[MUSIC]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
I'm your host, Robert Harrison.
And I'm joined today by my colleague, Marisa Galvez.
Marisa is a professor of literature in the Department of French and Italian here at Stanford.
And the author of a splendid book that came out with a University of Chicago press about a year ago.
Called Songbook, How lyrics became poetry in medieval Europe.
Marisa Galvez specializes in medieval poetry,
much of it in eclectic languages like Occitan, Middle High German,
and Early Castilian.
And she's here today to talk with us about the Troubadour poets who flourished in the South of France during the 12th and 13th centuries.
Writing in a language that no one speaks anymore, but which remains, at least in my opinion,
the most beautiful language of lyric poetry ever.
We don't know a whole lot about the mysterious Troubadour's, but we do know that they single-handedly invented Western Romantic lyric poetry.
And that their poems were suffused with an astonishing formal artistry that was not surpassed by anything that came afterwards in the history of European poetry.
This is a show I've been looking forward to for a long time. Marisa, welcome to the program.
Thank you. It's great to be here, Robert.
Great. So you brought some music in for us today and we're playing one of the tracks here in the background.
What is it that we're listening to exactly?
So we are listening to a modern reconstruction of a Troubadour song called La Con Lijon, Son Long and Mai,
when days are long and Mai. And this is a song that's often cited in by Troubadour amateurs, because it addresses a major theme of Troubadour poetry, which is Amour de L'One, which is far away love.
And this song is attributed to Joffrey Rudell, a Troubadour who was active in the mid-12th century in Southern France.
Amour de L'One in French or Amour de L'One in October.
My favorite kind of love, love from a distance from afar. And the notion of love from afar is something that we associate with the lyric tradition of the Troubadour poets.
It's something that became a kind of staple of romantic lyric poetry.
Can you say something about who the Troubadour's word and how is it that in the South of France in a very particular region and time in history, they're flourished.
This kind of poetry that's saying of an idealized love, courtly love we call it typically, of an idealized lady, love from afar.
And maybe say after that a few words about who did himself, who was known in a biography of his for being in love with the princess far away.
Right, so as you said, from the beginning of the 12th to the second half of the 13th century, this was the great Oxyton period, and Oxyton, because it's Oxyton, because Oxyton was, yes, it was a literate, this is why it's called Oxyton.
A literary language that emerged much earlier than the literary language of Northern France, actually it's a tested in religious poems in the 11th century already, and then you get this emergence of this beautiful art poetry by the Troubadour's.
And the Troubadour's, so this is really a cultivated art of the courts in Southern France at this time, the courts were the seats of political power, and the Troubadour's were spokesman of these
Signorial Courts, or the Signorial Clan, but their origins could be very varied. They could be lords, they could be humble origins, maybe they were clerics, they were also women.
But they were really known as artists, they were artists performers, and actually their name, Troubadour's, comes from Troubadour, which is to find or invent words that one matches with melodies, so it really is that word,
and the Troubadour also comes from Tropere in the Latin, which is also means composed texts with music added to an established liturgical chant, Tropere.
So really a test to the essentially musical nature of these poems, other songs, actually. And so the Troubadour's, this courtly poetry, why do we still talk about it today? Well, they invented, when likes to say, invented a certain way of talking about love.
And since we're talking about Joffee Rudell here, it's this faraway love, this kind of love that combines passion and restraint. Or this is, or one can think of this art poetry, the song as embodying passion as an end in itself.
And that is to say, it's an embodiment of the movements of the heart, or think of faraway love and all the feelings that come out of faraway love, longing, fear, lust, dispossession, anger, all those kinds of things are embodied in this song. And it's about really about, one could say, disciplining it.
And the Troubadour's talk about Miss Zora, which is moderation, when they also talk about courtliness and this kind of refinement of this passion into song, into this combination of words and melody.
So that's what the Troubadour's are about.
Yeah. You're pointing to one crucial distinction that they make between refined love and mad love or fanamore and...
It's all a mamore. So it's a courtly context, it's a courtly poetry, and becoming a true, refined lover is also a way of establishing one's credentials, not only with a lady, whom one can love from afar, even though you belong to the same court, as she does.
You establish your credentials as a gentleman, as well as a lover who is worthy of eventually if he goes on to prove that he is indeed sincere and not just being manipulative, becomes worthy of the favors of the lady and those favors, at least in the rhetoric of courtly love, was actual sexual...
in nature.
Yeah. And it's important to remember that. I mean, when you listen to this music, this art, it's about...
It is a sensual erotic art, and it's about this quest for an unnameable good bestowed by an unnameable lady in an adulterous situation.
And so it's a public secret, and you cannot get that. It's an inaccessible good. And so how do you, in many ways, this desire and this quest for this is a kind of way of prove and through song through this art as a way of proving one's self-worth?
One could say that the lady, perhaps, is just a pretext for proving one's self-worth, but I like to think of it as it's about an art form that is outpassion as an end in itself.
And this is what the Troubaders really invented, a certain way of refining that into an art form.
Yeah, and I think it's important that we clarify that adulterous love was really the norm of courtly love, of romantic love, a Western romantic love.
And it was for a number of reasons the most, let's say, pragmatic reason was that only married women in courtly situations were permitted into the public sphere.
And therefore, there was also a theory that love in the romantic sense could not properly exist between husband and wife.
And I'm thinking here of the art of courtly love of Andrea Escapalano's where they have a long debate about whether love is possible between a husband and wife, and they come to the conclusion almost unanimously that it could not because love is a contract.
And it's a binding obligation, but that there's something about love which has to be freely given, and it does not partake of the servitude that a wife enters into towards her husband when in matrimony.
Right.
So adultery is the context, therefore, you have to be very discretion is one of the prime values of courtly love, no?
And as you were mentioning, that leads to an unnamed lady and a lady who was not described, except in completely generic terms, because otherwise her identity could be revealed.
But I like the term that you use, which is a public secret.
So what relation did this poetry, which we can read on the page of the surviving poems of the troubadour's, what relation did the poetry have to the music that got company did?
Were they the same authors of the music as well as the poetry, or was it division of labor, where some of the troubadour wrote the music and others wrote the poems?
Well, what the troubadour say in their songs is that they're combining moths, a song, like words and sounds, so we have to think about that they had these melodies and that they were forming or fitting their words, their rhymes, these oral patterns to the melody.
So when you get something like a can so, so we're listening to Joffee Roodes' can so.
That's a mean song.
A song, later on, song, right, in French.
You have this monometric form, so these repeating, metrical patterns fitted to a melody, which gives it this overall structure.
But just these repeating rhythmic patterns, actually the formal principles are quite basic, but what the troubadour's were able to do was combine in all these different combinations.
And so we do think that they were musical poets, right, they performers as well, performing before a live audience, which is an important element that we sometimes forget as we're reading this poetry on the page.
This was orally transmitted for so long, it wasn't actually put down into writing in song books or Shon-Son-Yes until sometimes 100, 150 years later.
So this was an oral tradition, and we have to think about these poets as really musical performers who combine a music and words together, as they say it themselves.
They called these verses this.
Right, and I was reading somewhere about Joffee Roodes, then that we're talking about here.
That there was a famous vida of his a vida, it's a short life or biography that were compiled around some of the major troubadour poets.
And it was mentioned that he was not a very good wordster, but that he was an excellent composer or musician or a melodist.
He was, Melodist would be, I guess, the right word for it.
So these the vida's or the biographies are interesting, they were once the lyrics were transmitted in, or written down in song books, they were in some of the song books they added these vida's, and the vida's or the biographies are actually drawn from the lyrics themselves.
So we can't know how much of it is actually, you know, historical or not.
But what's interesting about them is especially for the Joffee Roodel poem is that you have this image accompanying the biography about how he was in love with the Countess of Tripoli.
And he was so in love with her, the far away love that he went overseas actually on crusade and met her, but once he found her he died in her arms and there was this image of that.
And yes, so we don't know that much about Joffee Roodel, but we do know that perhaps he did go on crusade, but it's something what those biographies are able to do is kind of crystallize these images for this later audience so that they could kind of have this memorial archive of the true vidors themselves.
But I think that what's interesting is in this song is, had there's this repetition of actually the words, "A mo de l'an, a mo de l'an," and what happens in the song is that you find that he actually starts, "Far Away Love starts to become a source of joy."
And it's a joy because there's also this, you never want the far away love to end because for him it's a source of creating some kind of creation of song in that continual desire.
So you never want joy and actually related to this idea of play, you never want the play to end and this is kind of the movements of the heart, there's strength, the passion, that balance, that is always in movement through the song.
Well, that's interesting because you do not want it to end, so there's an infinity that comes into play here that is part of a very strong legacy in even our still contemporary notions of romantic love, the forever motif.
But in the Vida that you are summarizing, it's interesting that the "A mo de l'an," he goes across the seas and as long as he's on the way towards his distant love, that his passion has kept alive.
And of course, as soon as there is the actual encounter, as soon as that distance is collapsed into nearness that he dies.
And this idea that death becomes a defeat of the inability to maintain the kind of infinite everlastingness of the passion, or you have this other beginning of this other tradition where love and death are linked together where one is the most sublime consummation of the other.
So, I don't want to get as too much off track, but this love and death connection is a really strong motif in subsequent centuries of Western, you know, romantic love.
And it seems to be predicated on first thing, the presence of obstacles that romantic love needs obstacles in order to thrive.
And of course, the married status of most of the ladies assured that there would be that obstacle at least. Physical distance could be another.
Can you say something about love and death and what Duneed the Hushmo, I know he's one of our favorite authors, the other calls, "Opsicle love," as the essence of romantic love.
Right, all those moral, I don't get the more on social inhibitions, drive, definitely drive this art form.
And it becomes once you get to romances that are actually kind of coming about it, the same times a troubadour, so Tristan and his old for instance, you get this idea that only, how do you sustain that adulterous passion?
And it's always, you create all these actually inhibitions and are obstacles or sometimes even just created by the lovers themselves to keep the game going, to keep the passion alive.
And the only solution, other solution to that, the only alternative is death.
So then you get this kind of correlation between passion and love and death that Duneed Hushmo theorized and wrote about so well.
But he doesn't just theorize, there are many instances in medieval romances as well as in the troubadour lyrics where this death is a presence.
I mean, you mentioned Tristan and his old, the two lovers die and it becomes one of the most sublime romantic love stories of all time.
Romeo and Juliet, they die, I mean, it ends in that death in Paolo and Francesca and Dante's death.
This obstacle then death becomes this obstacle which is infinite and therefore a love which consummates in death does have a kind of eternal everlastingness in literary history obviously.
Right, right.
And I mean, we're talking about then now romances, narrative romances and the interesting thing, Duneed Hushmo talks about that, that it begins with troubadour lyric and we're talking about lyric here in which you're able in that form, able to sustain that passion or at least articulated express it without having to end it in death.
But when we get to something like Bernardo Vintador, he mentions Tristan at the end or and it's also he mentions death at the end.
So we actually get to that point but what are we left with?
Well, he says, you left me with nothing, you left me with a ray and what's the ray?
Well, the ray is the song.
Right? And so that's what he's dispossessed, he's talking about that he's been left behind or by his late protesting it.
But what he creates is something like a beautiful love song in which his desire and where he's able to express his self worth in that dispossession.
So.
I'd like to read one of those poems by Bernardo Vintador and actually and this is the Apollo Daphne myth that you're actually describing in a certain way where Daphne is being pursued and chased by Apollo and she doesn't want to be caught by him.
So she prays to her father and I think he's a river god and she's transformed into a laurel at the very moment when Apollo is going to take possession of her and the laurel then becomes the crown for the poet laureate and therefore poetic desire realizes itself in the act of the writing of the poem.
And I think the poem that you selected for us today has something to do with that.
Yes.
Which poem is this and can you say something about Bernardo Vintador to begin with?
Right. So this is another, he's also another well known troubadour, active 12th century and he, you know, this is one of his most famous songs, The Lark Song.
And again, we don't know much about Bernardo Vintador and we just know the courts he was associated with, but he was known for his very simple style, but as this song indicates so well even in his simple style and he's able to kind of really track what I was talking about this for these movements of the heart in the actual, the meter as they kind of try to get close to the lady and try to give into that passion.
But then hold back. And this song, it's one of my favorites because it has a very famous opening in which he tries to, in which he's looking at a bird who's rising in the air.
And this is a conventional opening of this poetry. It's called The Nature Opening in which it's springtime and that's the time of love and what he's lamenting is that he is not feeling that.
So I'll just read the, maybe the first two, um, stanzas and in the Oxford town and then English, okay.
(speaking foreign language)
When I see the dark moving its wings enjoy
against the light rising up into forgetfulness
letting go and falling for the sweetness that comes to its heart
alas what envy then comes over me of everyone I see
rejoicing.
It makes me wonder that my heart right then
does not melt with desire.
I worry how much I thought I knew about love
and how little I know because I cannot keep myself
from loving one from whom I shall get no favor.
She has it all, she took my heart and me
and herself and the whole world
and when she took herself away from me
she left me nothing but desire and a heart still wanting.
- That's great.
How about we give it a listen then?
- Yeah.
(gentle music)
(speaking foreign language)
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[Music]