A Revisionary History of Portuguese Literature

Miguel Tamen, Helena C. Buescu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135814991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of original essays traces the history of Portuguese literature from the medieval period to the present, providing provocative new interpretations of this previously neglected literary history. The volume serves as a comprehensive introduction to Portuguese literature to students new to the field, and provides new insight into the ongoing controversies on the subject. The Introduction and Afterword explore the relationship between literary history and revisionism.

Chapter 1

Infractions of the Name-Hiding Rule in Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poetry

João Dionísio

A fundamental rule for the langue d’oc troubadour was to keep his love a secret, not revealing the identity of his beloved lady. The rule obliged him, above all, to celar “hide” her name. The significance of direct allusions to the lady, in the cases when this rule was broken, is a matter that deserves careful analysis. In the working hypothesis proposed by Monson, the lady celebrated by the troubadour may actually exist—either as a woman he is courting or as a benefactress to whom he dedicates a poem in hope of some material compensation—or she may be a strictly literary figure serving a precise function within the composition (257).

In spite of its schematic character, this hypothesis suggests that Monson regards the traditional sociological view of troubadour practice to be a reductive scenario. The view generally invoked when these issues are addressed is a kind of fusion of the two situations considered in the first part of the hypothesis: the lady is married to a nobleman and has an extramarital liaison with the troubadour which, if it became public knowledge, would cause her to fall into disgrace and cause him to lose the material benefits that the relationship had thus far afforded him. Regardless of whether Monson’s analysis or the traditional synthesis better describes what really took place, in either view, whatever the designation dompna or midons refers to, the troubadour is obliged not to reveal the identity of the lady he exalts in song.

Some of the vidas of the Provençal troubadours show that at times what was at stake, when this silence was broken, was not only a greater or lesser ensemble of material benefits but one’s very own life. The vida of Guillem de Cabestanh, for example, tells of his sorry lot after Raimon de Castel-Roussillon discovered that his wife, Saurimonde, was loved by the troubadour and had requited his affections:

E qan venc un dia, Raimons de Castel Rossillon trobet passan Guillem de Cabestanh ses gran compaignia et aucis lo; et fetz li traire lo cor del cors e fetz li taillar la testa; e.l cor fetz portar a son alberc e la testa atressi; e fetz lo cor raustir e far a pebrada, e fetz lo dar a manjar a la moiller. (Boutière and Schütz 532)

[And there came a day when Raimon de Castel-Roussillon found Guillem de Cabestanh passing alone in the country and killed him, and removed his heart from his body and had his head cut off. And he had the heart brought to his home as well as the head; and he roasted the heart with pepper, and gave it to his wife to eat.]

This account, whose veracity at this point is irrelevant, is an extreme illustration of the threat that hung over the troubadour and which gave rise to an obvious technical problem: how to let a woman know that a certain composition is directed to her, that she and not some other lady is being eulogized, if her name cannot appear in the verses? The troubadour had to maintain a delicate balance between the use of words and silence (Köhler 112). In the Provençal canso, this difficulty was overcome by referring to the woman with a pseudonym [senhal] in the poem’s final section [tornado], which was shorter than the stanzas. This achieved, in Jacques Roubaud’s well-stated formula, the differentiation between the generic I of the troubadour and the I who composes the canso, as well as between the universal woman who receives the composition and the specific woman to whom the song is addressed (270).

In Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry the convention of celar appears, not surprisingly, in the cantigas de amor, the genre closest to the Provençal canso. But the contours of the problem differ from those observed in langue d’oc poetry, for the cantigas are considerably more abstract than the cansos. This abstraction is especially noticeable in the qualities that the troubadour attributes to the senhor, the equivalent of the Provençal dompna, for in no cantiga can we find a descriptio dominae with the realistic traits that do appear in the canso. Various reasons have been posited to explain this difference. Tavani, who contends that the Galician-Portuguese composition is not directed to a real woman but to an abstract or highly idealized figure, cites sociocultural reasons, namely the concentration of Galician-Portuguese troubadour activity in a single royal court (A poesia lírica galego-portuguesa, 109-110). Luciana Stegagno-Picchio, while acknowledging the social causes for this phenomenon, emphasizes the different conception of sin shown by Provençal and Galician-Portuguese poets to account for the greater abstraction found in the latter (69-70). There are also those who point to a more tautological cause, apparently intrinsic to Galician-Portuguese poetry. Segismundo Spina, for instance, attributes the hazy portrayal of the beloved lady to the bashful modesty of Peninsular troubadours (426), an explanation that finds an echo in Maria da Conceição Vilhena’s contention that “more than their Provençal counterparts, the Galician-Portuguese troubadours succeeded in strictly adhering to the principle of discretion” (218).

Whether for reasons more extrinsic or intrinsic to the actual texts of the Galician-Portuguese poetic corpus, one fact seems indisputable: the convention of celar in Peninsular poetry extends to other characteristics of the inspiring lady besides her name.

The general consensus among authors is that the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amor, while deriving largely from Provençal models, did not adopt the device of the senhal commonly employed in the cansos (cf. Spina 427, for example), but no exhaustive study has been carried out to support this view. In fact some cantigas do have words that function in the same or a similar way to the senhal as it was used north of the Pyrenees. As an example we may cite the anonymous “A mais fremosa de quantas vejo” (Michaëlis I, 549), with its obscure references in the refrain:

A mais fremosa de quantas vejo

en Santaren, e que mais desejo,

e en que sempre cuidando sejo,

non ch’a direi, mais direi-ch’, amigo:

ay Sentirigo! ay Sentirigo!

al é Alfanx’ e al Seserigo!

[The fairest lady of all I’ve seen

in Santarém, whom I most desire

and who is always on my mind—

I won’t say who, friend, and yet I’ll say:

Ah Sentirigo! Ah Sentirigo!

Alfanx is other, and Seserigo, other!]

Taken literally, the refrain merely consists of allusions to small localities in the vicinity of Santarém (Michaëlis II, 447). The beginning of the cantiga and the final strophic verse, however, strongly suggest that the place names of the refrain serve to identify the lady from Santarém, for the troubadour announces that he will not publish the identity of his beloved but will do something else instead. The senhal consists precisely in replacing the lady’s real name by another, a substitution giving rise to difficulties of comprehension foreseen by the cantiga: “e non sei ome tan entendudo / que m’ og’ entenda o por que digo” [and I don’t know a man who grasps enough / to grasp why now I say] (vv. 15-16). The author, therefore, is conscious that his use of what seems to be a senhal creates serious interpretive problems, quite understandable in an ambit much less prone than the Provençal poets to employ this device. This consciousness is even more pronounced in the next cantiga recorded in the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, “Pero eu vejo aqui trobadores” (Michaëlis I, 550-51), which, given its textual proximity and the motifs it shares with the previous cantiga, is doubtlessly by the same author. The interpretive challenge is still present, though now the author is relying on an audience more skilled in exegetical difficulties, namely, the troubadours, as indicated already in the incipit. But not even this public is able to solve the riddle:

Pero eu vejo aqui trobadores,

senhor e lume d’estes olhos meus,

que troban d’amor por sas senhores

non vej’ eu aqui trobador, par Deus,

que m’ og’ entenda o por que digo:

al é Alfanx’ e al Seserigo!

[Though here I see troubadours,

O lady and light of my eyes,

who sing of love for their ladies,

I see no troubadour here, by God,

who understands why I say:

other is Alfanx, and Seserigo, other!]

The author almost seems to delight in the fact that not even those most familiar with the techniques for camouflaging amorous sentiments, the poets “que troban d’amor por sas senhores,” are able to grasp the refrain’s meaning. And so the lady could remain grateful to her troubadour for keeping their love a secret: so secret, in fact, that not only her identity but also that of the troubadour are a complete mystery to us today.

Another possible senhal is discernible in the Pero Garcia Burgalês cantiga that begins “Ay Deus! que grave coita de soffrer” (Michaëlis I, 806), in which the troubadour laments the departure of his lady, tersely related by the monostich refrain: “Porque se foi a Rainha Franca.” Carolina Michaëlis, it should be noted, admitted that the final words could be read as “a Rainh’ a França,” which would make the hypothesis of this being a senhal less likely, but she decided in favor of the first reading, a transcription also adopted by the monographic editor of the Burgalês corpus (Blasco 217).

Although the existence of a Galician-Portuguese species of senhal can be detected in still other cantigas, the number of them resorting to this device is minuscule in comparison to Provençal poetry. Apart from this limited number of texts, the concealment of the beloved lady’s identity in Peninsular lyric poetry depends primarily on a descriptio that is vague and unspecific, almost invariably the case in the cantigas de amor. Thus the apparent or actual revelation of the name of the lady to whom the troubadour addresses his songs stands out far more in Galician-Portuguese than in Provençal poetry.

Keeping in mind the rare nature of such an infraction, I will attempt to show how the Galician-Portuguese troubadours break the rule of celar, why they might be prompted to do so, and what effects they hope to achieve. I will look especially at the cantiga de amor and the cantiga de amigo, limiting the scope of my study to those situations in which the name of the beloved lady is revealed directly. I will make only a few brief observations with respect to the satiric cantigas and the Marian songs and will exclude minor genres such as the Galician-Portuguese lay [lai] and lament [pranto] as well as all those texts in which the woman is identified through a periphrastic reference (e.g., “filha de don Paay / Moniz” [daughter of Don Paay / Moniz], vv. 11-12 of the famous cantiga “No mundo nom me sei parelha,” Michaëlis I, 82).

One of the most common situations leading to the revelation of the beloved lady’s name is the troubadour’s feeling that his love is not requited, coupled with his languishing hope that such may yet occur one day. And so, in order to punish the woman, or simply to confirm that there is no love, the troubadour breaks the celar.

In the first stanza of “Pois non ei de dona ‘lvira,” a cantiga attributed to Martim Soares, the troubadour leaves the land where the lady resides, revealing her name because he has received nothing from her except wrath (Michaëlis I, 131; Lapa 432). Pero Velho de Taveirós’s cantiga “Par Deus, dona Maria, mia senhor ben-talhada” (Michaëlis I, 773) is likewise dominated by the discourse of one who complains of having been badly compensated for the good he offered his lady. The text of Roi Queimado that begins “Preguntou Johan Garcia” (Michaëlis I, 286) presents the curious case of the narrator’s not only divulging the name of the woman for whom he dies but also, in the incipit, the identity of the one who asked him about his dying. It being a rule of courtesy not to inquire about a love that is meant to be kept secret, the troubadour reveals both the name of the beloved over whom he despaired and the name of the man who had so discourteously questioned him. In this cantiga as well as in the one that follows it (Michaëlis I, 287), by the same author, it is interesting to note that the lady’s name is conveyed in direct discourse. In the first case it is what the troubadour himself said in the past that is quoted; in the second, what Guiomar Afonso will say once the troubadour has died. In this respect the cantiga of Joam Soares Somesso beginning “Ogan’ en Müimenta” (Michaëlis I, 738-39; Lapa 243) has affinities with Roi Queimado’s texts, being unusual insofar as only the first two verses of each stanza are ascribed to the troubadour, with all the rest consisting of direct discourse attributed to Martim Gil. Realizing he is about to lose his beloved, Urraca Abril, since her father means to marry her off, Martim Gil divulges her name and that of her possible future husband, who will indeed eventually contract marriage with Urraca (Mattoso 310, 424). Through the use of citation, the gravity of breaking the celar rule is attenuated in these cantigas. We can also speak of attenuation in the case of “Par Deus ay dona Leonor,” by Roi Paes de Ribela (Michaëlis I, 383-84), if we accept as valid the interpretation of v. 9, “e Deus que vus en poder ten” [and God who has you in his power], as an allusion to Leonor’s being a nun.

We may note, parenthetically, that all of these cantigas are transmitted by the Cancioneiro de Ajuda, very possibly a partial copy—containing only cantigas de amor—of a lar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Ghosts Revised: An Essay on Literary History
• Chapter 1. Infractions of the Name-Hiding Rule in Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poetry
• Chapter 2. Belief in History
• Chapter 3. The Songs of Melancholy: Aspects of Mannerism in Camões
• Chapter 4. Baroque Literature Revised and Revisited
• Chapter 5. Portuguese Poetics in the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter 6. Socio-institutional Literary Practices in Portuguese Romanticism
• Chapter 7. Decadence and Fin-de-siècle Literature in Portugal
• Chapter 8. Before the Barbarians
• Chapter 9. Fernando Pessoa’s Odd Epic
• Chapter 10. Notes for a Cartography of Twentieth-Century Portuguese Poetry
• Chapter 11. Contemporary Portuguese Fiction—Cases and Problems
• Chapter 12. Four Twentieth-Century Portuguese Critics
• Afterword: Literary History: Are We Still Talking?
• Contributors
• Index