“It is worthless to write a line / if the song proceed not from the heart” - The Troubadour Poets of Proensa

Paul Blackburn’s Proensa may not be the ideal place to start for someone interested in a historical, contextual understanding of the culture of the troubadours of Occitan, but as an entry into the poetry itself – almost surely the best way to start the subject – wow. Blackburn’s enthralling 1978 anthology gives us the glorious thing itself: a chronological arrangement of nearly 100 selections from 30 poets culled from the more than 2,000 works, by over 400 11^th – 13^th century troubadours, that have survived to the present. Proensa also includes a brief introduction, the vidas (lives) and razos (reasons) that make up the poets’ extant biographical material, a helpful bibliography and some 50 pages of endnotes nearly as entertaining as the poems. For basic knowledge of how the tradition came about, what the troubadours did, as well as definitions of the vers, cansos, tensos, sirventes, partimen, albas, coblas, estampinas and other poetic forms they used, one may need to search beyond the book. But small matter: as an introduction to the poetry, Proensa is exciting, the kind of work that could initiate a life-long interest or ignite a scholarly career.

Blackburn’s selections range across an astonishing variety of the themes, styles, and even personalities of his songsters. The image of the troubadour strumming a lute beneath a beloved’s window goes right out the window as one encounters the timid and the bold, the sincere and flippant, the romantic and the lecherous (often in the same person), kings and orphans, monks and married couples, even the trobairitz, the female troubadours, one of many paths Blackburn leaves for further investigation.

This is one wild and shaggy, vivacious, rich and constantly surprising set of poems. The selections demonstrate a great deal of self-reflexivity, authorial intrusion, experimentalism with style, use of double-entendre and a particular attention to and even debate about poetic construction: a constant reminder that there’s little new under the sun. For example, with Blackburn’s earliest poet, Guillem IX, one turns the page and runs smack into an 11^th century Jerry Seinfeld:

                        I shall make a vers about

                                    Nothing,

                        downright nothing, not

                        about myself or youth or love

                                    or anyone.

                        I wrote it horseback dead asleep

                        while riding in the sun.

Guillem goes on to aim his apostrophe, as courtly troubadours are wont to do, to a lady - but to whom exactly?

                        I have a friend, I don’t know who

                        for I have never seen her. So

                        she treats me neither well nor ill,

                        I do not say I blame her.

These are by and large composers proud of their work but who nonetheless don’t take themselves too seriously. One finds a frequent combination of bombast and self-mockery. Marcabru, one of the more renowned of the poets, begins a poem:

                                    Now here this!

                                    HEAR THIS!

                                    How our song

                                    betters itself,

                                    always at thrust

how, following his distinct grasp, Marcabru

                                    knows how to weave

                                    subject and theme,

to so accord the vers that no man can

                                    pluck from the line

                                                a word.

But in a subsequent verse Marcabru views himself more as channeler, suggesting that the poet’s aim lies in the etymological origin of “troubadour” from the verb trobar, or “to find” as much as to create the ideal sound and sense of his composition:

                        He knows not from whence it moves

                        who made the vers and dances it.

                                    Marcabru has made the dance

                                    but does not know who started it.

The wide renown of these poets, the degree to which they played off of one another’s work, as well as the vital way in which the tradition of trobar resulted from such interactions get reflected in many of the poems. The Monk of Montaudon, for instance, offers a series of strophes devoted to assessing (and largely dismissing) the work of each of the Monk’s troubadour rivals, such as the hapless

                        En Tremolet, the catalan who

  makes his tunes so easy and plain

                                    and his songs too, but

                                    he’s nothing: combs

                        his hair on top as if he had some

                        thirty years he’s wanted to make albas

                        and’s made nothing but the grimiest smut.

A playfully competitive awareness of the need for criticism also frequently appears, as in another of Marcabru’s poems:

                          No doubt at all,

                        I’ll take him on as critic,

                        who’ll call the meaning, in my song,

                        of each word,

                        who’s analytic, who

                        can see the structure of the vers unfold.

                        I know it’ll sound absurd, but

                        I’m often doubtful and go wrong myself

                        in the explication of an obscure word.

Arnaut Daniel, another poet, offers his own self-reflexive example of the craft of composition that many troubadours bring within their poems:

On this gay and slender tune I put and polish words and plane

and when I’ve passed the file they’ll be

                        precise and firm.

In terms of subject matter, the poems range widely. While some of the vidas hint at the religious schisms and holy crusades going on at the time, the poems seldom dwell on religious themes, or at least of those that indicate devotion. Guillem IX, in a poem of leave-taking, expresses an ambiguous attitude towards God more concerned with being bereft of worldly pleasures than with any promise of Paradise:

                        Gaily I lived. Now God no longer cares for it:

                        being half-dead, even I no longer desire it.

                        All ceremony quit, all loving habit:

                        if God love me, whatever comes, I welcome it.

                        Friends, at my demise come do me honor:

                        since I’ve taken my pleasure all over the neighborhood.

                        All gracious show I leave, joys of love and table,

                        two kinds of grey fur, also sable.

Even The Monk of Montaudon is not nearly as pious as his name might suggest. Finding himself in Paradise, Montaudon converses with the Lord, who wants the monk to stop wasting away in a monastery and go off to fight in His name. But citing the example of a king who pursued such a course, the monk objects:

                        ‘Why’d You let him be put in prison?

Now the Saracen fleet under full

sail makes headway – you ignore it –

and if it makes rendezvous in Acre

the Turks will make short work of that!

Anyone would have to be an idiot

                                    to follow YOU into battle.’

The great majority of Blackburn’s poets, however, aim their poems at loves near and far, since paying court is central to entire troubadour tradition. Proensa contains no shortage of seductive (and usually hyperbolic) appeals. But by and large, the plaintive and melancholic strains quickly turn, sometimes in the same strophe, to outright lust.

Thus Pere Vidal can write more or less purely:

                                    Lady cure me, don’t

                        stand and watch me die, a Lazarus,

                                                of this sweet sickness.

                                    My running away from it’s no good.

                                                My eyes play tricks.

                                    When I leave

                        I see your beauty before me upon all the roads,

                                    can neither go

                                                nor go back.

                                    May I die accused in hell

                        if I had the whole world, but lacked

you

and things stood well.

The poet Cadenet, more typically, brings things down to earth:

I’ve never seen any

horizontal lover

who liked dawn.

Jaufré Rudel de Blaia may best embody the troubadour’s love from afar by addressing himself to a lady from Tripoli he knows only from descriptions shared by traveling pilgrims. According to his Vida, he managed to secure passage on a ship to Tripoli, became deathly ill, yet regained consciousness just long enough to find himself in his beloved’s arms before expiring. One of his poems written prior to this sad fate begins, like many of these troubadours’ works, by enlisting spring in the service of love:

                        When the days are long in May

                                                it’s good,

                                    soft birdsong from afar

                        and when the melody leaves me

                                    I remember my love afar.

                        I’ve been bent and thoughtful with desire until

                                    hawthorn and flowers & all that song

                        mean no more to me than snow in winter.

Marcabru begins a poem with a similar evocation of spring:

                        In April around Easter the streams grow clear

                        and in the groves, leaves burgeon above the blossoms.

                        Gentle, with gentle pleasure, gently

                        pure love comforts me.

However, Marcabru’s appeal to the season to create an inviting atmosphere is more typical of these poems, which often quickly decline into rough expressions of disappointment when the hoped-for love is frustrated. A mere nine lines later, Marcabru’s tone has changed dramatically:

                        God down and damn eternally pied love and curse forever

                        all that it stands for! The drunk at least takes pleasure

                        in his letch – through if he drink too much

                        it drains his vigor.

Perhaps the most audacious approach is that of Bertrand de Born, a powerful viscount “who had this habit of stirring up war among the nobles.” Though de Born also begins a poem with a paean to spring, he gets right to the heart of things immediately in a way that probably hasn’t been improved upon in 800 years: “SPRING IS A JUICE!” And as though to mock the sentimentality of someone like de Blaia, de Born turns the season into an occasion not for love, but for war and conquest:

                        Pawn your castles, lord,       

                        pawn your towns and cities!

                        Before you’re beat to the draw

                          unsheath those swords!

                        Papiols, rejoice and go

                        with all haste to Oc-e-No

                        and tell him that we’ve got too much

                        damned PEACE down here!

Despite the plethora of proclamations of love, it need hardly be said that women, on the whole, get treated rather poorly in these poems, one moment set upon a pedestal only to be in the next accused of faithlessness, dissembling, and worse, often in the rawest language (as translator, Blackburn does not hold back, observing in a note that “If [raw language] was good enough for the 9^th duke of Aquitaine, it’s good enough for you”). Surprisingly, though, several of the male troubadours attempt poems from a woman’s point of view, or demonstrate that women can give as good as they get. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, for example, offers a back and forth dialogue between a Provençal suitor and a Genoese lady who isn’t having any of it:

YOU THINK you’re being courtly, joglar?

What you think you’re asking for?

Wouldn’t do it anyway, not if I

saw you were going to be hanged and quartered.

A friend of yours? – Look, I’d prefer

better to cut you up instead.

O, very tough luck, Provensal.

Here are some sweet nothings for you:

You cruddy dope, bald-headed asshole!

Think I’d ever love you? Never!

I’ve even got a husband better

looking. Clear off, you swine!

I don’t know you and I’m better off,

I like it fine.

Blackburn, however, reports that the poem may be seen as mocking the woman,  “a joke at the expense of the Genoese dialect” (and adds, in one of his typically wry notes, that he first tried to “do the lady’s stanzas in a kind of stage Italian-American: ‘I’ma goona slitta you throat’ etc., it was too embarrassing, and I settled for a tough New Yorkese tone’”).

Though at least one of the anonymous selections appears to be from a female troubadour, the only definite example of the trobairitz in the volume is Beatriz de Dia. It’s too bad, as more poems like hers would help one from wanting to whack some of these male troubadours over the head with their stringed instruments. In any case, hers is a refreshing perspective:

I have been in heavy thought

over a cavalier I’d had.

I want it clear to everyone

that I’ve loved him to excess,

and now I see he’s left me: pre-

text, I refused him my love.

I seem to be mistaken, then,

as to what was going on,

dressed or in bed.

Needless to say, I found Proensa enchanting, a wonder of marvelous poetic conceits and lines. I’ve conclude with two passages that demonstrate the poems’ tonal range. The first is a rather somber few lines from Aimeric de Belenoi:

                                    The full rich fact remains

that my heart in its clumsiness cannot fulfill.

So I suffer

a pain so great

it should be credited me as feat

having borne, having overborne it.

And finally, I’ll leave off with a passage from Peire D’Alvernhe, who seems to sum up the critical, self-deprecating joy to be found in this rich tradition and this delightful book:

My tune is of troubadours who sing variously,

and the worst believe he chants nobly.

I wish they would go somewhere else:

                                    two hundred shepherds

                                    trying to pipe

and not a damn one knows whether the tune

                                    rises or descends.