Die Lieder Peires von Auvergne by Rudolf ZenkerReview by: H. J. ChaytorThe Modern Language Quarterly (1900-1904), Vol. 4, No. 1 (May 1901), pp. 14-16Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41065278 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 07:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend accessto The Modern Language Quarterly (1900-1904).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.7 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:30:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

14 THE MODERN LANGUAGE QUAETEELY

of the relative probability of various rais- readings and misprin tings, emendation must remain in much the same state as medicine was before dissection was practised. Something has been done by Collier and others, but much remains. How much or how little is possible, cannot be said until some earnest attempt has been made.

In the meantime, such reasons of error as have been worked out, seem often to be brought forward to explain mistakes and to support proposed emendations where this cannot fairly be done. May we not protest against the continual assumption that a word which seems not to make good sense in its place, has been ' caught from the line above/ or from some other neigh- bouring line 1 Compositors at present do not set up one word at a time and then refer back to the manuscript for the next. They read from it at once as many words as they think they can remember. We do not see why it should have been otherwise in Shakespeare's day. Half-a-dozen words might be caught together from another place, but hardly, except in peculiar cases, a single one.

Mr. Deighton makes this latter assump- tion in his emendation of ' She would mod sure have yielded unto me ' ; for * not sure '

(Faithful Shepherdess, hi. i. page 40, first series). He seems convinced of the pro- priety of the change, but surely the passage makes perfect sense as it stands, if we con- sider that the Sullen Shepherd was de- liberating with himself and weighing opposing probabilities. The line, if taken in this sense, requires of course a query- mark at the end.

We note that some twenty conjectures are withdrawn in the second series, in most cases wisely enough, but we cannot help regretting that the extraordinary * Curtius- gulf for 'furcug' in Wit Without Money, II. ii. (page 52, first series), is not among them.

It is of course impossible here to com- mence the discussion of individual emenda- tions. We can only say that while the great majority of them are interesting and possible, and cannot be passed over in silence by any future editor, the fact that Mr. Deighton seems to have little acquaintance with the earlier editions of the plays which he emends, has the unfortunate result of making his two books appeal rather less to students who are interested in such matters than to the general reader who is not in- terested in them at all.

E. B. McKerrow.

Die Lieder Peires von Auvergne, kritisch herausgegeben von Eudolf Zenker. Erlangen, 1900.

Professor Zenker, who has already pub- lished two other works dealing with ancient Provençal, Die provenzaliche Tenzone (Halle, 1888) and Die Gedichte des Folquet (Falquet) von Romans (Halle, 1896), has now issued a critical edition of Feire d Alvernhe, character- ised by that careful and even laborious attention to detail which is the mark of German scholarship, or perhaps we had better sa}', erudition. It would be in- teresting to learn why our author was moved to edit this troubadour rather than another; for Peire is not a poet of great interest. He is mentioned by Dante, it is true, with some mark of respect (De Vulg. Eloq., i. 10), but he was not historically an important personage, and the literary influence which he exerted upon Provençal poetry, though appreciable, was small, when compared with the work done by such troubadours as Giraut de Bornelh or Arnaut Daniel in furthering the development of their literary art. Moreover, his poems, with but two or three exceptions, do not rise above the ordinary level of troubadour commonplace; they are also difficult, and in places entirely obscure. The chief interest attaching to this troubadour arises from the fact that he is one of the earliest in point of date of those that have come down to us ; but it cannot be said that any illumina- tion is to be shed upon the obscure origins of Provençal poetry by a study of his work, and the few hints that can be gained from his fashion of versification would hardly, of themselves, serve to justify the existence of a critical edition. Considering the large amount of work that yet remains to be done in the field of Provençal scholarship, we could almost wish that Professor Zenker had expended his time and his undoubted talents upon the elucidation of some better known troubadour ; and there are many of whose poems a critical edition would fill an obvious void.

Moreover, the author readily admits in his preface that he has hardly done his best for us : * Es wäre vielleicht möglich gewesen, in manchen Fällen Befriedigenderes zu liefern, hätte ich mich noch länger mit diesen Texten befassen, und mählig weiteren Stoff für ihre Interpretation herbeischaffen wollen/ One of the most pleasing features in the work is the frankness with which the author admits his own limitations: if he cannot translate a passage, or if his

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.7 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:30:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

EE VIEWS 15

translation is nonsense, he makes no diffi- culty about saying so. No one is more ready than ourselves to recognise the un- usual difficulties which confront the student of ancient Provençal - the awful obscurities arising from the exigences of a complicated system of rimes, and from the straining to tell in new form an oft-told and well- worn tale, are common to Peire d'Alvernhe and to many other Provençal poets ; Peire was an exponent of the trobar clus, or oscur, the dark and difficult style of diction, against which Giraut de Bornelh fought in his tenso with 'Linhaure' (Raimbaut d'Aurenga). A word should, perhaps, be said upon the * trobar clus (car, rie, oscur, sotil, cobert),' the involved, precious, preg- nant, dark, subtle, hidden style of poetical diction, as opposed to the * trobar leu (leugier, plan)/ the easy, simple style. It may seem to us a remarkable phenomenon that poets should have existed who actually desired not to be understanded of the people, who wrote, apparently, esoteric poems for an inner circle of admirers, and the more remarkable when we remember that the poems were intended to be sung, and that during the course of performance the majority of the audience must have found extreme difficulty in grasping the poet's meaning. Parallel cases are to be found among the Norwegian Skaldic poets, among the Irish, and, to a less degree, among the Welsh. But it is difficult to cite an instance which would enable the student of contemporary literature to realise the nature of the * trobar clus ' ; such obscurity as that of Browning is not to the point, because it was not the result of deliberate intention and elaborate polishing. Giraut de Bornelh tells us his method :

* Mas per mielhs assire mon eh an Vau cercan Bos motz en f re Que son tug cargat e pie D'us estrains sens naturals Mas non sabon tuich de cals. '

{Monaci, Testi ant. prov., p. 55.) ' But for the better foundation of my song, I am on the look-out for words good on the rein, that is, words tractable as horses, and, like horses, loaded high with a meaning which is unusual, though at the same, time it is entirely theirs, but that meaning is not obvious to every one.7 In other words, the * trobar clus' had this much in common with the 'preciosity' of later times, that it was a mode of expression characterised by the cult of the unusual adjective, by straining words from their ordinary senses ;

and to this we have to add the difficulties arising from systems of rime extraordinarily complex.

Now it is only to be expected that commentators should be baffled by these difficulties : ' die Deutung ist mir sehr zweifelhaft,' ' diese Strophe ist mir unver- ständlich geblieben

' - these and similar ex- pressions occur continually, both in Zenker's work and in the commentaries of every labourer in this field. The classical scholar struggling with a corrupt chorus has a light and easy task before him compared with that of the student of Provençal, who has but in- adequate dictionaries at his disposal, and is obliged to rely upon manuscripts often scanty in number, and, in cases, copied by a scribe who did not understand a word of what he wrote. But, at the same time, granted that the text is reasonably sound, a tone of utter despair is hardly justifiable. It is to us inconceivable that a troubadour, how- ever * sotil ' or 'cobert' his poetry may have been, should have written down what he knew to be utter nonsense. Some meaning must have attached to the many untranslat- able passages which might be quoted, and that meaning is to be extracted, if at all, only by employing the methods of the poets who wrote these enigmas. It is a task demanding extreme ingenuity and un- wearying patience of the commentator, and Professor Zenker admits that he has not always been sufficient for these things. Peire d'Alvernhe was not as eminent an exponent of the 'trobar clus' as Giraut de Bornelh in his earlier manner, or Arnaut Daniel ; but he is often quite as difficult to translate as either of these two poets, and himself tells us with a touch of pride that hardly any one could understand his poems. We need not, therefore, be surprised if Professor Zenker emits a grumble at the difficulties of reconstituting and explaining the text, at the 'mühsame und unendlich zeitraubende Arbeit'; but the reader may not unreasonably complain of the number of difficulties which the author declares in- soluble on his part, and the reflection that a perusal of his work is likely to suggest is one by no means new - ' This man began to build and was not able to finish.'

None the less, Professor Zenker has built and built well. His careful collation and relation of the manuscripts is an admirable piece of work; the notes are always in- genious and often brilliant. We may note several points on which improvement might have been possible. The biography says of Peire: 'Cansón non fetz neguna, que non

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.7 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:30:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

16 THE MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY era adoncs negus chantars apellatz cansos, mas vers ' ; on this point, the author remarks (p. 77) that Peire calls his own poems ' vers/ and that 'chans' and cognate words in No. v., 'nur auf die Melodie beziehen können.' What then is the explanation of 'sos e motz' in ii. 35, which must mean 'tune and words ' ? It is unlikely that Peire would have attached the same meaning to ' canso ' and ' son,' so that the former word requires further explanation. In No. vi. 31-2, 'desque ma dompna-m toi poders De so de qu'ieu plus l'ai requis,' the note runs, 'der Sinn muss sein, Weil sie mir den Mut nimmt sie anzureden ; wie sich derselbe aber mit v. 32 verbinden lässt, sehe ich nicht,' The connection, however, is as plain as it generally is in Peire's poetry : ' since my lady takes from the power of that (i.e. the opportunity of doing that) which I have most desired of her,' namely, takes from the poet the opportunity of urging his suit by chilling him into silence. In vi. 50, 'ja no t'en desrazics,' the verb 'se desrazigar' must be taken literally, 'do not root thyself up from her,' carrying on the metaphor of the over- shadowing branches of the poet's love in the previous stanza. The translation of xii. 72 seems to miss the true sense, namely, that the only blow that was occasioned by the presence of Gonzalgo Roitz at a battle was one struck at him as he was running away. ' Ab motz amaribotz e bastartz,' in xii. 77, is a puzzle, which the author ingeniously solves by correcting ' marabotz ' and referring the word to the term ' mara- bout ' of Arab origin, which came to be a word of reproach applied to converted Jews or Mohammedans who were suspected of leanings to their former faith, the phrase thus meaning words which are neither Christian, Jewish, nor Mohammedan, i.e. neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. 'Marabotz' is no doubt correct or nearly so ; we should prefer to read ' ab motz marabotis bastartz '

('maraboti' meaning £ maravedí, 'a coin of not infrequent mention among the trou- badours), and to translate, 'twopenny-half- penny words and bad coinage at that.' The constant use of coins of small value to point a comparison is well known to every student of troubadour poetry. In xiv. 43-48, the author admits himself unable to follow the thought : the clue seems to lie in the fact that retirement to a convent meant death to the earthly life, the 'segle,' and that ' mort ' in this passage does not necessarily imply physical death.

Comment on many other points might be

possible, had we space for it. Professor Zenker's book cannot stand in the same class with Stimming's Bertrán de Born or Canello's Arnaut Daniel, but it is a useful edition, and a valuable addition to the special editions of troubadours now pub- lished; it will be indispensable to every student of Peire d'Alvernhe for many years to come. H. J. Chaytor.

The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900. Chosen & edited by A. T. Quiller-Couch. Clarendon Press, 1900. [7s. 6d. and 10s. 6d.]

Those who have feasted on Mr. Quiller- Couch's Golden Pomp will turn expectantly to his new anthology of English verse, gathered from the lyrical remains of seven centuries, and they will not be disappointed. It is true that collections of the kind have multiplied of late years with alarming rapidity; but were our shelves yet fuller we would gladly bid

' Renowned Palgrave lie a thought more nigh To learned Bullen, and rare Henley lie A little nearer Palgrave,1

to make room for the latest of their clan - at least in his dainty India-paper garb. One peculiarity of the present collection is that the editor has ' not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long poem, when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric' It is an interesting feature, and opens up many possibilities - we can only wish that it had given us a specimen of the Pearl. Tastes will never agree in the selection of poems, but it is with surprise blent with delight that we turn over the pages of the present volume, and see how few are the friends who are not there to greet us. The earlier part especially is valuable as containing many poems not easily accessible. As we approach the poetry of our own day, the work of the anthologist necessarily becomes somewhat experimental, but the selection here given is certainly more satisfactory than that in the second series of the Golden Treasury. We should only like to express a hope that the inclusion of eleven poems of Christina Kossetti's, as against one solitary example of her brother Dante's work, is due to considerations of copyright. The collection, which extends to 883 pieces, representing some 270 authors, and filling over a thousand pages, closes with an anonymous poem entitled Dominus Illu- minatio Mea - a graceful compliment to the University whose press has, in the present antholosrv. ülaced vet another delightful volume upon our shelves. w. w. a

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.7 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:30:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions