“Chascus en lor lati”: Guilhem IX, Birdsong, and the Language of Poetry

At least since the foundational work of Alfred Jeanroy, scholars have referred to the language of troubadour song as a poetic koinê, a trans-regional lyric language, which displays a formal stability unique among twelfth-century vernaculars.¹ This modern assessment is based on the evidence of the surviving chansonnier texts, the earliest of which date from the mid-thirteenth century or roughly a hundred years after the major period of troubadour composition. The appearance of linguistic uniformity is further supported by the Occitan grammars of Raimon Vidal and Uc Faidit, among others, which define Occitan as a specialized language of poetic composition with a grammatical system similar to that of Latin. Like the chansonniers, the grammars are primarily a thirteenth-century phenomenon, and testify to a desire on the part of readers in France, Spain and Italy, where the majority of these texts were produced, to memorialize troubadour songs as a coherent and authoritative tradition.

The representation of Occitan as not only a lyric language, but a literary language, possessing many qualities identified with Latin as a language of textual authority, is therefore as important to the construction of this tradition as the composition of commentaries (vidas and razos) and the compilation of chansonniers. The special status of Occitan as a literary vernacular raises questions about the composition, performance and reception of troubadour poetry, which in turn engage a variety of issues related to cultural and political identity and the status of regional dialects during the twelfth century. Which factors motivated poets to choose Occitan as a language of composition? What are the social, political and artistic implications of this choice? And to what degree were troubadours themselves aware of the status of their language as a trans-regional langue d’auteur?

This essay approaches such questions by examining one significant word for language in the poems of Guilhem IX, the earliest-recorded troubadour. This word is lati (or latin), which primarily means “Latin,” but acquired another valence in Occitan and other Romance vernaculars of language that is obscure or difficult to understand, such as dialect, jargon and, for troubadours in particular, the language of poetry.² In this secondary sense, lati is uniformally accompanied by a possessive pronoun (mon, son, lor, etc.), which indicates that it is a particularized kind of language, identified with its speaker and with the specific context in which it appears.³

Readers of medieval lyric will likely have encountered descriptions of birds who sing “en lor lati,” which survive in the works of numerous troubadours, including Cercamon, Marcabru and Arnaut Daniel, as well as in poems by Chrétien de Troyes and Guido Cavalcanti, among many others.⁴ The earliest occurrence of this trope is Guilhem IX’s celebrated love song “Ab la dolchor,” where it appears in the context of an otherwise conventional début printanier:

Ab la dolchor del temps novelFolio li bosc e li auzelChanton chascus en lor latiSegon lo vers del novel chan.Adonc esta ben c’om s’aisiD’acho dont hom a plus talan.

(PC 183.1; Bond 10:1-6)⁵

[With the sweetness of the new season / The trees put forth leaves, and the birds / Sing, each in their own language, / Following the measure of the new song; / Therefore it is well that a person take possession / of that which he most desires]

Here and elsewhere, I cite Gerald Bond’s translation as typical of modern editions. The rendering of lati as “language” is standard; the curious application of a word for human speech to the singing of birds has received surprisingly little critical attention. Jeanroy dismissed the issue by explaining that, “le mot latin désigne souvent le ramage des oiseaux, probablement parce que leur gazouillement et le latin étaient également inintelligibles au vulgaire” (Poésies 210). This makes a certain amount of sense; the twittering of birds mimics language, but a kind of language that is unintelligible to humans. And yet this explanation ignores the semantic range and complex associations that inhere to lati as a word for both...