3 - Bernart Marti

Summary

Bernart Marti is one of the most perplexing troubadours of the early period. In some of his songs he seems to have been influenced by the style and ethics of Marcabru; in others he appears flippant and cynical, if not amoral. Was Bernart a disciple of Marcabru, as some scholars have thought, or one of the ‘trobador ab sen d'enfanssa’ Marcabru criticized? Ernest Hoepffner concluded his study of Bernart:

ici c'est le persiflage, la moquerie légère; là la satire mordante. Il semble ne rien prendre au sérieux. Le même spectacle qui arrache à Marcabru ses invectives furieuses, ne provoque chez Bernart qu'un sourire amusé.

I propose to take a closer look at Bernart's ‘sourire amusé’. It is not always a happy smile, but it is frequently ironic, constantly inviting Bernart's audience to question the apparent or pretended meaning of his utterances.

Bernart's poetry poses serious problems of interpretation, often surviving in only one manuscript in a form that is clearly corrupt. The nine poems which can be attributed to him with any certainty were edited by Hoepffner in 1929 and by Fabrizio Beggiato in 1984. I have chosen not to refer to either of these editions for two reasons. First, I found a small, but nevertheless significant, number of discrepancies between their readings of the manuscripts and my own. Secondly, neither scholar hesitates to correct the manuscripts in places where it may not in fact be necessary, often without justifying his decision to do so.