Preface

Summary

On the twelfth-century Limoges casket that we have used as our frontispiece, the enameled figures enact a narrative in which a bird, by moving across space, suggests the passage of time. On the left, a man gazes at a woman whose dress contains the night sky. She returns his glance, and they dance together as he fiddles. In the sky above, a night bird seems to watch them. It passes across the horizon and reappears on the right, perched on the hand of the same woman, who is now dressed in the green of springtime. Her lover half kneels before her, enthralled by the object of his desire. The dawn witnesses their engagement. Below the hasp, the watchman's feet move toward the dancing couple, but his eyes turn toward the lovers at dawn. Holding both a sword and a key, he protects the treasure, their intimacy.

The casket provides an exquisite visual representation of the alba or dawn poem, and, by extension, of the love sung throughout troubadour poetry composed in medieval Occitania, the land we know today as the South of France. For the troubadours and their listeners, sexuality is the worldly expression of the sacred. The pleasure of desire brings happiness, and the sexual narrative holds the promise of continuity. The yearning and fulfillment that lovers experience make sense of the world—its seasons, its wars, its anguish. On the casket the bird's flight is circular; at the end of the story it is poised for flight, signaling that the narrative may begin again. The poets, too, sing of continuity and the kinship between people and nature. So it is that in an early poem, a lover yearns to be a goshawk (Poem 4); in another the poet implies a kinship with his falcon (Poem 22). When Peire Vidal sings of inhaling a breeze from afar, he suggests the communion he feels with both the distant land (Provence) and his lady (Poem 59).

In this book, intended primarily for the reader who does not know Occitan, we present English translations that we hope will communicate not only what the troubadours said but some of the excitement in how they said it. We have approached each poem as a performance, as an artifact within a context; we have considered its language, its place in history, its prosodic structure, and its treatment by scribes and editors.