Cantigas - (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation) by Richard Zenith (Paperback)

About the Book

"Cantigas are lyric poems in Galician-Portuguese, a language of the Iberian Peninsula, written and performed during the 13th and early 14th centuries. They are divided into three major genres: cantigas de amigo (songs in the voice of women), cantigas de amore (courtly love songs in the voice of men), and cantigas de escarho e mal dizer (joke and insult poetry). The cantigas de amigo, thought to be inspired by popular and indigenous women's songs, represent the largest body of woman-voiced poetry in Europe, although the surviving compositions are attributed to male poets. In this book, the award-winning translator Richard Zenith has revised, expanded, and retitled a volume of cantigas he first published in 1995, in the UK only, with Carcanet Press (113 Galician Portuguese Troubadour Poems, now OP). The new book includes 122 cantigas, including several new translations, with the original text on facing pages, and a new introduction to provide background and context"--

Book Synopsis

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 escárnio 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.

Review Quotes

"

This edition will bring this considerably large lyric corpus to the attention of a much wider circle of readers. It is a volume that deserves to be in the library of every medievalist.

"---Josiah Blackmore, Speculum

"Zenith is to be congratulated for an authoritative, attractive and highly readable presentation of these songs to a twenty-first-century anglophone audience."---David Frier, Times Literary Supplement

"Delightful. . . . A bilingual volume that reveals an intriguing world of courtly love and satire in medieval Portugal and Spain."-- "Portuguese American Journal"

"These cantigas, in Zenith's hands, remind me that a poetry's message is its music."---Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"Zenith helps provide a roadmap to appreciate some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the medieval language while also allowing himself the freedom to interpret the cantigas without a priority for overly literal translation. . . . Zenith's phrasing conveys the love-sickness, anguish, jealousy, danger and fear that pulse through the original poems."---Jacob Abell, Reading in Translation

About the Author

Richard Zenith, the author of Pessoa: A Biography, is a prolific translator of Portuguese and Brazilian poets and writers.