For I have the experience and the bread and the knife with
which it pleases me to feed [get the better of] the people who
have raised up a model for themselves in this profession, with-
out recognizing that a task should not be left half-finished.
(trans. Paterson)[9]
The kind of "accord" that befits "this profession" is not a contractual "agreement" or political "harmony" but rather that fitting of motz to son which derivatives of acordar so often signify in troubadour poetry.[10] Travel—that is, transmission—was hard on poems, and Peire evokes the bumpy roads of the time and their hazard to fragile things. The song should be composed for durability in recitation, so that the jongleur can sing it without fits and starts, without changing his mind midword about what word comes next:
C'a un tenen ses mot borrel
deu de dir esser avinens;
quar qui trassaill de Maurin en miron
entre·l mieg faill si no·s pren als ladriers,
com del trebaill quecs motz fatz trezagiers,
qu'en devinaill met l'auzir de maison.
(P d'Alv 11, 13–18; in Paterson 1975, 60)
For at one stretch, without broken words, he should be pleas-
ing in recitation; for he who leaps across from Maurin to
miron falls down in between, if he does not cling to the sides,
as he makes every [rhyme] word the occasion for turmoil, so
that he sets in riddledom the hearing of the house [ maison ].[11]
In lines 15–18, the words maurin,miron, and maion (MS E ) function in two ways: in addition to their semantic value, they represent the near homonyms among which a jongleur must choose correctly in order to make sense. "He who takes a leap between mauri and miro, " if he "falls down midway," will produce a hybrid of vowels and consonants from each word: maio . His poor memory for sound produces an aural riddle.
Peire thinks it best not to hesitate, but to sing without stopping to ponder and blunder (v. 13). Yet this is not an argument for rote memorization; the hesitation among mauri, miro, and maio is the sort of error that would be made by someone who tried to memorize only the sound and could not remember or reproduce the sense. It may also be an argument for reinforcing rhymes: the jongleur should know whether the word ends in -i or in -o and should not try to compromise by singing -io .
The poem is in coblas unissonans, with four internal rhymes. Thus, no rhyme sound is so rarely used that one can forget it; even the internal rhymes, each of which is confined to a single stanza, recur four times in four lines. Perhaps, like Marcabru, Peire believed that the form of coblas unissonans would protect his song from others' detractions, and thought of the repeated rhyme as a way to "bind up the razon in the verse." Peire does derive the proof that his vers is entier from his strict adherence to his argument: "Auia dese con estau a razon" (Hear right now how I stick to the argument; v. 6).
There is no sign, however, that Peire concerns himself with the order of stanzas. Although the modern reader might suppose that a coherent argument must develop its ideas in a necessary order, it is possible that
the troubadours' conception of the razo differs from modern expectations. Perhaps the "argument" consisted of movable parts: one might estar a razo without depending on a particular sequence.
Rather than derive "security in his song" from an exclusionist principle that restricts access to his song, Peire explains his "certainty" with farmers' metaphors:
Q'ie·m sen sertans del mielis qui aqui fon
ensegurans de mon chant e sobriers
ves los baisans e sai que dic, qu'estiers
no vengua·l grans don a trop en sazon.
(P d'Alv 11, 27–30; in Paterson 1975, 60)
For I feel confident about the best that ever was, self-assured
about my song and superior to those on the decline, and I know
what I am saying, for in no other way is the grain forthcoming,
of which there is much in due season.
(trans. Paterson)[12]
Peire attributes the "security" of his song to its abundance, to the fact that the original version (the "seed") is more than sufficient. The biblical parable of the Sower enters the picture, and its application appears to be that the song will "grow" when it is seeded in the "good soil" of audiences and performers who "heed the word." Peire declares himself the "root," "the first" in "finished recitations" ("qu'ieu soi raitz e dic que soi premiers / de digz complitz," vv. 22–23); by emphasizing growth from "root" and "seed" (raitz,grans ), Peire describes the lyric as an organism whose quality depends on its origin and that illustrates the genealogical aphorism of trobar natural that only good trees bring forth good fruit.[13] Peire d'Alvernhe thus, with his talk of "root" and "seed" of "complete poetry," achieves an effect similar to what Pickens observes in Jaufre Rudel's work, where "the erotic movement in the composition, transmission, destination and retransmission of the song associates . . . the spring topos with the topos of the 'seminal word'" (1977, 327).
The "abundance" of Peire's original work, what makes it ric, comes from the creative force of joi: "D'aisi·m sent ric per bona sospeison / qu'en ioi m'afic" (In this respect I feel rich, through a pleasant apprehension that I am fixed in joi ; vv. 38–39). The manuscripts give asic in line 38, from asezer (sit, seat); this makes good enough sense to render emendation unnecessary. "I am seated in joi " would give the same sense of sta-
bility and well-being as m'afic, except that instead of the overtones of being "fixed" or "attached," m'asic has the additional sense of "being set to music."
Sung performance, then, was clearly one of the major considerations in "securing a song" ("ensegurans de mon chant," v. 28), in keeping it "whole." Peire trusts in the reinforcing rhymes of coblas unissonans, as well as in the more than sufficient creative virtue of the original "seed" or "root" song, which should guarantee that the quality of its "offspring" will be as high as its own. Peire d'Alvernhe, today remembered most for his Marcabrunian satire, was known in the thirteenth century for his outstanding melodies. The superiority that he claims in "Sobre·l vieill trobar" was explained by his Provençal biographer as justifiable by the excellence of his musical compositions:
E trobet ben e cantet ben, e fo lo premiers bons trobaire que fon outra mon
et aquel que fez los meillors sons de vers que anc fosson faichs.
(Boutière and Schutz 1964, s.v. "Peire d'Alvernhe")
And he composed poems well and he sang well, and he was the first good
troubadour who went beyond the mountains and the one who made the
best lyric melodies ever made.
In general, Peire seems to rely on large, encompassing structures such as the melody (son, acordier ), the argument (razo ), and the rhyme scheme to keep the song entiers . "Breakage" (frachura ) in details, like the blurring of mauri and miro into maio, he blames on jongleurs' failure to sing consistently ("a un tenen") and thus to ensure meaningful sequences of sounds, rather than on their inability to remember the exact wording of the original composition.
In this way, Peire d'Alvernhe's view of what constitutes the "integrity" of the song—its son, its razo, and its rima (melody, argument, and rhyming)—strongly affirms the view of Jaufre Rudel:
No sap chantar qui so non di
ni vers trobar qui motz no fa
ni connoys de rima quo·s va
si razos non enten en si.
(J Rud 6/1, 1–4)
One cannot [know how to] sing without uttering the melody,
nor compose a poem without making rhymes [words], nor
know how the rhyme goes if he does not comprehend the argu-
ment within himself.
Understanding the razo ensures that one will know "how the rhyme goes," and not vice versa. The need to match rhyme and melody while making sense is the singer's, as well as the poet's, task; the rhyme does not precede the sense but follows it. Otherwise one sings well-rhymed nonsense, the devinaill referred to in Peire's song.
In "D'entier vers far ieu non pes" ("I care not for making 'entire' poems"), Bernart Marti discusses "textual integrity" as the counterpart of personal integrity, challenging Peire d'Alvernhe's boastful song on both levels, at times blending these levels. Even his own songs, Bernart admits, are not "whole," although he himself has not made "breaks" in them: "D'entier vers far ieu non pes / ni ges de frag non faria" (I am not thinking of making a "whole" song, nor would I make a broken one; B Mar 5, 1–2). Bernart denies that he, as the "original composer" of a song, could presume to claim the high perfection that entier implies; nonetheless, his songs' distance from that perfection does not brand them vers frag . He also does not blame others for whatever flaws might be found in his songs: transmission neither corrects their imperfections nor creates new "breakage." He composes two or three songs each year, he says, "et on plus sion asses / entier ni frag no son mia" (5, 5–6). In this context, asses may again mean "set to music" (from asezer ): "the more they are set to music, the more they are neither whole nor broken."[14]
Bernart interweaves personal criticisms of Peire d'Alvernhe—his "sin of pride," his disloyalty to monastic vows—with criticism of presumptuous aesthetic claims; the language of secular poetry, he insists, is a fallen language that can no more aspire to perfect "wholeness" than men can aspire to the "wholeness" that preceded original sin:
E so quez entier non es,
ni anc no fo, cum poiria?
Fols horn leu so cujaria
que chans melhs entrebesques,
qu'om de vanetat fezes
entiers ni frags non seria.
(B Mar 5, 13–18)
And that which is not "whole," nor ever was, how could it be-
come ["whole"]? A foolish man might easily believe that he
could weave the song better, but whatever a man might make
out of vanity would not be either "whole" or "broken."
Here, Bernart criticizes the vanity of the reviser: if a song never was "whole," and is not "whole," how can its "wholeness" be restored? "The fool might think he could weave the song better" (v. 16), perhaps better than the original poet made it. However, the works of vanity are flawed by their own motive; they cannot even be "broken" because the word implies a preexisting "wholeness."
Bernart also appears to recommend a division of labor between poets and musical composers; this supports my reading of the first stanza, where the phrase "on plus sion asses" (the more they are set to music) represents the time when the song leaves the poet's jurisdiction and becomes the work of others.
De far sos novelhs e fres,
so es bella maistria
e qui belhs motz lass'e lia,
de belh'art s'es entremes;
mas non cove q'us disses
que de tot n'a senhoria.
(B Mar 5, 73–78)
To make new and fresh melodies—that is a beautiful craft to
master, and he who laces up and binds beautiful words has in-
volved himself in a beautiful art; but it is not suitable that one
man should say that he holds dominion over all.
The making of a song requires the blending of two arts, the maistria of melodic composition and the belh'art of "tying and binding fine rhymes," but no one can claim absolute supremacy in both. Again, Bernart's comment indicates that a "whole" song would, ideally, create a perfect bond between the motz and the son . This responds to Peire's claim of superiority over others in his trade whose "acordier . . . se romp'al semdier."
Bernart also reminds Peire that he cannot keep constant vigil over transmission: he cannot spread his own praises over the countryside by himself, and it would be a disgrace if he tried to do so:
Pro sap e ben es apres
qui so fay que ben estia
et es mager cortezia
que sos laus es pels paës
per autruy que per el mes,
qu'ab pobol par vilania.
(B Mar 5, 67–73)
He knows enough and is well educated, he who makes a mel-
ody that may suit; and it is a greater courtly refinement that his
praise is spread through the countries by others than himself,
for among the population, baseness appears.
This stanza includes a backhanded compliment to Peire's musical compositions: it is enough that he "makes a melody that is perfectly adequate" (ben estia ). Peire should allow others to "spread his praises"—that is to say, he should leave the making of vers to others and stick to what he does best, the son . Among country audiences, the courtly song may acquire some new vilania that would wound its author's sensibility; he had better stay home. Bernart mentions the peasant audience to deflate Peire's lofty claim to have achieved the aesthetic ideal of "wholeness."
Time and performance leave songs neither "untouched" nor "broken"; they are mended as often as they are rearranged by other hands, other voices. Bernart laughs at the claim of absolute and personal control (seignoria ): once a song is known, it no longer belongs to its creator, and recreators share the credit (laus ) for making it, or the discredit (vilania ) for unmaking it.
Giraut de Bornelh uses Bernart's own argument to refute him: Bernart denies the poet's right to boast of his songs, since once they enter the public domain they may only distantly resemble his original productions. Giraut argues that, on the contrary, these conditions leave the poet at liberty to praise his own songs as loudly as if they had been made by another. A song's virtues are intrinsic in it and not conditional on the hearer's acquaintance (or identity) with the author:
S'es chantars ben entendutz
e s'ofris pretz e valor,
per qu'es lach de trobador,
desque sos chans er saubutz
qu'el eis en sia lauzaire?
Que be pareis al retraire
si·lh n'eschai blasmes o laus.
(Gr Bor 62, 1–7)
If a song is well planned, and offers in itself value and worth,
then why is it unbecoming in a troubadour, after his song is
known, that he himself be its praiser? For it is quite apparent
at the performance whether blame or praise redounds to him
because of it.
Giraut further clarifies the process of disjunction between the poem and its original author. A song may have an excellent author and yet come to a bad end (as Bernart Amoros later pointed out) because the jongleurs squabble over distorted versions of what was once a good poem by a good troubadour—just as the shrill grackle and the screaming peacock squabble over which of them produces the superior cacophony:
Lo vers auzitz e mogutz
coma de bo trobador
pois reverti en error,
lo chans can er' asaubutz,
c'us s'en fazia clamaire
dels dichs don altr'era laire,
corn fetz de la gralha·l paus.
(Gr Bor 62, 29–35)
The verse is heard and "moved"[15] as the work of a good trou-
badour; later, the song turns back into error when it becomes
known, for one man makes himself the claimant of verses an-
other man stole, just as the peacock does [complains] against
the grackle.
In "un vers que volh far leuger" (a poem that I want to make light), Giraut turns Peire d'Alvernhe's notion of "textual integrity" upside down: poetry too pure to be shared by all never achieves its full potential value:
Be·l saupra plus cobert far;
mas non a chans pretz enter
can tuch no·n son parsoner.
(Gr Bor 4, 8–10)
I could easily have made it more obscure; but a song does not
have its full worth when all are not sharers in it.
That Giraut intends this to be paradoxical is clear from his description of the aristocratic pretz enter as something to be found even in the voice of a hoarse servant who has gone to fetch well water:
Qui que·s n'azir, me sap bo,
can auch dire per contens
mo sonet rauquet e clar
e l'auch a la fon portar.
(Gr Bor 4, 11–14)
No matter who is angered by it, I savor it when I hear my song
sung in rivalry, both hoarse and clear, and hear it carried to the
wellspring.
The kind of "sharing" to which Giraut refers is access not only to the understanding of poetry but to its performance as well. He draws on the idea of the fon as a source of inspiration; even the lowliest performer who "takes the song to the wellspring" will contribute new lines to it, will recast and recreate its imperfect passages, will "refresh" it.
Peire d'Alvernhe, in 1170, calls Giraut's music "thin and sad," "the song of an old woman with a bucket." Answering Giraut's idea of integrity through communality, and at the same time replying to Bernart Marti's attacks, Peire defends the poet's personal responsibility for his song and (with a touch of comedy) returns pretz to a matter of beauty and not politics. The poet's "vanity," so disparaged by Bernart Marti, is quite suitable by comparison with the vanity of the "viella porta-seill" who dares try her voice at the canso . As Peire pictures for 5s the old bucket woman donning the persona of the canso 's poet/lover and gazing into the mirror, the reflection we glimpse is of a burlesque Giraut in drag; the typical modesty of the lover is transformed into the old woman's comment on her beauty ("not worth an eglantine"):
Q'es chans de viella porta-seill
que si·s mirava en espeill
no·s prezari'un alguilen.
(P d'Alv 12, 16–18)
For it is the song of an old woman, a bucket carrier, who, if she
saw herself reflected in a mirror, would not value herself worth
an eglantine.[16 ]
Can such a performer confer pretz enter on a song, when her own pretz is "hardly worth a suck"? Peire makes uproarious fun of Giraut's faith in literary partnership with humble folk ("can tuch en son parsoner"). The beauty of "carrying the song to the wellspring" is lost on a singer who would use even the fons Bandusiae for dishwater. She is the antithesis of the powerful lady whom the canso honors, and who in turn does honor to the canso by learning to sing it. Peire lets the bucket woman stand as the disheveled Muse of Giraut's aesthetic democracy, capable of frank self-judgment but unlikely to beautify a song.
In this exchange, then, it would appear that Giraut's views on textual integrity—comparable to those he expressed in the tenso with Raimbaut d'Aurenga over trobar clus versus trobar leu —concern accessibility or exclusivity to the performer, not just to the listener. This is consistent with other ideas Giraut defends: the initial composition of a song as the first stone in a tower "only half-built here" and completed through a long process of interchange, and the idea that a poet can no longer take full credit for his works once they enter the public domain. Peire d'Alvernhe, if he heard the tenso, would probably have sided with Raimbaut d'Aurenga: rauquet or enraumatz, a vilain is more likely to damage a song than to improve it.
"Dry Verse"
In "Cantarai d'aquestz trobadors," Peire d'Alvernhe criticizes Giraut above all for his dryness: "e sembla rare sec al soleil" (and he resembles a dry wineskin in the sun). The troubadours appear to associate dryness with a sort of insincerity or inconstancy: Peire Vidal brings alive the double meaning of pics (woodpecker; or, as adj., piebald, black and white; changing, inconstant), suggesting that the dryness, or untrustworthiness, of the woodpecker comes from the fact that he has "his mouth full of garbage":
Et es assatz plus secs que pics
e non pretz tot quant elh retrai
sa boca plena d'orrethai.
(P Vid 25, 82–83)
And he is somewhat more dry than a woodpecker, and I do
not deem valuable all that he reports [with] his mouth full of
garbage.
Raimbaut d'Aurenga associates the dry with the deaf: "Car sabran li sec e·il sort . . ." (For dry men and deaf men will know . . .). Sec describes an interference with entendre in both senses, deflecting intention as well as understanding.
Alegret's vers sec turns on a rime équivoque that reappears in the first line of each stanza; the refrain word sec, one of the "dos motz ab divers sens" (two words with varying meanings), sets equivocation itself as the theme for some stanzas—equivocation, hypocrisy, insincerity.[17] The mal sec that afflicts Larguetatz in lines 22–25 seems harmless, creeping up, imperceptible to the hearing, sight, and touch until it suddenly "skins and plucks" its victim. Dry people promise more than they accomplish:
Aqill son dinz e defor sec
escas de fag e larc de ven
e pagan home de nien.
(Alegret, "Ara pareisson ll'aubre sec"
[P.-C. 17,2], 29–31; in Riquer 1975, 239)
These people are dry inside and out, stingy with deeds and
generous with wind, and they pay a man with nothing.
They are "windbags" (larc de yen ). The association of sec with contract breaking or "paying with nothing" leads into a suggestion of stinginess: "Joven vei false flac e sec / c'a pauc de cobeitat no fen" (I see Youth so false and weak and dry that it nearly bursts with coveting; vv. 15–16). The natural "dry trees" of the opening lines, in their setting of wintry fog and lightless or "unclear weather" (vv. 1–4), become the biblical dry trees that can bear no fruit, just as "malvatz horn no poc esser valen" (a bad man cannot become worthy; vv. 13–14). This theme appears in numerous sirventes, including Marcabru's challenge to Alegret:
Alegretz, fols, en qual guiza
cujas far d'avol valen
ni de gonella camiza?
(Mcb 11, 65–67)
Alegret, you madman, by what trick do you expect to make
the base into the worthy, or trousers into a shirt?
For Alegret, "dryness" or equivocation is despicable in every situation but one: it is avol for youth, liberality, patronage, and love, yet valen as a device of versification, of rhyme and wordplay. His entire poem turns on
the shifting meanings of the word sec; while denouncing shifty people, it celebrates the shifty style.
Alegret anticipates objection to his vers sec, and his challenge to its detractors focuses on defending the style rather than the moral content of the song. Non-saben (know-nothings) who equate sec with avol might also equate vers sec with vers avol . But the listener must "double his understanding": Alegret is willing to prove, by fistfight if necessary, that he is too good a poet to blunder. He "foams up" the words on purpose:
Hueymais fenirai mon vers sec,
e parra pecx al non saben
si no·i dobla l'entendemen,
q'ieu sui cell que·ls mots escuma
e sai triar los auls dels avinentz;
e si fols ditz qu'aissi esser non dec,
traga s'enan, qu'Alegretz n'es guirens.
Si negus es del vers contradizens,
fassa·s'enan, q'eu dirai per que·m lec
metr' en est vers dos motz ab divers sens.
(Alegret [P.-C. 17,2], 50–59; in Riquer 1975, 240)
Now I will finish my dry poem, and it will appear stupid to a
know-nothing if he does not double the interpretation, for I
am he who foams up the rhymes, and I know how to separate
the bad ones from the suitable ones; and if a fool says that it
should not be this way, let him come forward, for Alegret is its
protector.
If anyone is a contradictor of the poem, let him come for-
ward, for I will tell why I allow myself to set in this poem two
words with various meanings.
Alegret's repeated request that his critic "come forward" suggests a challenge to combat, but it may be that instead Alegret wishes him to "contradire lo ver" in some form of public debate. One possibility is that the "fool" who "says that it should not be this way" would be charged to recite the poem as he believes it should be, the "counterversion" qualifying him as contradizens .
The poet, too, is a "dry tree" that puts forth no rhetorical flowers when he lacks the "sap" of inspiration: a troubadour may be sec when he cannot "express" his complaint in poetic flowers and leaves. It is this
blocking of expression that Peire d'Alvernhe struggles to overcome in the sirventes "Belh m'es qu'ieu fass' oimais un vers":
si que flurisc e bruelh defors
so que dedins mi gragelha.
(P d'Alv 15, 7–8)
So that what grumbles within me may bloom and leaf out,
outwardly.
In this poem, sec is the final blow in a long accumulation of adjectives denouncing those who "fan que quascus aprent un quec" (bring it about that each of them should learn something or other). What the dry people have tried to learn, the "un quec" in question, is a song; Peire lets us know this by describing the results of this education as a parody of genuine creativity. The real troubadour, when he makes a new song, "nais e cresc e bruoill" (is born and grows and bushes out), his words blossoming like spring branches. But for these low-born "degenerates," "volpillos, blau d'enveja, sec" (negligent, white with envy, dry; v. 38), the excitement of "learning un quec " causes them to break out in boils:
fan que quascus aprent un quec
don nays e bruelha·l pustelh.
(P d'Alv 15, 39–40)
They arrange that each one may learn a [little] something,
from which cause a boil is born and leafs out.
Peire's comment on Giraut's "dryness," then, may include both reproof of his populism (suggesting that the uninspired and vulgar can mimic but never invent good poetry) and a response to Giraut's claims for the refreshment of the public fountain. The "dry-wineskin" poet may hear his songs "carried to the wellspring," but the Muses' wineskin is empty, and likely to be refilled with the commonest water.
Giraut's answer to the criticism of resembling "a dry wineskin in the sun" (or perhaps part of what provoked that criticism) comes in his "Leu chansonet'e vil" ("Light little song and lowly"), a poem composed especially to be sent to Alvernhe (al Dalfi [to the Dauphin], though, and not to Peire):
Car ges aiga de vi
no fetz Deus al manjar
ans se volc esalzar
e fetz esdevenir
d'aiga qu'er ans
pois vi per melhs grazir.
(Gr Bor 48, 15–20)
For not at all did God make water from wine at the feast, but
rather he wished to exalt himself, and he caused what was for-
merly water to become wine, the better to confer grace.
Sharing with the public the "wine of poetry," by the same token, does not instantly convert it to water. The poet who wishes to "s'esalzar" and "melhs grazir" should follow the example of Christ, and having transformed something common (ordinary language, water) into something precious (a song, wine), he should distribute it freely in proportion as the original substance was plentiful. Rarity and expensiveness, says Giraut, do not guarantee excellence in a song; the troubadour's work is a craft, not a parade of furs and jewels. This is his objection to trobar car and ric ("rare" and "rich poetry"): a craftsman cannot sharpen his tools on a sable cape (a symbol of lavish payment for poetry, as well as of "soft" poetry) even if he has received such "rich" compensation for "rich" work:
E qui de fort fozil
no vol coltel tochar
ja no·l cut afilar
en un mol sembeli.
(Gr Bor 48, 11–14)
And anyone who is unwilling to strike his knife on a strong
whetstone certainly can never expect to sharpen it on a soft
sable.
For Giraut, the general public is the strongest "whetstone" (fort fozil ) for a poem, and their "sharpening" a better recompense for the poet than furs and other wealth.
Writing and Monumentalism: Some Modern and Medieval Views
Concern for the preservation of one's works has no doubt changed in character since the Middle Ages. For the modern author, "preserving" one's
works means supervising one's publisher. The poet studies the typesetter's proof sheets, requests fine paper and sewn binding to improve the durability of the book, campaigns for wide distribution, and finally buys up all the unsold copies to save them from being "pulped." One must, if possible, issue a Collected Poems late in life, to make sure one's best work, at least, does not go out of print before it has time to become a classic.
Air and stone (or the voice and the inscription) as two opposing media for poetry have long fascinated poets who could look back on the durable literature of antiquity, or of the nearer past. Aware of composing in sound rather than in printer's lead, the modern poet often seems to envy by turns the immortality of stones and the immortality of the nightingale. Basil Bunting, a poet who destroys his "imperfect" works, appears to distrust the printed word as sufficiently permanent to preserve the poems he has chosen to publish: "Pens are too light / Take a chisel to write" (1978, 41).
In "Briggflatts," Bunting's metaphor of the poet as stonecutter makes the analogue of the poem the ultimate monument: the tombstone. Yet other works are ambivalent: Bunting describes the words of his "Ode 33: To Anne Porter" as "a peal after / the bells have rested" (1978, 106). Robinson Jeffers with optimism compared poets to "stonecutters fighting time with marble": the "foredefeated" and "cynical" builders, like the poet who "builds his monuments mockingly," underestimate the power of stones and poems to weather the fall of civilizations (1925, 249). These poets come late in a long tradition of monumentalism. Shakespeare calls it a "miracle" "that in black ink my love may still shine bright" (Sonnets 65, 14), yet expects no less than that miracle: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme" (Sonnets 55, 1–2). Horace, who could perhaps count on readers who read aloud, insisted that verse could be both permanent and alive. The dance measures he had transformed into a metal harder than bronze, making of them a "monument," could still escape oblivion through oral performance: dicar (I will be recited; Odes 3.30). The Occitan troubadours appear to be much more interested in "gathering from the air a live tradition"[18] and, having shaped it into song, returning it "alive" to the air it came from. Peire d'Alvernhe asks a viscount to do what he will with his song, "but please do not keep it silent" (e que no·i l'en teigna nec; Zenker 1901, 798). Pons de la Guardia hopes his song will find favor so that "it will be sung in many a good place" thereafter.[19] All the troubadours' ref-
erences to memorization and relay point to the idea that circulation in performance meant more to these poets than did scrupulous control over the precise words to be sung. Poetry was the "air they breathed," not their graveyard.
Instead of fussing over manuscripts, the troubadours fuss over performance, believing perhaps that one's songs were sufficiently preserved if they remained alive, regenerating themselves with each new recitation. The poet-as-phoenix has no need of a "well wrought urn" for his ashes:
Plus que ja fenis fenics
non er q'ieu non si'amics.
(R d'Aur 4, 64–65)
No more than the phoenix was ever finished will I ever stop
being your friend.
The persona of the lover, as well as something of the poet behind it, revives with each new voice taking up the song:
Amiga, tant vos sui amics
q'az autras paresc enemics
e vuelh esser en vos Fenics
qu'autra jamais non amarai
et en vos m'amor fenirai.
(P Vid 35, 90–94)
My friend, I am so much your friend that I seem an enemy to
other women, and I wish to be a phoenix in you, for I will
never love another and in you I will complete my love.
Both of these passages, the first from Raimbaut d'Aurenga and the second from Peire Vidal, are tornadas —the usual location for poets' comments on the song itself and its destiny. The simplest interpretation, in each case, is that the poet's amiga, like Peire Rogier's patronesses, will learn the song and thus "resuscitate" the voice of the poet. Peire Vidal's use of the phoenix occurs at the end of his last datable song (1204–1207; Avalle 1960, 286), but even a young poet might enjoy the prospect of "being a phoenix in" the memorizing patron's voice.
Rigaut de Berbezilh, in "Atressi com l'orifans" ("Just like the elephant"), wishes he were artful enough to transform his song into something perfectly artless. If he could "contrafar fenis" (36–37), this self-
immolation would destroy the "voice" of the "controlling poet" and would thus free the song of all its artifice, indeed of its very words. The song would live again as pure emotive utterance (sighs and tears) in the addressee's safekeeping:
e mos fals ditz messongiers e truans
resorsera en sospirs e en plors
la on beutatz e iovenz e valors
es . . .
(R Berb 2, 40–43)
And my false speech, lying and truant, will rise again in sighs
and in tears, there where beauty and youth and worth are . . .
The troubadours seem to have been conscious of a phenomenon we can observe retrospectively in the chansonniers . To transmit a song is to transform it: a single poem, both by rearrangement of stanzas and by abundance of variants in detail, comes down to us in a great many avatars. The lyric "phoenix" could take many different shapes, emerging into each new life with its structure significantly altered.
In summary, we have no reason to suppose—and good reason not to suppose—that literary self-consciousness, or a need to make salable commodities of their works, or even concern for reputation and posterity, should have compelled troubadour poets to commit their works to parchment. All of these motives can be satisfied independently of writing. The troubadours developed a different kind of monumentalism from that which depends on printed publication and copyright—a monumentalism no less flattering to the self-conscious poet, no less profitable, and no less concerned with posterity. Each new learner of a song speaks partly with the voice of the original poet and partly with his own voice: he can use the poem for fame or for profit, he can teach it to singers of another generation, and he can tell or withhold the name of the original poet:
E diga·l can l'aura apres
qui que s'en vuelha azautar.
E si hom li demanda qui l'a fag, pot dir que sel que sap be far
totas fazendas can se vol.
(R d'Aur 24, 40–43)
And let him recite it, when he has learned it, anyone who
wishes to embellish it. And if someone asks him who com-
posed it, he can say it was that man who knows how to create
all kinds of things when he wants to.
A system of transmission that depended primarily on sung performance could not satisfy a desire for letter-perfect transmission comparable to that of Scripture, or of modern printed poetry. But as I have shown, that type of literalism runs counter to the predominant spirit of troubadour song.