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Marisa Galvez on William IX ("The Song of Nothing")
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For the first time in the run of this podcast (though certainly not the last!) today we have a poem in translation. Marisa Galvez joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing," a poem by the first attested troubadour, William IX.
The poem is something like 900 years old, and Marisa helps us see both its strangeness and the sense in which it feels like it might have been written yesterday. You'll hear Marisa read the poem both in an English translation and in its original language, Old Occitan, where its musicality and verve really come through. This was a fascinating conversation about how poems are made—and why, and who and what for—with lessons to offer both about the medieval period and about the poems and songs we encounter today.
Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian (and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature) at Stanford University, where she specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. She is the author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press: Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (2020). Her current book project concerns contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of "lyric knowing" the Global South.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizre, and I am very happy today to have Marisa Galvez on the podcast. And Marisa has come on to talk about, she and I were just chatting about this before we started the recording. This will be the first time, though certainly not the last,
00:00:25
Speaker
that we have a poem featured on this podcast that we're bringing to you in translation, though you'll also hear it in its original.
William IX and 'The Song of Nothing'
00:00:34
Speaker
The poem is called The Song of Nothing, and it is by the first attested troubadour whose name in English, as I checked with Melissa, I should refer to as William IX, though perhaps you'll get into some of the other ways by which he can be identified.
00:00:54
Speaker
We'll make a text of that poem available to you, so look for that in the episode notes for people who'd like to look as they listen.
Marisa Galvez's Background and Work
00:01:03
Speaker
Let me tell you first, though, a bit more about Marissa Galvez. She's a professor of French and Italian and by courtesy of German Studies and of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. And she's the author of two books,
00:01:20
Speaker
both of which were published by the University of Chicago Press. So her first book, called Songbook, How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe, and that was published in 2012. And that was followed by a book called The Subject of Crusade, Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500.
00:01:44
Speaker
that one, as I say, published also by Chicago in 2020. And she's currently working, as I've learned from her website on, I think, two things maybe. One, a book that would be a trans-historical interdisciplinary study of crystals as metaphor, material, and object.
00:02:07
Speaker
and a project on contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of, and this is her phrase, quote, lyric knowing in the Global South.
00:02:23
Speaker
She's also involved with, or I think the director of, an ongoing project called Performing Trobar, which seeks to cultivate the experience of troubadour lyric as live performance.
Impact of Marisa's Work on Understanding Poetry
00:02:38
Speaker
Fans of this podcast might note a kind of uncanny coincidence, which is that the most recent episode of the podcast
00:02:49
Speaker
featuring Stephanie Burt from Harvard University on the poet Alan Peterson. Steph and I, before we got to that poem last time, talked about, while we were talking about Taylor Swift, and we were talking about the relationship between song lyrics and lyric poetry,
00:03:07
Speaker
And Steph, unprompted, brought up the work of Marissa Galvez and said, you know, she'd published this great book. Steph was referring in particular to Marissa's first book, song book, and said that it just totally changed her sense of the relationship between popular music or popular song forms and lyric poetry of the history of the relation between those genres
00:03:34
Speaker
and that it was one of the great books in poetry studies of the last few decades. Little did Steph know I was in the process of booking Marissa to appear on the podcast. So I don't know, make of that what you will, the poetry world is small or fate is well designed or something like
Early Songbooks and Troubadour Tradition
00:03:55
Speaker
that.
00:03:55
Speaker
That first book, both of the books are fascinating, but perhaps because of the recent conversations I've been having, that first book has really caught my attention in preparation for this conversation.
00:04:11
Speaker
Marissa is looking at early songbooks to investigate how, in her words, songbooks establish the expectations of the poem, the poet, and lyric poetry itself. She writes that what we consider poetry is built on the remains of lyrics seen in the material formations of the songbook.
00:04:37
Speaker
And so I think we have the great fortune today of having on the podcast a scholar in the truest sense of the word, someone who helps us understand what has made possible or even sort of necessary what we do now when we read a poem or write a poem or think about a poem. And therefore, I think, you know, I have the good luck today to be talking to a medievalist who can also help us see anew our own encounter with poetry.
Troubadour Tradition and Language
00:05:05
Speaker
And so I'm just very pleased to have you on the podcast. Marisa Galvez, how are you doing today? Very well, thank you. Very happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Well, it's totally my pleasure. So when you and I were talking about your coming on, I thought, oh, it would be cool to have something from the Troubadour tradition featured on this podcast.
00:05:32
Speaker
I, as you may know, mostly work in the 20th and 21st centuries, and for a lot of modernist poetry, and of course I'm thinking of a figure like Ezra Pound or someone like that, the Troubadour tradition occupies a privileged place in the imagination of what poetry is or might be or should be or I don't know what. But I like to take a really kind of
00:05:57
Speaker
open-ended and generalist approach with this podcast, and I don't want to presume that anybody really, you know, knows much about what we mean when we use that term. So I wonder if we could just begin this conversation by my inviting you to tell the uninitiated something about what the Troubadour tradition was. Like, what does that word Troubadour designate
00:06:20
Speaker
either historically or formally, generically, linguistically, I don't know. How would you introduce someone to that term and concept? Sure. So the word troubadour comes from the Occitan word trobar. Occitan was the old Occitan, that is, the medieval language that the troubadours employed. It's a Romance language based on Latin as well.
00:06:47
Speaker
Trobar means to find, to compose, and bench, similar to tropari in Latin. But really finding, like finding words, finding words in song or sound together, that's what the troubadours were about. And they called themselves troubadours, or troubadours.
00:07:05
Speaker
In finding and I like to think of their songs is always in this process of trying to find putting music and words together It's a process They'd never called themselves a poet. They called themselves a finder an active activity Was poet another word that they might have used but declined to use? I mean, what is that a distinction they were making from some other Yeah, they never poet doesn't come back. They just say you but or they say shantador singer.
Geographical Influence of Troubadours
00:07:30
Speaker
Uh-huh
00:07:32
Speaker
our troubadour support today, William and I say, I'm going to make a song, I'm going to make a verse that I am this. So they're always making something or composing something or
00:07:43
Speaker
crafting something. Plaining words, right, are no time bulbs, really. And of course, making is also there in the etymology of poetry, right, or poesis. Right. Or the macar, yeah, okay, go on, yeah. Yeah. Tell us more, yeah. So, Occitan, for those of you who might not be familiar with that word, it's still actually a language used in Southern France today.
00:08:08
Speaker
The Troubadours were medieval poets active in the 12th and 13th century in mostly southern France, but also northern Iberia and northern Italy. And Occitan, it used to be called, in academic scursals, Provençal, which is what most people are familiar with, Provençal. But actually, Provençal is only one dialect of Occitan. There's Tagaskan, Prolemudoc,
00:08:31
Speaker
So, but Occitan is the general term for the medieval language that they use for their poetry. I see. So, right. And so I think this is right. I referred to Pound earlier. He would have used the term Provencal, I think. But what I think I've just heard you say is that Provencal is a sort of smaller category than Occitan, which includes Provencal, but includes other dialects as well.
00:08:59
Speaker
Is that our poet today writing in the Provençal dialect of Occitan? Yeah, I'm not actually quite sure. I guess the dialect of his region, which is Poitiers, that area. I don't think people have been able to tag exactly. They just generally call it Occitan. There are other jubitors that are much more market like Gascon dialect or
00:09:24
Speaker
closer to Catalan or something like that. But Occitan is basically the term that we say that he was composing at. And I think you said 12th and 13th centuries, is that right? Yeah, all the way up there. But pretty much the high point of it was, you know,
00:09:42
Speaker
William the Ninth burst upon the scene at the beginning of the 12th century. He was our first attested troubadour. I see. And then they really have the height of the most well-known troubadours and the height of the activities, like the mid-12th century.
00:09:54
Speaker
of
Themes and Performance of Troubadour Songs
00:09:55
Speaker
course. So here today we're talking about like 900 years ago, basically. Yeah. I love that. I love that. What about, you know, you say they didn't use the word poetry, but of course here we are talking about one of these songs on a poetry podcast. I'm using that. We're sort of shoehorning them in or something. And of course we'll get a close encounter with one example
00:10:25
Speaker
of what these songs were like, but how would you compare generically, if you even accept that there is a typical Troubadour song,
00:10:40
Speaker
you know, for a contemporary reader, a reader of contemporary poetry, or someone familiar with the, say, history of English or American poetry, sort of what would they notice typically about how a troubadour song is both, is both like and unlike, you know, what we have come to, you know, call a poem or a lyric poem? Right. Well, the main reason why we read them today is that they are, they are well known for inventing a certain
00:11:10
Speaker
type of love language. That is to say, love for an illicit love object, adulterous love. They popularize that also in vernacular language.
00:11:20
Speaker
And the idea that this quest for this unattainable love object who is unnamed is a good and enough itself. The quest isn't it? And you don't actually want to attain that love object, but rather you just want to sing about it as that. So they copyright that when at a time when people were talking about going on crusade or God or, you know, this, they suddenly they, they popularized as such a matter of erotic, illicit love.
00:11:44
Speaker
for a high-born lady, for a very noble love object, not vulgar love. And so what they did is they translated that desire, all the movements of the heart, which we would recognize in any pop song today. You mentioned Taylor Swift before. You sing about not being able to have that love, but all the movements of the heart, hope, despair, frustration. And they make that into a song.
00:12:12
Speaker
Oh, I love that. I'm going to make it a point now just to drive up the podcast popularity to mention Taylor Swift on every podcast. We're doing that for our course I'm teaching this spring. It's like the history now from Sappo to Swift.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, right. Not Jonathan. Yeah, right. Right. No, I mean, I won't actually do that, but you've given us a really interesting, I think, way to conceptualize it. And I love what you say. We say sort of love poetry, erotic poetry, but what's the sort of condition, if I'm hearing you right, that sort of sponsors the singing or the making, the finding of these words,
00:12:59
Speaker
I don't think you use this word, but I'll use it and see what you think of it. It's like the condition of longing, of sort of being in the grip of desire, but not having the desire satisfied. These aren't poems about happy marriages, in other words. No. But wanting and not wanting, and that gap in between where you think about that frustration and hope is that gap is filled in by the song.
William IX's Song Innovations
00:13:29
Speaker
And the other aspect of the troubadours that is important for those lovers of poetry, of people who care about poetry, it's that this music, this was music. It was always performed. It was, you know, their troubadours are known for inventing this love language of desire, but then also for their virtuosity and meter and putting words and sound together in these kind of virtuous, these forms of repeated, of repeated mellies fit to,
00:13:57
Speaker
repeated metrical form in each stanza. So when they performed it, the songs weren't written down until generations later. It was just basically remembered improvisation of a blueprint of words and sound together. So that's another amazing thing, and I always like to emphasize that these songs are performed before a live audience, and that was part of their power.
00:14:21
Speaker
That's fascinating. Performed before a live audience. So William would sing, yes? He would sing, which we don't really know, probably, but they vary their monologic kind of poems that maybe had some musical background, but they're powerful in of itself. When I recite it, you will hear that even when I'm not singing it, it has its own rhythm, its own sound.
00:14:41
Speaker
Right. Okay. So I was going to ask you that too. Was there a company meant, you know, with like, you know, I think of the ancient Greek example of the liar or something like that. So we're not sure. Maybe yes. We're not sure, but probably there might have been. Yeah. Right. Okay. And then, um, I'm also fascinated, of course, with what you said about the fact that they weren't copied down until generations later. So it's, it's not, I mean,
00:15:05
Speaker
I guess I'm sort of anticipating that the answer to this is going to be another we're not sure, but let me ask the question anyway, because it's an interesting one to me.
00:15:16
Speaker
They weren't copied down till later. They were performed. Would I be right in sort of guessing that the composition, whatever that means, the kind of making up or the finding of these words was not something that involved pen and paper or the equivalent of that? Like they were composed orally as well. It's not just like, right? So it's not like he was sort of working it out on paper.
00:15:43
Speaker
came up with the song to perform and then ditched the manuscripts. There wasn't a manuscript really until it was copied down generations later. Have I got that history right? Yeah. We think that, and also there's sort of hints in the lyrics and also in the parallel German troubadour tradition in Minnism. We know that they might have had props, maybe paper props that eventually became the fancy songbooks that would collect the lyrics later. But in general though,
00:16:13
Speaker
I think that they had what I like to call the blueprint of a repeated meter to a melody that repeated every stanza. That was enough to carry a song as remembered improvisation. Maybe you change the stanza, maybe you change the word to fit the meter, but
00:16:30
Speaker
I mean, it was kind of, troubadours were very much singer-songwriters. They could be of different classes, but they were known, they had their stature because they were excellent singer-songwriters, right, that they could really make a song that locked it in. And we know this because, for instance, one of the most famous troubadours, Bernard de Vantadon, and his most well-known song, The Lark Song,
00:16:53
Speaker
he, in all the manuscripts, it's transmitted basically, like, in the same way every time, because it's the blueprint was so solid, right? Maybe there was stands transposition, but basically, it's the same. So I think, I think that's, yeah, it's important to, I mean, we sometimes forget, like, during the Middle Ages, and before people heard everything they could, you know, they didn't, we weren't relying on like, reading anything, but everything was a text in the sense of sound and
00:17:22
Speaker
And memory could even print themselves on the mind in that way. So yeah. And so in my sort of amateurish way, I guess I'm wanting to say, but I think I'm also hearing you say, so I feel sort of sponsored in this belief that some of the formal features of the poem we're about to hear, but of other poems in this tradition too, or songs in this tradition perhaps I should say,
00:17:47
Speaker
uh are sort of aids to memory or or kind of help to lock help in that sort of process of locking in so what do I mean
Analysis of 'The Song of Nothing'
00:17:56
Speaker
like structures of refrain certain kinds of metrical regularity or the fact that as I look at this poem on the page I see stanzas that all
00:18:06
Speaker
If I couldn't read the words, I would say they all look the same, right? There's a kind of regularity to the line lengths and so on. And that formulaic nature helps with that kind of locking in process. Exactly.
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Wonderful. Okay, so I think we're ready. I mean, I guess I have, you know, I was going to say, I think we're ready to hear the poem, but maybe I could just ask you to say one more thing before that, which is, all right, so I invited you to do a Troubadour poem. You have at your fingertips a great kind of archive of possibilities here.
00:18:45
Speaker
Can you say a word about why you chose this particular one for this conversation? Like, does it, you know, you love it, it amuses you, or what do you think it's useful for beginners or what? Yeah, you know, I almost didn't want to get this one because William the Ninth, he's our first attested Jupiter that we know of. And it's almost too modern because like what I said that most of the reasons why we
00:19:11
Speaker
we know about the troupe to say is like, it's like love, a love song, right? Like, Oh, I wish I had her, but I can't. And I'm going to sing about that longing and despair. But if you win the night song, he comes up like he can compose those songs. But he also does these body boasting songs, which is the song that we're going to, we're going to look at and listen to. And so it's kind of like extrinsic to the tradition, but also very much part of the part of the
00:19:37
Speaker
the world of the troubadours. So I like it because it brings up well, one of the parallels I like to make with troubadours is they're kind of like it's like hip hop rappers kind of things that a lot of the things that they do the rhetorical maneuvers, they're citing about their material wealth, the
00:19:54
Speaker
kind of associating poetic prowess with sexual prowess. William the Ninth does it just right there. So he's kind of deliberately body and boasting, but then he's also very sophisticated in his poetry. So I find him fascinating and his poems, the ones that I'm, his boasting songs are very relatable to a modern audience, almost too much so, but I think they're lots of fun as well.
00:20:18
Speaker
Okay, good. So maybe a good way in, but not entirely representative of the whole tradition in that one sense. There's a term of art that you've used and I've used it too, I think, but maybe we should just gloss it for the audience. When we say first attested troubadour, what work is the word attested doing there and what does that mean exactly? Right, so he's the earliest troubadour of whose lyrics we have written down, right? And we know, unlike other troubadours who we vaguely know about,
00:20:48
Speaker
William IX, because he was an aristocrat, is such an important lord. We have a lot of documents on him, historical documents. He was actually in trouble with the church. Apparently he had long hair. He went to hang out with his ladies. And he had an affair, got excommunicated, and then actually repented and went off on crusade. But we know a lot about him. He got in trouble with the clerics, but he was also a very powerful lord. So that kind of biography
00:21:16
Speaker
You know, of course, we're always careful not to read his lyrics in those framework But we do know more about him and that give him give a context about it But when so first attesting means that the first lyrics earliest lyrics that we know of that have been transmitted in manuscripts Okay, and that we can though though it sounds like the sort of whole sort of concept of like what an author was or what authorship or whatever is obviously a highly
00:21:41
Speaker
historically contingent sort of thing. It does sound like these songs are his in some real sense. Yeah, okay, good. All right, so yeah, let's listen to the poem and I guess first in the Occitan and then we can sort of take a breath and then hear it as well in English.
00:22:05
Speaker
And just as a reminder to our listeners here, you can find a link to the text of this song in the episode notes. Marisa, take it away. Okay. For the first time, we have not been able to do anything. We have not been able to do anything. We have not been able to do anything. We have not been able to do anything.
00:22:31
Speaker
Nous s'ai en calor a une vignette, Nous s'oe a l'égros n'ie a rat, Nous s'oe est rans m'is s'oe cri vat, Nous n'on qu'est gal, Qu'en ais s'ie fous d'ignuettes pas d'at s'oe b'un prégal. Nous s'ai chorame suis en dans mitz, Nous chorame vais s'omme nous d'its, Perpoc nous m'est le corps patits d'un d'ol cholare, En nous m'opret s'un una from mitz, Percent m'us d'au.
00:22:57
Speaker
Ma l'artso écranie m'oril érai nos ai mas can now stil, me cich la ai ami l'arville en nong saitau. Boos mech que sein simpote qué lir, mas nong si amau. Amigo ai yu nos ai qui seis, que no la vie ci ma vu fes, ni fes qu'em plasse ni ken bes, ni nong ta. Qu'en nog qu'en noma ni pan ses, dinz mon austau.
00:23:24
Speaker
And non la vie es am la fort, and no a dreit nie non fest tort, can no la gai be mende port, non prais son ja. Que nous sais gensour les belazoles et quis max va. Nous sais le les pessons que esta, si a su prégos en n'enpla. Nous as ville le l'autaut que ma abandement ca, et peis ambe carçais raima, hab ait an va.
00:23:52
Speaker
We are the world, the society, and we are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones who are the ones.
00:24:06
Speaker
And now English? No, well, hang on, hang on a second. That was great, Marisa, yes. So I just want to, you know, again, remind people, you've just heard, that was fantastic. I'm so happy to have had that, to have gotten to listen to that. That was Marisa Galvez reading in the Occitan. And Marisa, did I hear you right? This would be Old Occitan, is that right? Yeah. Which is a little bit different from modern Occitan, yeah.
00:24:32
Speaker
Would a modern Occitan speaker be able to, notwithstanding that difference, be able to understand what you just said more or less? Yes, more or less, yeah. Okay, cool. So that was Marisa Galba's reading, William IX.
00:24:53
Speaker
song of nothing and now we'll hear it in English. And what kind of translation is this that you have at hand? Is it like fairly kind of literal and or do you want to set up the translation in any way or just we can talk about it afterwards up to you? Yeah, I think this is usually the English translation that's most used closest to the Occitan. There's a lot of
00:25:19
Speaker
ambiguity in translate, especially towards the end of the song. Have I got it right? I think it's the most reliable. So we should we should credit the translator part. The translator is Gerald A Bond. Is that right? Right. Yeah. OK, good. OK, so now in English, please. Oh, yes.
00:25:38
Speaker
I'll do a song about nothing at all. It won't be about me nor about others. It won't be about love nor about happiness nor about anything else. For it was composed earlier while I was sleeping on a horse. I don't know what time I was born. I'm not happy or sad. I'm not a stranger or an intimate friend. Nor can I do anything about it. For so I was enchanted at night upon a high hill.
00:26:02
Speaker
I don't know when I'm asleep nor when I'm awake or someone doesn't tell me. My heart is almost split apart by a heartfelt pain, but that is not worth an answer to me by St. Marshall. I am sick and I'm afraid of dying, yet I know nothing about it except what I hear. I'll search for a doctor to my liking, yet I don't know any. He will be a good doctor if he can heal me, but not if I worsen.
00:26:27
Speaker
I have a woman friend. I don't know who she is, but I never saw her, so help me. She never did anything which I like or dislike, and I don't care, for there was never a Norman or a Frenchman in my lodging. I never saw her, and I love her greatly. I was never right, and she did me no wrong. When I don't see her, I'm happy about it. It's not worth a rooster to me, but I know one more gentle and beautiful who is worth more.
00:26:53
Speaker
I don't know what the place where she stays, whether it's in the hills or on the plains. I don't dare speak of the wrong she has done to me. I'll just drop it, and it grieves me to stay here, so I'm going. I've done the song about whom I don't know, and I'll send it over to the one who will send it from me through another towards Anju, so that she might send me a copy of that key to her copper.
00:27:17
Speaker
All right, thank you. That's great. So I had this initial feeling of delight. I confess I did not know this text before you suggested it to the podcast. But when you gave me the title, I thought, oh, how wonderful. The Song of Nothing. And of course, I thought of this, I guess, just marks me generationally or whatever. I thought, oh, it's like Seinfeld, like a show about nothing or something.
00:27:45
Speaker
So if we take those first lines of that first stanza, and again, I guess one thing maybe I could just sort of call attention to for people who aren't looking at the text or didn't necessarily hear it in Marissa's wonderful reading of the Occitan, these are stanzas of six lines each and they have
00:28:09
Speaker
they rhyme in a kind of, what, A-A-A-B-A-B, and those B rhyming lines are shorter lines, so the fourth and the sixth line of each stanza is shorter. In that first stanza, and there are eight of them, eight stanzas,
00:28:28
Speaker
in that first stanza, I'll do a song about nothing at all. And then this sort of series of statements about what it won't be about. I think you've already sort of set this up for us in some ways, but I just want to make it crystal clear for people. The series of negations, what are the
00:28:51
Speaker
What are the expectations that are being undermined? Do these have to do with genre or social class? What's the poem that he's not doing or the song that he thinks we expect him to be singing that he's disavowing in some way? Right.
00:29:15
Speaker
Yes. So there's even in the first stanza, there's a lot. So I'll do a song about nothing at all. That already is a provocation because here you have
00:29:27
Speaker
a Lord, a very powerful Lord of his area, the Duke of Aquitaine. When you do a song in that position, you have to do it's about God or religion or going on crusade. You don't do about nothing. So that already is a provocation. And I also like to say, I'm making a song, it's song translated, it's translated, but it's really a verse, which can be different things, but all you need to know is it's gonna rhyme.
00:29:54
Speaker
it's gonna be you know he doesn't say it doesn't identify it since he's the first jubita we know of the earliest ones just say this you know which is kind of you don't know what that is and cognate with our word verse or whatever yeah so it's something that turns back on itself and it rhymes and it does have that repetitive rhyme
00:30:15
Speaker
And so he already, from the very first line, he's making this provocation in terms of like, your son has to have a subject and usually a serious one at that, or maybe love, but nothing, to name actually nothing, is already provocation. Then he starts a series of negations. It won't be about me nor about others. So then what is it about? It won't be about love or about happiness, nor about anything else. And then he says, boy, it was composed earlier while I was sleeping on a horse.
00:30:42
Speaker
Now, if you're a lord like that, what do you do when you're on a horse? You do your night, you do shivers things, you do things for the social good, maybe go on crusade. But not only do you compose poetry on a horse, but you are sleeping on it. Like there's just, you know, this provocation. And I like to say he introduces the horse thing because
00:31:04
Speaker
Already the song, even though we don't have the music to this particular song, it has this kind of almost plodding horse-like rhythm. And that is a deliberate... This guy's sophisticated. He's making it deliberately crude for a reason. Like, here's my stupid nothing song with this plodding rhythm. Because anyway, I composed it while I was like... So everything's like, I don't have an activity. I don't have a subject matter.
00:31:29
Speaker
Uh, you know, I'm going to not sing about anything that you think is important. So already from the first stanza, we have this like provocation of what it is a song about nothing in sound and also in subject matter, right. And also a verse, like verse fills up, like this is the place, this playful lyrical space where someone who before he was born, he had an identity.
00:31:52
Speaker
Now he's negating that identity. And within this poetic space of negation, he can be anything he wants. So this is what it's opening to us. This realm of possibility in the song about nothing.
00:32:04
Speaker
Oh, I love that before he was born, he had an identity, right? William the Ninth, you know? Good. And this idea, I'm totally persuaded by this idea about the horse, too, because it's as though, right, like, okay, the content of this song is nothing.
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, perhaps you think even if that's the case, then I've made up a pleasing rhythm of my own, but like I didn't do that. The horse did that or something, right? You know, there's almost nothing there. Yeah.
00:32:40
Speaker
And there's this attachment to the horse that's very much, again, introducing this thing that's always kind of boastful, sexual poetic prowess. Because the horse is attached to this kind of masculine, knightly ideal. And he's playing with that. He's like, well, what I do on a horse is I compose poetry. But there's a kind of a symbiosis between this animal bestiality and him that we hear in the poetry itself. Like it's like plotting, it's like this. So I think that that's kind of interesting.
00:33:07
Speaker
important to remember as a context with when you read medieval poetry, right, kind of this thing.
00:33:12
Speaker
And not just coming up with the poem or the song, the verse on the horse, but while sleeping, which sounds even less sort of masculine or whatever, heroics or something. I mean, it sounds like, I don't know, like Don Quixote or something. Yeah, I mean, you have to wait until like the Renaissance where it's okay to be idle and not seen as a virtue.
00:33:40
Speaker
imagine the activity comes, oteum, right? No, no, here, you're supposed to be active in doing something, right? And so the idea of he's combining all these things that you're in which the audience would have known he would have that that's what's expected of him in that social world. But he's like, no, it's gonna be a song about doing nothing at all, right? And he names it as such.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah. And the second stanza really sort of doubles down on or reasserts these series of negations. Like I'm really struck by that kind of anaphoric rhythm of those first, what is it, three lines, which I mean, I won't really try the Occitan, but I notice as I look at the
00:34:32
Speaker
at the left-hand side here of my page, which has that text on it, you know, nōsai, nōsōi, nōsōi, you know. Right. So in those negations, I don't know what time I was born.
00:34:46
Speaker
I mean, just let's take that first line of the second stanza. Would I be right to infer that, or is the implication there something like, well, you might expect a poet to sort of tell you the story of his life or something, which would begin with when he was born, but I don't even know when that was.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he's obviously playing with the expectations of, of course, everyone knew when he was born is important, like, you know, and that and he's not, you can't and the idea that he's identifying some space between happy or sad, where poetry is supposed to kind of identify
00:35:29
Speaker
some kind of peak emotion or something that comes from being to dispossess of a lady or being in grief. He's like, I'm not either one of those things like those extremes. So an interesting thing about it is he identifies negations, but they don't line up ever. But they also create some negative space in which you are left wondering, right? What's about, you know, Can you say more about what you mean by they don't line up? Because that sounds really interesting. But I'm not sure I'm not sure I follow up. Later on, there's a better
00:35:58
Speaker
uh um stanza six i never saw her and i love her greatly i was never right and she did me no wrong so that kind of stuff he that's he does these things where you expect to be like oh i you know i love her but she ignores me or something with that but it's always like you how do you love someone they've never seen before uh or this kind of thing he kind of um undoes all the expectations in which
00:36:24
Speaker
love poetry is supposed to be like, oh, love enters through the eyes. That's a common convention or, but then you can never have her. The distant love is always there. So you have these, all these things about despair. So he kind of, he makes a mockery of that. And that's even more emphasized by just if I could, looking at the sense against stanza,
00:36:42
Speaker
Again, with the rhythm, that's very crude. He uses like very strong masculine rhymes that have this like fricative, that fall, gnat, irat, privat. And that only emphasizes that parallel, no soy, no soy. So that adds to this like, you're not supposed to take me seriously, except I kind of know what I'm doing, that deliberate crudeness.
00:37:02
Speaker
is part of the negation song. I see. Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of ideas, but I love how they're being sort of configured or stitched together here. I mean, you might expect, in other words, okay, if the poem is going to have a series of negations, they will sort of cohere. Your term earlier, lineup, is now making a lot more, I'm seeing it more clearly, and the fault was mine before, but now I'm getting it, I think.
00:37:30
Speaker
You know, I think of, for instance, like, you know, my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. Right. A series of negations in that famous Shakespearean sonnet. But you can see how they sort of stack on top of each other, how they're sort of consistent with each other. They by by saying.
00:37:49
Speaker
not x, not y, not z, we understand, even if it's only ever implied, that some other thing is true. Here, it's like the negations don't leave room for anything to be true in their stead, right? It's like everything is negated. And that seems linked
00:38:12
Speaker
paradoxically perhaps to the kind of, what were you pointing out about the sound of those fricatives to like the sureness or the aggression or the confidence of the vocal
William IX's Legacy and Influence on Modern Songs
00:38:23
Speaker
performance? Yeah, the confidence and the provocation, nats irats privats. So I love that TZ, that fricative thing, which only adds to the force of a masculine rhyme. That's when the
00:38:35
Speaker
It's not that the beat drops on the on the last syllable rather than the penultimate, which would be a feminine rhyme like ira or something like that. Like here, he's like very aggressive, but it's also his chord and it's boasting. This is a boasting song in uxitan. It's called the gap.
00:38:52
Speaker
It's called a boat. That's the genre of the boat. That sound almost sounds like Germanic to me or something. I don't know. Yeah. I said romance language, but yeah, anyway, go on. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you. He invented this genre. The Bose Sing song, he was known for the Bose song and he's the first Jupyter, but also he invented this, the song of negation and other Jupyter will copy him.
00:39:12
Speaker
kind of like but he I feel like this this one as the genesis of that genre is really great because it's uh I don't know it's this kind of a combination of sophistication and that the negatives don't line up in various ways and then the the kind of crude poetics of it that's quite sophisticated as well
00:39:32
Speaker
It's kind of incredible. Am I hearing you right that this is both? You would consider this both a boasting song and a song of negation? Yeah. I mean, clearly it's a song of negation. There's other songs that's like...
00:39:47
Speaker
uh also body but but this one is really about i'm not this i'm not this i'm not this where it's a serial listing of negations yeah right i mean i guess i'm thinking of you know again i'm so i keep taking as far afield historically but like so emily dickinson or something i i'm nobody who are you that's that's a kind of song of negation but to me that doesn't sound well maybe i don't know like boasting it sounds like um
00:40:11
Speaker
humility or self-negation, you know, or kind of this kind of disappearing act or something. But this feels like it's got real bravado to it. So, you know, I got it. Yeah. I mean, you understand that. Like, I like how you bring that in because it kind of places
00:40:31
Speaker
this song, this song of negation, that's a medieval song and kind of in this trans historical context. So when you talk about Emily tickets in here, it's boasting because it is a provocation to be like to even sing a song about nothing. And then it is boasting to say,
00:40:48
Speaker
undo all these conventions that one would expect, such as you don't know when you're born, I have a woman friend, I don't know who she is. Usually you have a woman friend, I know she is, I can't get to her. So there's all these subtle things that he's playing with.
00:41:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you gave us that lovely, I mean, in the kind of lead up to talking about this poem, you gave us that lovely description of the typical troubadour subject of sort of erotic longing or whatever, where at least the kind of object of desire is named and fixed or something, right? And it's one's access to her that's at issue.
00:41:28
Speaker
But here, even that kind of convention seems obviously to be denied. Since you liked my one trans-historical reference, I'll give you another. And the other thing this reminds me of a little bit, and this is really now in sort of my
00:41:42
Speaker
area of research is like John Berryman and in the dream songs who who's like the sort of conceit of that long poem is also and you know I think songs in that maybe in the troubadour sense he means to he's also of course referring notoriously to the tradition of minstrelsy and of you know blackface performance in the US but
00:42:07
Speaker
But the reason I think of it is because, you know, in the Dream Songs, Berryman says, it isn't me, it's this character Henry, and it isn't even Henry. Henry's asleep, you know? So this idea of the sort of disavowal of agency, like this is just, you know, sort of coming out of me, you can't put this on me, the kind of hand in the face of the reader as a gesture, I think. I'm sort of picking up on the tradition of that.
00:42:42
Speaker
you know, dispossession is something that the troubadours sing of. It's like something's taken away from me and therefore I'll sing and complain about it. And the lady, that inaccessible love object who's not named becomes a pretext of song to sing about oneself and to celebrate oneself, right? But then here, it's like when you use the word disavowal, it's great because towards the end, he really says like, not only disavows, like I don't really, I have a, you know, I saw her, I love her greatly, but then she's not worth anything more than me.
00:43:03
Speaker
And usually, just to rip off of that, usually it's
00:43:11
Speaker
for I know one more gentle and beautiful who is worth more. So there's this idea that you keep negating your game so you can create a space where you can boast, but then also replace it with something else that's better. It's a constant, it's like, you know, it reminds me of what you're saying. It's like deferral of agency, disavowal, but then, but William does, as a boasting song, he fills it in and be like, it doesn't matter. Not only do I not care, but I'll just replace it again with something else. I'll keep this going.
00:43:37
Speaker
Right. And I guess we can imagine all different sort of varieties of that kind of stance that one might take, you know, and like, and I really am thinking of like songs in contemporary songs where, you know, there's like the jilted lover who's like, I don't care, you know, I'm moving on, you know, kind of thing where in some cases that might seem to be
00:44:01
Speaker
a kind of ironic way of licking one's wounds, or a kind of angry song, or boastful song, and here it seems like we have something more like the latter. I'm also interested in what you were describing just a moment ago as this kind of
00:44:20
Speaker
process that happens chronologically where there's the negation and the freedom that's created and the replacing of the object and so forth. And part of what I'm thinking about here is the sort of structure of these stanzas, which as I noted before, like begin with the three rhyming lines and then we get a short
00:44:40
Speaker
line that's unrhymed, at least to us at first it seems unrhymed, a return of the longer rhyme line, and then another short line that rhymes with the earlier short line. My question for you in thinking about things
00:44:57
Speaker
I'm thinking of analogues like, say, the sonnet. You know, I'm trying to pick a kind of familiar sort of form where readers of the sonnet, say the Elizabethan sonnet, know to expect in the couplet a kind of witty turn or in the Petrarchan sonnet know to expect in the Volta kind of
00:45:20
Speaker
argumentative turn on what has come before. I'm trying to figure out the right words to describe, if even you think this is worth investigating, what that metrical pattern
00:45:36
Speaker
sort of corresponds to either tonally or argumentatively within these stances. Do those short lines tend to correspond with deflationary acts or turns of a kind or, you know, what are you noticing about like,
00:45:52
Speaker
what the short lines tend to be associated with or what the typical sort of arc thematically or whatever of one of these six line stanzas is. Yeah. No, it's a good point. I think after the, when you get to the short lines, there's, I think the strong disavowal like, well, I don't care or I don't know any, right?
00:46:21
Speaker
But then, but then he, he trumps it by saying, but it doesn't matter because I'm going to find another one. Like there's usually, or some kind of thing where he's going to replace it and get over that somehow compensate for that disavowal or for that dispossession or something like that. Or, you know, I don't care. But I think because you mentioned the sonnet, one of the things that's important about the troubadours and that these kind of repetitive, you know, you have these, these stanzas and with the same meter repeated,
00:46:50
Speaker
for everyone and it would have been a melody that repeated for each stanza. There's this constant like,
00:46:55
Speaker
maybe a movement of resolution, and then it come back from it, and then it starts again. So something about the sonnet, for instance, in its form, there's the the volta or the turn, but it comes back and creates more of a bounce form, maybe because it's just one, you know, a single sonnet that can exist as that autonomous integer, whereas it can so the ways mechanics work. And I think this is goes right to the heart that it was performed. It's a musical phenomenon, right?
00:47:21
Speaker
that you can keep on going and riff on certain conventions, certain themes. And the only thing that closes, you have a beginning, which is usually a nature opening or some kind of intro. For the love song, the Kanso, it's a nature opening. And at the end, you have what's called a tornada or the envoy or whatever that would have you send off a song. It repeats the meter in the rhymes of the last stanza and then sends it off. So you only have those beginning and ends, but between that, you just kind of repeat certain things.
00:47:52
Speaker
And each stanza has a play on that, of arising or falling in different formations.
00:47:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, I'm noticing how now that you say that, how the first stanza begins, and again, forgive my pronunciation, but farai, and then the last stanza, the same verb, but in a different tense, I take it, right? Fae, right? So, I'm going to make or I'm going to do, I have made, I have done. I have made, right.
00:48:23
Speaker
But but then also something that really caught my ear. And maybe it would be useful if I just read I'll read in English the fourth and fifth stanzas again right now. So here's how they go. I am sick and I am afraid of dying. Yet I know nothing about it except what I hear. I'll search for a doctor to my liking. And now we get the first short line. Yet I don't know any. He will be a good doctor if he can heal me.
00:48:51
Speaker
And then another short line, but not if I worse than the fifth sentence. I have a woman friend, I don't know who she is, for I never saw her, so help me. She never did anything which I like or dislike, first short line, and I don't care. For there was never a Norman or a Frenchman, the next short line, in my lodging. So interestingly, it's like that first short line is like a first kind of
00:49:17
Speaker
like deflationary negation or something. I mean, not that there weren't negations before, but it really does. I mean, I have the image of like somebody pricking a balloon with a pin or something. But then the fact that we get another like a longer line and then the short line again comes in. It's sort of an interesting rhythm. I guess I'm not really adding anything to what you said, but just I wanted people to having heard that really fascinating reading to now.
00:49:46
Speaker
get to hear an example of it. I think he says always playing with our expectations, whether in the negations don't light up, they don't really completely match or within the structure of the stanza between the short, the first short and the second short, you're like, okay, deflationary prick, as you say, I don't know any, he will be a good doctor, but not if I worsen, like kind of, he's playing with that rhythm of like, well, let me get back to, let me have the last word on this. And you don't know what I'm going to say.
00:50:12
Speaker
Right and I think right. I don't know. I don't know if we have time to talk about the last answer which is yeah, which gets to the heart of how he plays with he's playing with everything with the possibility of language of trying to decipher his Okay, textual objects because the two videos were as you say he says I've done the song Right completed my jewel of a song. You're not gonna figure it out I'll send it over to the one who will send it to me over from me through another
00:50:42
Speaker
towards Anju so that she might send me a copy of the key, a copy of the key to her copper. So it's like... Yeah, I get a little confused there, help me, because there's so much sort of, you know, layer upon layer of framing or something. I get a little lost. So what's happening for you in that sequence?
00:51:05
Speaker
I mean, this is a lie. It's like, yeah, why does a liberate like I'll send it over to the one, okay, you think that's maybe that's the lady who he loves or someone who will send it to and for me through another, maybe replacing that former one to with another lady, I don't know, so that she might send me the copy of the key to her copper. So I guess the last one will
00:51:30
Speaker
send back in exchange for his poem a copy of the key to her copper which is could be the key to her body or you can have me or
00:51:39
Speaker
uh, um, her own song. Yeah. Like, you know, but anyway, we were familiar with the ideas of, as a poem or as something to be unlocked. So a copy of, but it's like this fact that he says the copy of the key really, it's like, why not just the key? I don't know. But he's playing with a lot of ideas. It's like kind of a copy of the keys, the same key.
Transmission and Adaptability of Troubadour Songs
00:52:02
Speaker
One, another person, everything's a messenger. Everything kind of like continues in this paratactical, like,
00:52:08
Speaker
versions of the song sent away. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's just kind of why I'm like kind of playing with all these expectations we have about how a song can be transferred, how it can be heard.
00:52:23
Speaker
Can it hold any meaning that everyone understands or no? Maybe it's just about the relation of being transferred one to the other and creating a song that you can't really unlock, but yet can be transferred from one person to another. If it's sufficiently unopened, you can't open it, impenetrable.
00:52:43
Speaker
Oh, I love that, actually. So, I mean, so yeah, I want to spend a little bit more time talking about that final stanza. But in fact, first I want to just back up slightly from it and sort of remember that you said earlier, like, all what the negations kind of make room for a kind of, I don't know, like free play or something, right?
00:53:09
Speaker
So then I think, well, like evacuated of content, then what's left is just like the sound of the voice or something, right? Like voice without content, you know? It's as though like the song doesn't have words, just a melody or something.
00:53:29
Speaker
And so then I think, well, what's the value of that or what's the point of that? I don't know, it's pleasing or something. But this idea that comes in in the last stanza of, actually, I have one kind of factual or sort of gloss, like a request for a gloss here, en jus, toward en jus, what is that?
00:53:52
Speaker
Yeah, this is town. So one of the things that when they mix these references to towns or Norman or Frenchman or things, those places actually exist that they said something to the audience. Like this is one of these kind of deictic tags, like pointing, like everyone knows, like, you know, sending it off to Palo Alto. It's like, okay, that means something to that audience, right, that they know exactly what you're talking about. But it just usually happened to tornada, right?
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah, like that city over there so that she is identified with a certain place, you know. I mean, but does that place have a particular character in the, I don't know, 12th century? Yeah, I mean, I think it was probably a well-known city that's well established and has, but I don't know anything more about it. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, that's good. But what isn't like a small village was definitely
00:54:44
Speaker
So it puts it on a map. I guess one thing that might make us think is, oh, maybe there is a particular lady or something, right? I mean, if he's got, if he's willing, or patron, good, yeah.
00:54:59
Speaker
although he doesn't need a patron, so for someone who he's connected to. But I like what you said about, he kind of evacuates meaning from the language. All we're left is this song that we can't really figure out. It's just a series, a network of negations, but that somehow can be transferred at the end to one to another. Yeah. Well, it sounds like in the kind of
00:55:28
Speaker
in the iterative replicability of the stanzas themselves, now, having read that last stanza again, I'm looking at them like, oh, they all look like keys or something. Or they look like they have the same shape. They seem like copies of each other.
00:55:48
Speaker
I'm thinking, for instance, there's this wonderful early letter that Marianne Moore, the great American modernist poet, writes. She sends it, actually, to someone we've named already, to Ezra Pound, in which she describes her compositional practice. And she says what she does is she'll write
00:56:11
Speaker
she'll write the first stanza of a poem deciding where the line breaks sort of naturally fall. She'll finish the stanza and then she'll just take that form and repeat that as many times as she needs to to get through the opponent. She doesn't necessarily actually always do that but she does and seems like in some poems. And there's this idea that like okay I found the kind of modular form for this
00:56:37
Speaker
text, and now I can repeat it as long as I need to, having fashioned it for the first time, I can keep repeating it. And those do sound to me in a way like, you know, copies of a key or something, you know, that I mean, the stanza shape itself. And then there's also something very moving about, I mean, going all the way back to what you said earlier about the kind of
00:57:05
Speaker
historical fact that these songs weren't written down at all until several generations after they had first been performed.
00:57:18
Speaker
that clearly too relies on a kind of hand-to-hand or mouth-to-mouth kind of transferring. Yeah, transmission, yeah. Yeah, transmission through a set of copies that, I mean, I noticed for instance, like it doesn't seem, at least from talking to you about this one poem, like there's all that much concern or anxiety about like the, any,
00:57:46
Speaker
degradation that happens through that series of transmissions over generations. It seems like, yeah, we're reasonably happy with the texts that we have. There's no like hand wringing about, oh, certain things got smoothed out or altered in the transmission. That also seems sort of generically interesting to me, historically interesting to me.
00:58:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean the idea that so we as modern people like are so fixed a text should be a certain way but you know when you go into pre-modern text they had a certain framework of meters they had as melody and that
00:58:26
Speaker
that they could have played with it, maybe replace certain rhymes or themes. And we do have instances where people are like, well, that negation doesn't make sense there. But for the most part, the text could basically remain malleable as way as a blueprint and stay the same. So when they say, I'll send it over to the one and the other to another,
00:58:48
Speaker
maybe it's like you can imagine might be changed by one word that but in structure stays the same and what I find interesting but send me a copy of the key to her copper what I thought so much about what does that mean like why
00:59:01
Speaker
a copy of the key and what the coffer might mean. To me, it's always like bodily like he wants because he's so like a boastful, sexual, poetic prowess kind of guy. That it's something about an exchange for giving the song that's so impenetrable. She will give me the key that will be able to unlock hers.
00:59:20
Speaker
Uh, but I don't know. Right. Yeah. Right. The impenetrable song, the, the penetrable love object or something. Yeah. And on that note, uh, William the ninth note.
00:59:36
Speaker
In other songs, he always boasts about like, I have my two horses and my two castles and the horses are obviously these women he plays off with each other, which is close to that line. I know one more gentle and beautiful who is worth more. So he's always like, I can have, I exchange one woman with my other. I play them off each other, this kind of control and boasting. Right, right. Oh, that's amazing. This has been such a pleasure. You know, I wonder,
01:00:06
Speaker
If I can ask you, Marisa, I feel like I'm asking too much of you, but listeners have told me that they like it when they hear the poem again at the end of a conversation.
Final Reading and Conclusion
01:00:17
Speaker
Would you be willing to read it again for us? Yeah, sure, in the oxygen. I think so, yeah. Yeah.
01:00:24
Speaker
The one thing I always make my students like, even if they don't know us in, you know, or whatever, they try to read it because they'll find that the words, I say you pronounce every syllable, and you find that the rhythm and the meter just falls into your mouth because of the way it's designed. It's a very good practice. But yeah, every time I read, I'm like, Oh, this is really, you know, deliberately sounds this way. Yeah. Okay. All right, here we go.
01:00:49
Speaker
For the first three years, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough time.
01:01:13
Speaker
We don't have a place to live, we don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live. We don't have a place to live.
01:01:40
Speaker
I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say.
01:02:05
Speaker
Not only do you have a sense of love, but also you have a sense of love. You have a sense of love and a sense of advancement. And you have a sense of love, and you have a sense of love. You have a sense of love, and you have a sense of love, and you have a sense of love, and you have a sense of love, and you have a sense of love, and you have a sense of love.
01:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I know, the counter key. Good, right. Yeah, so that's the translation ends to her coffer, but that's what that sounded like to me, was the key. Yeah, I love that we end with that word in Oxford. The key. Yeah. The counter key.
01:02:48
Speaker
the counter key. What a lovely word to have. Marisa Galvez, I'll do a song about nothing at all, William the Ninth. This has been a real pleasure and an education for me and I'm sure for our listeners. So Marisa, I want to thank you again for taking the time to talk with us about this Troubadour song.
01:03:14
Speaker
You're welcome, and thank you. It's been so much fun. Oh, good. I'm glad you thought so. Listeners, thank you for hanging out with us for the last hour. I hope you'll follow the podcast on whatever service you get your podcasts and leave us a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. Let's spread the good word. It's nice to grow this community when we can, and I will have more for you soon. Be well, everyone.