Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems

by Richard Zenith (translator)

A bilingual volume that reveals an intriguing world of courtly love and satire in medieval Portugal and Spain



The rich tradition of troubadour poetry in western Iberia had all but vanished from history until the discovery of several ancient cancioneiros, or songbooks, in the nineteenth century. These compendiums revealed close to 1,700 songs, or cantigas, composed by around 150 troubadours from Galicia, Portugal, and Castile in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In Cantigas, award-winning translator Richard Zenith presents a delightful selection of 124 of these poems in English versions that preserve the musical quality of the originals, which are featured on facing pages. By turns romantic, spiritual, ironic, misogynist, and feminist, these lyrics paint a vibrant picture of their time and place, surprising us with attitudes and behaviors that are both alien and familiar.

The book includes the three major kinds of cantigas. While cantigas de amor (love poems in the voice of men) were largely inspired by the troubadour poetry of southern France, cantigas de amigo (love poems voiced by women) derived from a unique native oral tradition in which the narrator pines after her beloved, sings his praises, or mocks him. In turn, cantigas de esc�rnio are satiric, and sometimes outrageously obscene, lyrics whose targets include aristocrats, corrupt clergy, promiscuous women, and homosexuals.

Complete with an illuminating introduction on the history of the cantigas, their poetic characteristics, and the men who composed and performed them, this engaging volume is filled with exuberant and unexpected poems.

Genres: Poetry

377 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 17, 2022

About the author

Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal’s Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

Reviews

[Jack Hutchinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cantigas are an incredible part of Galician-Portuguese literary tradition and highly, though surprisingly, entertaining. Some of the views that the poems represent are of course outdated and at times misogynistic and homophobic, but on a whole the humour of many of the poems continues to hold up after some 800 years. Richard Zenith’s selection of Cantigas seems appropriate and well thought out, and his translations are excellent.

[Ostrava · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not read this book. I'm merely using this space as a placeholder for the general idea of it (its content).

[Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction to this book, Richard Zenith contextualizes the entire troubadour tradition more succinctly than any other scholar I've read on the subject, including Ezra Pound. Medieval Romance often alienates modern readers, but for the first time I felt as though I understood this kind of poetry on its own terms.

This selection of cantigas, all brilliantly translated by Zenith, draws from each of the three Iberian lyrical genres: cantigas de amor, cantigas de amigo, and cantigas de escárnio. It was thought that Iberian troubadours were inferior to their French peers, but this book would make that difficult to believe. the cantigas de amor are vivacious despite their conformity to the troubadour tradition, but the cantigas de amigo and escárnio are unlike anything I've read from this period and what makes this book an instant treasure. Completely lacking the stilted mores of unrequitable chivalric love that usually define the troubadour canon, the cantigas de amigo and escárnio reveal a more unfettered version of the medieval psyche, allowing their lyricists to indulge in delightfully shocking expressions of sexuality and humor forbidden to the rest of medieval Romance poetry.