An Erotic Galician-Portuguese Cantiga de ?
Descripción
You Said You Loved Me: An Erotic GalicianPortuguese Cantiga de ? Rip Cohen
The Johns Hopkins University
GalicianPortuguese lyric is traditionally grouped under four genres, three secular and one religious Of the three secular genres, two are love poetry: cantigas d’amor (malevoiced) and cantigas d’amigo (femalevoiced). The third secular genre, the cantigas d’ escarnho e maldizer, is poetry of insult and mockery, nearly always with comic intent. The cantigas de Santa Maria are mainly narratives in praise of the Virgin, every tenth song (with a couple of exceptions) being a cantiga de loor, a song of praise of the Virgin. And throughout the genre the theology of the medieval Catholic church is expounded and exemplified (Cohen and Parkinson 2009 provide an overview of the four main genres). So what kind of poem is this? (I have numbered only the verses under study, even though the full text is longer.) E disse: “pois m’ ás leixada, ũa cousa eu te rogo me di, que saber querria: non es tu o que dizias que mi mais que al amavas e que me noytes e dias mui de grado saudavas? Porqué outra fillar yas amiga e desdennavas a mi, que amor ti avia? Demais saudarme vẽes pois que te de mi partiste; en todo torto me tẽes; di, e porqué me mentiste? Preçastes mais los seus bens ca os meus? Porqué feziste, sandeu, tan grand’ ousadia?”
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And said, “Since you’ve left me, I ask you just one thing— Tell me—that I would like to know: Aren’t you the one that used to say That you loved me more than any other And who, by night or day, Would be glad to greet me? Why did you go and choose another Girlfriend, and show disdain For me, who loved you? You no longer come to greet me Since you went away from me; You wrong me in every way. Tell me, why did you break your word? Did you value her favors More than mine? What, you fool, Did you dare to do such a thing? What is its form? Who is speaking to whom? What kind of speechaction or move is represented, enacted, or performed? (Bing and Cohen 1991: 1921; Cohen 1994) Formally, these are strophes consisting of seven verses, each scanning 7’, with a rhyme scheme abababc, and the section quoted apparently begins with the last three verses of a strophe, followed by two complete strophes. So this is strophic poetry, like nearly the entire corpus of GalicianPortuguese lyric, in all four genres. And what are the elements of the pragmatic schema or script? Persona 1 speaks to persona 2, providing, within the symbols { }, background and present information (x, y + z) leading to (→) a present action or emotion or both (A), notated thus (Cohen and Parkinson 2009: 3740): P1–P2 {x, y + z → A} There does not appear to be anything enigmatic or difficult in the analysis of our text. We can tell that the speaker is a woman from the feminine participle leixada (v. 1), which stands in grammatical agreement with m’. And the masculine adjective sandeu (v. 17) shows the addressee is a man. There is also, revealingly, a reference to another woman, outra amiga (vv. 910). Absent this evidence, we could still reasonably infer the genders of the personae from the widespread custom, not confined to medieval Europe, that the man does the wooing and the
woman is wooed. The backgound information is given quickly and fully. Before synthesizing it, let us examine every detail. ·0 ·1 ·2 ·3 ·4 ·5 ·6 ·7 ·8 ·9
You left me (v. 1). You used to say that you loved me more than anyone else (vv. 45). You used to greet me all the time (vv. 67). You took up with another girl (vv. 89). You abandoned me (910). You have not greeted me since you left (vv. 1112). You are wronging me in every way (v. 13). You broke your word (v. 14). Did you choose the other woman because your prefer her bẽes (vv. 1516)? You are a mad and arrogant fool (1617)
The conclusion of the speech is a rhetorical question: How dare you do such a thing (vv. 1617)? And the vocative sandeu (“crazy”, “insane”) is harsh, so that we might say anger itself forms part of the conclusion. What, then, do we make of the utterance in its entirety? For the sake of convenience, let us call the female speaker “girl” and the male addressee “boy,” as in the cantigas d’ amigo. The script would be: G–B {you said you loved me, you left me for another + you wrong me → come back/I am angry}
To what genre does this poem belong? In what circumstances is this utterance spoken? It sounds like a cantiga d’amigo, since the speaker is female and similar scripts are found in that genre (e.g., Martin de Padrozelos 2, Johan Airas 43; cf. Cohen 2011: 112113). But it cannot be. In the cantigas d’ amigo the girl always uses vós, never tu, as a form of address, whether speaking to her boyfriend, her girlfriend, or her mother (except in two poems where she addresses Amor, personified; Cohen 2012: 6567) and the rhyme scheme is unlike any cantiga d'amigo. Nor can it be a cantiga d’amor—unless it were one containing a long citation of what a woman says. That does happens once, in a song Osoir’ Anes (Cohen 2010: 1920, 3538). But, again, tu is not used as a form address in that genre. There is apparently nothing that qualifies as comic insult or mockery, although the woman expresses indignation, so it ought not to be a cantiga d’ escarnho or de maldizer. There does not appear to be anything religious about this speechaction, or move (Cohen 2011: 100105), so we would hardly think this a cantiga de Santa Maria. Let us, for the moment, imagine that these verses have just been discovered, found alone on a fragment of parchment (forming the cover, say, of a 15th century volume of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris) and dating to the mid to late 13th
century. We do not know the genre, but even without knowing the generic contexxt, we can analyze the kind of move performed and understand (we think) what is meant, and to what end. The woman has been left. The man who used to say he loved her more than anyone else (or anything else; al can mean either) has abandoned her for another girl, just as in many cantigas d’ amigo (Cohen 2012: 61, 6786). He is therefore wronging her, breaking his word (mentiste, v. 14; this is often the meaning of mentir), cheating on her, and ignoring her. When she asks if he left her because he appreciates the other girl’s bẽes more than hers, these bẽes, in a love poem, would might refer to sexual favors (Cohen 2021: 10), but the plural is not found in the cantigas d’ amigo. The word could also refer to wealth. But here are very few clear references to social distintions in that genre (Pedr’ Amigo de Sevilha 10 and Johan Perez d’Avoin 5 are exceptions). So the girl is rebuking the boy in an effort to get him back. This move is found in the cantigas d’amigo; and the accusations of disloyalty and infidelity, the implied scorn of the other girl’s bẽes (which could be an erotic vaunt, as in Johan Perez d'Avoin 5, v. 9; Cohen 2012: 7274) and the understood request that the man return to her are all elements in scripts of peacemaking (Cohen 2011). Our fragment could then be from a cantiga d’ amigo, although strangely the form of address is tu and not vós. This is how we might read these verses. And we would be on the right track, but to the wrong station. This is just a brief section, with the refrain omitted, of a cantiga de Santa Maria (E 132 = To 77). The man, who had pledged his virginity to the Virgin, has been talked into getting married, and Santa Maria has come to reproach him and get him back. The bẽes she offers are therefore not sexual, neither are they riches. The Virgin is sarcastically contrasting the worldly pleasures of having a woman with the bliss of eternal life which she can arrange by interceding with her son. Yet the language of this section, except for the second person singular verbs, is exactly that of GalicianPortuguese female voiced love lyric. In the European tradition, religious poetry that makes use of erotic imagery or sexual analogies is as old as the Hebrew Bible, where the language of love and of love's insults is deployed as a metaphoric system by the prophets. Alfonso X, or whoever on his staff composed the song, is working within this tradition, and in so doing gives us a love poem which, in its linear development, is unlike any cantigas d’ amigo and therefore matched by none. There is one facet to this poem that would pass unnoticed if one merely read the text of E printed by Mettmann (19591964: II, 8792), without looking at the critical apparatus. The reading of the first three verses of the section given above—and of the whole strophe in which they appear—is significantly different in the older Toledano manuscript (To) than in E, the manuscript on which
Mettmann’s edition is based (see Bertolucci Pizzorusso 2000: 113 on this strophe). The version printed by Mettmann reads as follows: E a virgen escolleyta tragia eno meogo da companna, que dereita mente a el vẽo logo e dissellhe: «Sen sospeyta dim’ hũa ren, eu te rogo, que de ti saber querria: And the excellent Virgin Was coming in the midst Of the entourage, and she Went straight to him at once And said: “Without guile, Tell me something, I ask you, That I would like to know from you: Whereas To reads: E a uirgen corõada tragian eno meogo que mui feramẽt yrada uẽo pera ele logo e disse pois mas leixada ũa cousa eu te rogo me di que saber querria And the Virgin with her crown Was coming in their midst, Who, fiercely angry, Went right over to him And said, “Since you’ve left me, I ask you just one thing— Tell me—that I would like to know: Only in the Toledano do we learn that Santa Maria is yrada, just like the sanhuda (angry girl) of the cantigas d’ amigo (Cohen 1996: 527). And only there does she begin her speech with the words pois m’ ás leixada. Thus in T and E, where these words have been eliminated and replaced (for formal reasons, according to Bertolucci), the persona of the sanhuda (irada), common in the
cantigas d’ amigo, has lost the epithet that would identify her, and the basis of the Virgin’s complaint, namely that she has been abandoned, is not mentioned at the beginning of the speech. We might think of this alteration to the text as a kind of decontextualization in the later fate (in T and E) of Santa Maria’s speech (after the Toledano). What I have done here is to decontextualize the entire speech, presenting it as a love poem—which it is, but only by analogy—to call attention to one of the most effective uses of erotic themes and language in the cantigas de Santa Maria. This erotic vector, despite its sources, derives largely—in language and style— from the two secular genres of love poetry, here the cantigas d’ amigo. In erotic love it is is (culturally) natural to ask: “If a man put away his wife and she go from him and become another man’s may he return to her again?” (Jeremiah 3.1; trans. The Holy Scriptures). In Jewish theology the answer varies, since God can be wroth with his people, “Por que da maneira que quebra a molher a fee a seu namorado, assi a quebraste tu ao señor, O casa de Ysrael“ (Usque 1553 fol. 55r): “Just as a woman breaks her faith with her lover, so you broke yours with your Lord, O House of Israel.” Yet the Hebrew Bible abounds in requests, or demands, that the people of Israel return to God, and this is one of the main themes of Judaism. In the cantigas d’ amigo a girl who has been betrayed in not usually in any mood to take the boy back, let alone to ask him to return (exceptions are Martin Pedrozelos 3, Pedr’Eanes Solaz 2, Juião Bolseiro 11, and Johan Airas 43). Santa Maria follows the analogical erotic line of reasoning of the Bible and Catholic theology as it is represented in the cantigas de Santa Maria. She is not just willing to take the man back: she won’t let him rest until he returns. And this is in keeping with an important but mainly overlooked aspect of the poetics of this genre. From the beginning of the project, Alfonso X and his team, whenever it suits their poetic purposes, turn to the language of love and of love poetry, including the contrast between Santa Maria and other “girls” (Prologue B, vv. 5 6): e cuid' a cobrar / per esta quant' enas outras perdi (“And I hope to recover with this Lady [Santa Maria] all that I squandered on the others”). Out of context, we might have sworn that that phrase must come from a cantiga d’amor, just as our “poem” (except for the tu addressform and the refrain) seems to be a cantiga d’ amigo. But one genre has been left behind, perhaps unjustly. Now that we know that this is Santa Maria speaking, ought we not to consider the possibility that her use of the language and style of a wronged girl straight out of a cantiga d'amigo is meant to be humorous? In her fury she outdoes any girl in that genre, and appears to be beside herself with jealousy. Is she even erotically coy and slightly nasty in referring to the other girl's "goods" as compared with her own? Might this not be a bit of comedy, even if the theological context rules out
mockery of Santa Maria herself? Is this the parodiant of a well known parodiè, the angry girl? To understand texts and whole genres, individually and in relation to one another, we must study the form, rhetoric and pragmatics of all Galician Portuguese lyric. To separate the Cantigas de Santa Maria and the secular lyric would be philological folly. And we can well ask: how far are the Marian poems intertwined with the secular lyric in the area of erotic parody?
Manuscripts and Works Cited E = Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo (El Escorial), MS B. I. 2. T = Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo (El Escorial), MS T. I. 1. To = Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), cod. 10.069 (“El Toledano”). Afonso X, o Sabio. 2003. Cantigas de Santa Maria. Edición facsímile do Códice de Toledo (To), Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (Ms. 10.069). Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega. Bing, Peter, and Rip Cohen. 1991, Games of Venus: An Anthology of Greek and Roman Erotic Verse from Sappho to Ovid. New York and London: Routledge. Cohen, Rip. 1994. “SpeechActs and Sprachspiele: Making Peace in Plautus”. Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (= Mnemosyne, suppl. 130). Ed. Irene J. F. de Jong and J. P. Sullivan. Leiden/New York/Köln: E. J. Brill. 171205. ___. 1996. “Dança Jurídica. I: A poética da Sanhuda nas Cantigas d’ amigo; II: 22 Cantigas d’ amigo de Johan Garcia de Guilhade: vingança de uma Sanhuda virtuosa”. ColóquioLetras, 142: 549. ___. 2003. 500 Cantigas d’ amigo: Edição Crítica / Critical Edition. Porto: Campo das Letras. ___. 2010. “Three Early GalicianPortuguese Poets: Airas Moniz d’ Asme, Diego Moniz, Osoir’ Anes. A Critical Edition”. Revista Galega de Filoloxia 11: 1159. ___. 2011. “The Poetics of Peace: Erotic Reconciliation in the Cantigas d’ amigo”. La Corónica 39.2: 95143.”
___. 2012. Erotic Angles on the Cantigas d’ amigo (Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 68). London: Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Queen Mary, University of London. ___, and Stephen Parkinson. 2009. “The GalicianPortuguese Lyric”. Companion to Portuguese Literature. Ed. Stephen Parkinson, Cláudia Pazos Alonso and T. F. Earle. Warminster: Tamesis. 2544. The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917. Mettmann, Walter. 19591972. Afonso X, o Sabio. Cantigas de Santa Maria. 4 vols. [“Glossário” in vol. IV]. Coimbra: Por ordem da Universidade. Pizzorusso, Valeria. 2000. “Primo contributo all’ analisi delle varianti redazionali nelle Cantigas de Santa Maria”, in Cobras e Son. Papers on the Text, Music and Manuscripts of the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’. Ed. Stephen Parkinson. Oxford: Legenda. 106118. Usque, Samuel. [1553]. CONSOLACAM AS TRIBVLACOENS DE ISRAEL COMPOSTO POR SAMVEL VSQVE [armillary sphere]. Empresso en Ferrara en casa de Abraham aben Vsque 5313 Da criaçam. a 7 de Setembro.
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