Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, a Bilingual Edition (review)

Ezra Pound, often hailed as the father of modernism in American poetry, made his acquaintance with the troubadours as a teenager around 1900, and this encounter had an enduring impact on his output. As a precocious undergraduate at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, he majored in romance philology under the tutelage of the German-trained William Shepard. Although not destined for the dry duties of the philological calling, Pound the poet nevertheless made the art de trobar his own, translating many of poems of the troubadours and weaving the Southern songmakers into his own works, such as the evocation of Sordel in the opening of the second of the Cantos. His predilection for the troubadours is best remembered from his Spirit of Romance (1910). What all of this has to do with the anthology under review here is that Pound's work is its starting point and he is one of its three contributors. A quotation from the Spirit of Romance opens this book (p. xi): 'Song did not again awake until the Provençal viol aroused it.' In Pound's day, quite a few collections of troubadour poems translated into French had appeared, and by the time of his death in 1972 the flow of them was still going strong. But English anthologies of troubadour poetry, such as Frederick Goldin's Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères (New York, 1973), have been far too few.

This is precisely what makes Lark in the Morning such a welcome publication. Taking Pound's translating effort as his starting point, the 'troubadour enthusiast' Robert Kehew has joined forces with W. D. Snodgrass and Pound to bring to a lay audience a selection of fifty-three poems by twenty-six troubadours, each poem edited in full (except for one, Guillem Figueria's sirventes) and translated into English. The book's format keeps close to its French antecedents. Over a mere seventeen pages, Kehew deftly covers considerable ground in his Introduction, running from Guillem de Peiteus (i.e. Poitiers) to Geoffrey Chaucer, and discussing the cultural context of the troubadours, the main song types, and pertinent historical events, all in lively prose calculated to retain the reader's attention. There is the occasional overstatement, such as that, while in Antioch, the first troubadour 'may have found solace in Eastern music . . . sung by almond-eyed Moorish beauties' (p. 9). The rest of the book is the anthology proper, followed by an appendix of two alternative translations, a bibliography, and an index of first lines and titles. Each troubadour has a short introduction prefaced by a vida excerpt, unfortunately taken from previous works rather than translated afresh by the editor.

It is hard to find fault with the selections, which follow the accepted troubadour canon. The anthology is divided into three sections. The first, 'The Dawn of a New Age', presents nine poems by four troubadours, Guillem, Cercamon, Marcabru, and Jaufre Rudel. The second, and by far the largest section, 'Zenith of the Troubadours', includes the usual names: Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Guiraut de Bornelh, Arnaut Daniel, Gaucelm Faidit, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Peire Cardenal, and Guiraut Riquier—even the Comtessa de Dia is here, along with Maria de Ventadorn. One regrets not seeing Raimon de Miraval, who might have replaced Arnaut de Marueill, for example. If Arnaut Daniel is represented by as many poems as Bernart or Bertran, it is because he was Pound's favourite; Pound is also the reason for the presence of the obscure Peire Bremon lo Tort. Contrary to usual practice, Folquet de Marseilla is absent in the 'Zenith' period and instead put into the final section, 'Destruction of the Southern Courts', presumably because of his role in this destruction; here we also find Guiraut Riquier and the poet Pound once called 'my Sordello' (Canto II, line...