Cantigas

mistermarx

Nov 1

Cantigas -

Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems

Translated by Richard Zenith

Princeton University Press - £14.99

Those who spend their lives at sea

think there is no pain in the world

as great as their pain, and no fate worse

than a seaman's fate, but consider me:

the pain of love made me forget

the pain of the sea, so harsh and yet

as nothing next to that greatest pain,

the pain of love that God ordains.

As stated on the back cover of this rather revelatory book: ''the rich tradition of troubadour poetry in western Iberia had all but vanished from history until the discovery of several ancient cancioneiros, or songbooks, in the nineteenth century. These compendiums revealed close to 1,700 songs, or cantigas, composed by around 150 troubadours from Galicia, Portugal, and Castile in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.''

And what a furore of a find the 341pages of Cantigas – Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems (excluding Notes to the Poems, About the Galician-Portuguese Troubadours and Bibliography) appear to be.

Poems that are not only implicitly poems within and of themselves; but also a form of poetry that clearly pre-dates Shakespeare's sonnets, which somehow appear to assemble a trail of thought and thinking that majestically manages to underline the true trajectory of love.

Along with love's everlasting ability to destroy and decline.

Inspire and infiltrate the heart like noting else.

For instance, the final line of Joam Garvia De Guilhade's 'Song for a Distraught Lover':

''The Wedding cake that never was

is over.''

Or the line:

''who could probably cure you of your nostalgia''

in Pero Da Ponte's 'Song about a Man Who Serves Villainy.'

Not to mention the second stanza of the latter's 'Song of a Lover Who Would Hate':

''But I can't even learn to fool

my very own heart. It fooled me

by making me completely fall

for one who'd never fall for me.

And this is why I never sleep:

because I can't repay the grief

to the woman who so grieved me.''

As Richard Zenith writes in the elongated Introduction of twenty-nine pages: ''In these intervening years I have translated many other poets, from recent and not so recent centuries, but I still find that the cantigas require more technical and creative sweat - along with patient waiting for the serendipitous workings of chance - than any other poetry I've rendered into English. The greatest difficulty? To make them simply sing.''

Might I be among the many (no doubt), to congratulate Zenith on the exemplary feat of enabling me to sing along in harmony.

David Marx

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