The Influence of Troubadour Poetry on Iberian Lyricism
Cultured Primitive Lyric: Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Arabic-Hebrew. The lyric learned in Catalan during the 12th century emerged in Provence, where troubadour poetry influenced Catalonia in the following century. This poetry is reflected in almost 100 songbooks. The troubadour poetic character was created by known authors and expressed in a homogeneous language. It was cultivated by trovadores, whose songs were performed by minstrels. These interpreters were required to be very loyal to the texts. The poetry ought to have consonant rhyme, and the most common stanza length was 8 verses with the same rhymes.
Types of Provençal Poetry:
- Tired: A composition of love, always male to female, reflecting feudal ideology.
- Sirventes: A composition used as a form of expression of anger or personal attack.
The Conception of Courtly Love: Love was seen as the art of courtesy and understood as a service to the lady, considered a superior being.
Galician-Portuguese Love: This love excelled in the western peninsula during the 13th and 14th centuries. The influence of troubadour poetry was seen through other routes, such as the pilgrims walking the path of Santiago. The poetic tradition inherited from Provence depicts a man going to a lady. In terms of love, the joy of loving becomes a torment. Additionally, this includes a songbook of ridicule, composed of two types of compositions: mocking songs and cursing, as well as religious songs, such as the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a work of King Alfonso X the Wise, which lyrically praises the Virgin.
Arabic and Hebrew Poetry: In the 10th and 11th centuries in Al-Andalus, two kinds of stanzas emerged: the zejel and muwassaha. The fundamental theme is love, often with homosexual undertones. The muwassaha was written in classical Arabic, with the last stanza ending in a verse written in Arabic dialect called jarcha. The zejel was written in Arabic dialect and lacked a jarcha.
The Original Lyrical Folk:
- Jarcha: These closed lines, known as moaxajas, were composed in Arabic, Hebrew, or vulgar Romandalusí. They mostly consist of 4 verses, especially hexasyllabic and octosyllabic, with consonant rhyme. The rhyming is almost always full of love: the love a young emissary expresses their suffering to their mother, sisters, or friends in an environment characterized by simplicity. A characteristic feature is the mention of the beloved through the substantive habib (friend).
- Cantigas de Amigo: In Galician-Portuguese, muxaxos express love, conveying feelings of pain due to the death or absence of the beloved. Nature becomes extremely important to identify the poetic context, as the speaker asks for their friend’s usual verse.
- Carols: In Castilla, cults are composed of poems whose opening lines are called carols, and the rest of the composition is a glosa. The common theme is love, where a girl laments her situation. In rural contexts, water acquires importance, and common motifs include the hair of the young and flowers. The carols often lack adjectives, with verbs predominating, and they feature diminutives, hortatory and optative sentences, repetitions, and parallels.
Great Poets: Notable figures include Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, and Juan de Mena in the first half of the 15th century, followed by Jorge Manrique. Santi M. formed at the court of Alfonso Aragon, focusing on moral cultivation, poetry, politics, and allegorical narrative. His production highlights the serranillas, which chronicles the encounter between a knight and a shepherdess, and attempts to Castilianize the Italian sonnet. Juan de Mena is known for his love ballads with an intellectual tone and artful style, with his most notable work being The Maze of Fortune, dedicated to King John II. This long poem uses dodecasyllabic verses, complicating syntax and vocabulary while introducing names and lists of authors.