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I. Non desidero ricevere né doni né indennizzi né ringraziamenti da parte dei potenti capi con la loro saggezza fallace, perché mi sento di rimproverarli per le loro azioni vili e avventate, e non voglio che i miei sirventesi siano apprezzati da fannulloni senza spina dorsale, poveri di cuore e potenti in ricchezza.
II. Prego il re d’Inghilterra di ascoltarmi, perché ora sta rovinando la sua esile reputazione per l’eccessiva paura, dato che non è disposto a difendere la sua gente. Al contrario è così debole e confuso che sembra essere profondamente addormentato, perché il re di Francia è assolutamente incontrastato nel rubargli Tours, Angers, i normanni e i bretoni.
III. Il re d’Aragona deve senza dubbio portare il nome “Jacme” perché gli piace troppo stare sdraiato [“jazer”], e se qualcuno vuole prendere la sua terra è così rammollito e lezioso che non ha neppure un argomento da opporgli, eppure laggiù sta facendo pagare agli infidi Saraceni un prezzo elevato per i danni che sta subendo qui vicino a Limoux.
IV. Fino a che non vendica il padre non può valere un granché, e non deve pensare che io gli dica nulla di gradito fino a quando non accenderà un fuoco e attizzerà un incendio e colpi potenti si abbatteranno su questa faccenda; allora sì sarà carico di giusto valore, se egli riduce i possedimenti del re francese che vuole mettere il signor Alfonso in possesso del suo feudo.
V. Conte di Tolosa, dovreste affliggervi per il reddito che eravate abituato a ricevere da Beaucaire; se voi e il re che è vincolato a voi aspettate ancora molto a fare la vostra rivendicazione, l’impresa sarà disonorata a meno che non vediamo ora le tende e i padiglioni, e i muri crollare e le alte torri cadere.
VI. O ricchi privi di discernimento, parlar male di voi infastidisce la gente, e io vi lascerei in pace se vi vedessi coraggiosi e valorosi; ma non vi temo al punto di mentire a causa vostra.
I. I wish to receive neither gift nor compensation nor thanks from the powerful leaders with their flawed wisdom, for I feel like upbraiding them for their base, injudicious actions; and I don’t want my sirventes to be appreciated among the spineless idlers, poor in heart and powerful in wealth.
II. I beg the English king to listen to me, for he is now ruining his slight reputation through excessive fear, given that he is unwilling to defend his own people. Instead he is so limp and confused that he seems to be fast asleep, for the French king is entirely unopposed in robbing him of Tours and Angers, Normans and Bretons.
III. The King of Aragon should unquestionably bear the name «Jacme» because he likes lying down [«jazer»] a lot, and if anyone wants to take over his land he is so effete and precious that he hasn’t a single thing to say against it, and yet over there he is making the treacherous Saracens pay a high price for the damage he is suffering here near Limoux.
IV. Until he takes revenge for his father he can’t be worth a great deal, and he shouldn’t imagine I’ll say anything pleasing to him until he starts a fire and conflagration and mighty blows are struck over this affair; then he will be full of fine worth if he trims the holdings of the French king who wants to put Lord Alphonse in possession of his fief.
V. Count of Toulouse, you ought to grieve over the income you used to receive from Beaucaire; if you and the king who is pledged to you wait a long time to make your claim, the enterprise will be dishonoured unless we now see tents and pavilions, and walls crumble and high towers collapse.
VI. You undiscerning rich men, it annoys people if I speak ill of you, and I would leave you alone if I saw you brave and valiant; but I’m not so afraid of you as ever to lie on your account.
3 del C 4 quen coratiai que r. R 5 dels] lurs R; issernitz R 7 flax or flacx C, fols with the ‘s’ apparently corrected R 12 quels sieus C 13 flac R 14 sien dormitz R 16 angieus R 17 daragon R 22 re R 24 prezar | lay l. R 26 non R 29 sia be | be f. R 31 sas tenezos] sai be | de followed by an erasure R 33 la] li R 34 soles R 36 lojatenda C 37 queu C 42 en uey hom or enuey om C, enueion or enueiom R; mals ditz C 44 ia men lays p. u. C.
1-8. Bernart’s defiant assertion of his indifference to any favourable response of part of his potential public seems to be a negative development of Raimon de Miraval’s canso on which he based his versification and almost certainly tune. Raimon’s song begins: Chans, quan non es qui l’entenda, / No pot ren valer, / E pus luec ai e lezer / Que mon bel solatz despenda, / Ses gap si’un pauc auzitz; / Quar totz ditz es mielhs grazitz, / Quant a la fi pauz’om ben las razos, / Per qu’ieu vuel far entendre mas chansos («Une chanson ne peut rien valoir s’il n’y a personne qui la comprenne; et puisque j’ai l’occasion et l’inclination de prodiger ma belle joie, qu’on mécoute sans bruit! car tout chant est mieux apprécié si à la fin on établit bien le sujet. C’est pourquoi je veux faire comprendre mes chansons»; Les Poésies du troubadour Raimon de Miraval, ed. Leslie T. Topsfield, Paris 1971, XXII, 1-8, pp. 198-201). The word entendre can of course also mean «to hear, to listen to» as well as «to understand».
3. Translation of saber is always tricky; here I interpret it to mean that the rich and powerful think they always know best, belied by their lack of judgment in their actions (v. 5). But there may also be a nuance of «learning» or «education». The adjective fals implies both «unsound» and «assumed».
5. All previous editors print yssernitz, though C’s reading is clear (R issernitz). It appears that all subsequent editors relied on Raynouard’s transcription.
7. Raynouard (who sometimes «normalises» graphies, e.g. Angieus for Angieu) and subsequent editors print flacx.
12. Bosdorff (whose choice of ms. readings is eclectic) opts for C’s que.ls sieus, but the context shows that the concern here is the defence of property, not people.
14. Bosdorff opts for R’s si’endurmitz which avoids hiatus.
15. Bosdorff prints reis here and in 37, apparently misreading C.
16. The line in both mss. mixes places and people. Bosdorff opts for R’s angieus which he translates as ‘Anjou’. Given that Tors is unambiguously ‘Tours’, Angieu probably refers to Angers rather than Anjou (compare Wilhelmina M. Wiacek, Lexique des noms géographiques et ethniques dans les poésies des troubadours des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Paris 1968, p. 73 and Frank M. Chambers, Proper Names in the Lyrics of the Troubadours, Chapel Hill 1971, p. 48. Bosdorff notes that Touraine, Normandy and Anjou had already been seized from John Lackland by Philip Augustus, but Henry, as his father John, regarded the judgment delivered by the peers of France in 1204 as invalid. Henry tried on several occasions to recover them through force of arms, until at the treaty of Paris in 1259 he finally renounced his claims (see Powicke, p. 169).
17. Bosdorff corrects to Reis, unnecessarily: see Ruth Harvey and Linda Paterson, The Troubadour Tensos and Partimens: A Critical Edition, 3 voll., Cambridge 2010, vol. I, pp. xxii-xxvi.
19. As Bosdorff observes (p. 806), such etymological wordplay on names is not infrequent among the troubadours. Here the link of James’s name Jacme (jac me, «I lie down») to jazer («to lie») mocks James not only for idleness but also for his well-known womanising.
23-24. For the concessive sense of the conjunction e «and yet» see Frede Jensen, Syntaxe de l’ancien occitan, Tübingen 1994, § 733. Bosdorff comments that despite the troubadour’s gibes at the King of Aragon for his inactivity in Occitania, his resounding successes against the Moors were too well-known simply to be ignored. – The allusion to the shame James is suffering in the vicinity of Limoux concerns his seigneurial rights over the district of Carcassonne (Bosdorff, p. 807), which had been taken from Raimon VII in 1229.
25. For car vendre in the sense of «to take revenge for», see SW, VIII, 633, 7, citing this line, and Bosdorff’s note (p. 807). James’s father Peire II of Aragon was killed by the French during the Albigensian crusade at the battle of Muret in 1213, a disaster for Occitan resistance to the northern army under Simon de Montfort.
32. For the sense of heretar here, see Bosdorff’s note (p. 807) and SW, III, 121. As Jeanroy observes (Alfred Jeanroy, «Le soulèvement de 1242 dans la poésie des troubadours», Annales du Midi, 16, 1904, pp. 311-329, on pp. 326-327), Louis IX had not conceded any fief held directly by the king of Aragon, but he had perhaps granted Alphonse some rights that the treaty of Paris allowed him upon the succession of Raimon VII, and in Raimon’s lands there were fiefs where James also claimed rights.
35. As Bosdorff notes, Beaucaire was one of the main towns of the county of Toulouse and was often referred to by the troubadours as standing for the whole region. The loss of this rich city at the treaty of Paris in 1229 was a painful sacrifice for Raimon VII.
40. Bosdorff justifies retention of autas tors at the rhyme in 40 by reference to Stimming and Levy. While most of the numerous examples on COM of tors = «towers» rhyme with -ors, two non-lyric examples show it rhyming with -os: Liurez aces cloceis e murs e tors. / Ne cuit Carles Martels ja baut per vos (Girart de Roussillon, ed. W. Mary Hackett, 3 voll., Paris 1953-1955, vv. 803-804), and E le bons Costantins, qu’era rey poderos, / tota la sieutat fes rebastir e las tors (Nicola Zingarelli, «Le roman de Saint Trophime», Annales du Midi, 13, 1901, pp. 297-345, vv. 741-742). For the fairly common licence of -ors rhyming with -os, from Marcabru onwards, see Ruth Harvey and Linda Paterson, The Troubadour Tensos and Partimens: A Critical Edition, 3 voll., Cambridge 2010, vol. III, p. 1207.
42. Milà and Bosdorff were puzzled by the mss. readings (Milà had translated «todos ven lo malo que de vosotros puede decirse (?)») and the latter corrects to Enueia.m. There is no need for emendation: the readings echo the troubadour’s professed indifference to public acclaim in stanza I. – For the possessive pronoun vostres used as an objective genetive, see Bosdorff’s note (p. 808) and Jensen, Syntaxe, § 286.
44. C’s m’en lays is facilior. In BdT 66.2 Bernart also declares he will not lie to powerful men: see my edition on Rialto, vv. 7-8 and 51
Edition, english translation and notes: Linda Paterson; italian translation: Luca Barbieri. – Rialto 5.i.2013.
C 326v (Bernatz de rouennac), R 38v (Rozenac).
Critical edition: Günther Bosdorff, «Bernard von Rouvenac, ein provenzalischer Trobador des XIII. Jahrhunderts», Romanische Forschungen, 3, 1908, pp. 761-827 (p. 794).
Other editions: François Juste Marie Raynouard, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours, 6 voll., Paris 1816-1821, vol. IV, p. 203; Manuel Milá y Fontanals, De los Trovadores en España, Barcelona, 1861, p. 178 (text Raynouard); Victor Balaguer, Historia politica y literaria de los trovadores, 6 voll., Madrid 1824-1901, vol. II (1879), p. 214; Die Werke der Troubadours, in provenzalischer Sprache, ed. Carl August Friedrich Mahn, 4 voll., Berlin, 1846-1886, vol. III, p. 132 (pace Bosdorff; line 22 missing).
CR are close, as expected, and may derive from a defective source: see the notes to 40 and 42. They contain indifferent variants 4-5, 7, 13, 14, 16 and 22. Because R is garbled or erroneous in 24, 29, 31 and 33, C has been chosen as base, but is corrected from R in 3, 36 and 37 (minor errors), and 42 and 44 where R shows better understanding.
Versification: a7’ b5 b7 a7’ c7 c7 d10 d10 (Frank 577:295), -enda, -er, -itz, -os, five coblas unissonans and one four-line tornada. There are twelve other texts with the same verse-form but only one with the same rhyme-endings, a canso of Raimon de Miraval (BdT 406.22, Frank 577:303, with a tune preserved in ms. R, 87r), from which it undoubtedly derives: see the note to 1-8.
The sirventes relates to the Occitan uprising of 1242 when Raimon VII of Toulouse allied himself with Henry III of England and Count Hugh of La Marche in resistance to French rule. After the battles of Taillebourg and Saintes (20-22 July) Hugh submitted to Louis and Henry withdrew, apparently taking no further military action. Raimon capitulated on 20 October 1242, and in January 1243 accepted the peace of Lorris where he undertook to abide by the treaty of Paris of 1229, which put paid to further resistance to French influence in the Languedoc. Henry returned to England in September 1243. The sirventes may have been composed in the spring of 1243 as a hopeless, unrealistic last-ditch attempt to revive the Count of Toulouse’s claims (see Dating and historical circumstances).