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Modern-Day Troubadours: Contemporary Literature in the Occitan Languages
IN both theme and form the influence of the troubadours on Western literature and poetry has played a role of incalculable importance. The apogee of their activity is usually placed between 1100 and 1350, the tradition they instigated, however, has not perished and continues to the present day. The troubadours (from the Occitan trobar, 'to invent') were poets to the various courts in southern France. Love, both sexual and courtly, became the hallmark of their compositions and left an indelible mark on our culture. But of even greater import than the evolution of the 'pure love' theme was the fact of their writing in the vernacular. The move away from Latin had tremendous impact and influenced such literary giants as Petrarch and Dante. The language of the troubadours spread far and wide and for a time, a pidgin form of it, known as Sabir, spread by the crusaders, acted as a lingua franca throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.
From medieval times the tongues of France were defined by the affirmative particle, in the north la langue d' oil which later evolved into oui, came from the Latin die, 'that', whereas the southern word for 'yes' in the langue d' oc came from the Latin hoc, 'this'. The dividing line between the two language groups extends from Bordeaux on the Atlantic, following the northern contour of the Massif Central to the Italo-French border and down to the Mediterranean.
The language of the troubadours, often referred to as Provencal, was Occitan; a blanket term which covers the local toponymic variants such as Provencal, Languedocien, Auvergnat, Limusien, Gascon etc. Unlike a mainstream language no single variant came to dominate the others, until, that is, Francien, the oil dialect of the Paris region, became the standard language of the court and subsequently the whole of France.
The rich spectrum of local distinctions and mutations which make up the Occitan languages has given rise to an ample tradition of oral and written literature.
With the publication of the epic poem Mireio in 1859 by the Provencal poet Frederic Mistral (awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1904), and the establishment of the Felibrige movement, a literary association that sought to promote Occitan culture and writing, the revival of a literature in Occitan took on the proportions of a renaissance.
The fate of Occitan in the twentieth century, however, makes for a strange tale of contradictions and vicissitude. Whilst the works of troubadours were studied as a pinnacle of the poetic tradition of France and Mistral hailed as embodying its greatest re-awakening, the living language was systematically vilified. Labelled as patois, a pejorative term which until recently was defined as a language spoken by small rural communities culturally inferior to the mainstream civilization, the various dialects of France were not only barred from being used officially, but the educational system went so far as to punish children who so much as uttered a word in the regional languages within the school precinct. Although since the post-war years Occitan has been reinstated to the status of an important regional language -- it can now be studied and taught at all educational levels -- it is doubtful that anyone born after the 1940s can be said to have Occitan as their true mother tongue: as a language learned in the home environment before the onset of the schooling years.
Philippe Gardy, lecturer in Occitan at the Paul Valery University of Montpellier, has explored the paradox of the survival of Occitan as a vibrant literary language into the second half of this century. His collection of essays L'Ecriture Occitane Contemporaine: Une Quete des Mots (Contemporary Occitan Writing: a quest for words), 1996, gives an excellent analysis of the themes and word-makers who have shaped the spoken language into a written diction full of vigour and originality.
If a literature in Occitan continues to enjoy a lively publishing activity it is partially due to those writers who struggled to keep it alive through the years when it seemed doomed to perish. Among the older generation three voices stand out for their originality and diversity of approaches.
Among contemporary voices, Robert Lafont (born in Nimes in 1923) is a maverick figure whose output is as vast as it is varied. His writings cover a wide spectrum of genres in both literary and academic fields ranging from poetry and fiction to history and political pamphlets. As an activist for the Occitan cause and a long-time teacher of Occitan at the University of Montpellier, not only has he encouraged the younger generations to reclaim their cultural heritage but he has also challenged the conservative approach which would see contemporary Occitan relegated to the status of a quaint folkloristic voice.
If until mid this century Occitan literature was largely confined to poetry, Lafont's first novel Vida de Joan Larsinhac (life of John Larsinhac), a chronicle of the war and the Resistance published in 1951, opened the way for fiction. With distinctive penchant Lafont has steadily broadened the narrative genre in Occitan to include philosophical tales: Te Tu Te leu (to you to me) 1968; a science-fiction novel of a post-nuclear world: L'Icona dins l'Iscla (the icon in the isle) 1971; a detective novel (Tua Culpa, 1974); and La Festa (the feast) 1983-1996, a trilogy of labyrinthine proportion which spans the continent and the centuries.
The Occitan of Lafont, a Provencal bordering on Languedocien but redefined and altered by the author, has strong affinities with the Mediterranean and is best illustrated by his latest publication La Gacha a la Cisterna/Le Guetteur a la Citerne (the look-out at the cistern), 1998, an epic poem of over 2600 lines.
As Lafont's lookout keeps watch over the cistern, a tank for gathering precious water in an often arid region, from it emerge words and memories: the massacres propagated in the name of god(s); the celebrations and atrocities of human(s); and finally, inner and outer space(s).
La Gacha, written in a tumultuous and fierce language rich in metaphors of sea, wine, olive groves and wheat, is reminiscent, in theme, to sirventes, a poetic form employed by the troubadours to criticize the moral or political state of the world.
The rigourous rhyming scheme which Lafont developed for his poem, however, was directly inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy with which it also shares a tripartite form. The effect of the troubadours was of tremendous importance in Dante's work thus, with La Gacha, the influence of the troubadours has come full circle.
At 90 Max Rouquette is still fully alert, indeed his eyes sparkle with mischief. Born in 1908 in Argelliers, a small Languedoc village surrounded by a landscape of Mediterranean oaks, vineyards and garrigues; the waste lands of spiky scrub and limestone that imperceptibly dissolve into a desert-scape where light becomes a predominant element, Rouquette has been actively writing a chronicle of the landscape and its people since the 1920s.
Although every contemporary Occitan writer is indebted to Frederic Mistral for having revived the troubadour tradition, Rouquette is adamant that the model he set up had to be overcome in order to avoid that same revival stagnating into countless imitations of Mistral.
D'aici Mil Ans de Lutz/A Mille Annees-lumiere (a thousand light-years hence), 1995, a collection of poems, delineates the themes that are central to Max Rouquette's work. Nature, inhabited or left vacant by the presence and struggle of man and his destiny. The opening poem, E Quand Seria? .... echoes the question imposed by the title:
E Quand Seria?...
E quand seria?... lo caminet espera
Jos los sambucs, los fraisses e las blacas.
Jos l' ala viva dels aucels
de jos la passa de las nivols,
de la tenebra, e mai dels jorns.
Ges de patz non i tinda pas.
A delembrat
lo pas de l'ome e de son ombra
L'ome s'es enanat un cop per totes.
E dins l'ombra muda dels olmes e dels sambucs
Podia pas qu'i daissar son ombra.
Perduda entre erba rasa e bauca;
beguda per las peiras dau camin.
Esvanida? o! sai que non: mesclada
a l'erba e qu'arresta pas dins lo riu de la saba
d'enaigar, en sa lutz, la branca dels aucels.
And When Will it Be?...
And when will it be?... the path awaits.
Under the elder, the ash and the oak.
Under the live wings of birds
and under the passage of clouds,
of the tenebrous, and of days also.
Naught of the peace no resounding step.
T'is forgotten
the step of man and his shadow
Man is gone once and for all.
And in the mute shadow of the elms and the elders
Could not but leave his shadow.
Lost between level grass and wild-oats;
drunken by the stones of the path.
Passed-out? oh! certainly not: mingled
to the grass that never stops in the flux of its sap
to suffuse, in its light, the birds' branch.
Simplicity combined with attention to minute details is the hallmark of Max Rouquette's work in which time and again he uses the blade of grass as a signature.
Since the early 1930s Rouquette's prose has consisted of brief texts that defy categorisation. Admixture of diary, tales, sketches and childhood reminiscences, they have been grouped together over the years under the same ambiguous title of Verd Paradis (paradise green), to date there are five volumes. A comprehensive selection of the first two volumes has been translated and published as 'Green Paradise' (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1995). Possibly the only work by a contemporary Occitan writer to be translated into English, it reflects, along with Rouquette's poetry, his mastery of what the troubadours called the trobar leu style, the easily comprehensible.
From the Gascogne Landes, south of Bordeaux, hails a poet whose language sticks to the palate. Well nigh incomprehensible to French speakers and most southern Occitan speakers, Bernard Manciet's language belongs to the trobar clus style, the hermetic tradition.
Born in 1923 in Sabres, Manciet has recorded his native town in a unique fashion. L'Enterrament a Sabres (burial in Sabres), 1989, a poem of some 5000 verses, is rightly regarded as his major work. In presenting this work, Manciet has written of the Landes (the word, apart from that region between Bordeaux and Bayonne on the Atlantic ocean, also designates heaths, moors, dunes and other barren tracts of land). Bernard Manciet writes (in French) on the jacket of L'Enterrament a Sabres:
There (on the Landes) subsist, be aware of it, a horde scoffed by history. I will treat it better, I will give it myth. They speak, it is said, a language of brutes, inadmissible. I want to make it sing. Considered as lost, dead, along with their tongue, their customs, their beliefs; I will bury them, but I will bury them alive.
Written in the dark Gascon of Sabres, and published, as with most poetry in Occitan, with a French translation by the author, L'Enterrament a Sabres is a mighty requiem of tenacious and majestic tones that has the power to resuscitate the language and the people it mourns.
The poetry of Manciet, both in L'Enterrament a Sabres and in his sonnets (Sonets/Sonnets, 1996) is difficult. Its hermeticism need not be excused or glossed over; in the end process the trobar leu and the trobar clus, the open and the closed style, reach out towards the same sublimation of language, revealing the deeper, profound elements of the everyday.
Writing in a regional language offers a unique opportunity. One that cannot be easily shared by the mainstream tongue, which by widespread use, if not abuse, falls with ease into the banal. Occitan literature might be confined to a small readership but the fact that each village can be said to have moulded its language to the contour of its environment, gives it the ever-present vibrancy of a language newly discovered, a language where the process of creating and exploring new forms and rhythms is a constant force.
The release, in 1997, of a Bernard Manciet compact disc (Aura Productions, Montpellier) offers a unique opportunity to listen to Manciet read. The guttural spirant (a gradual or sudden expulsion of breath), characteristic of Gascon, is accentuated by Manciet in a breath-taking orchestration of sound and meaning. To hear the author read his prose and poetry is to be transported into a unique realm where language becomes a palpable experience. It is best described by the subtitle of the proceedings of a conference held in Bordeaux in 1992 on the author (published by the Centre d'Etude de la Litterature Occitane and William Blake & Co., Bordeaux 1996), Bernard Manciet: Le feu est dans la langue, the fire is in the tongue, an apt phrase to describe the survival of the ancient language of the Troubadours.
Bib. note:
At the time of publication most of the Occitan material mentioned in this article could be obtained from: Institut d'Estudis Occitans (institute for Occitan studies): IDECO B.P. 6, F-81700 Puylaurens, Occitanie -- France
Web site: http://www-sv.cict.fr/oc/ieo/ideco
Aura Productions: Web site: http:www.chez.com/aura
Editions Jorn 38 rue de la Dysse, F-34150 Montpeyroux, France.
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