The Poems of the Troubador Bertran de Born. ed. William D. Paden, Jr., Tilde Sankovitch and Patricia H. Stablein. University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1986.
Dates: born c. 1150, died c. 1215 (19)
Eldest son, inherited father's lands 1178. Wrote first surviving, datable poem, a sirventes ( satire) in 1181 in which he boasted of being a poet of war (19)
"The art of Bertran de Born springs from an obsession with conflict and a drive to master conflict by an act of will." (33)
"For Bertran war functions as a source and emblem of moral value. [...] For Bertran it is the ideal of war which upholds the secular virtues of the age, demanding that a knight be courageous, generous, courtly and slightly mad; a prince must display the same qualities in order to direct society to its proper goal. [...] The precise violence of war produces a well-formed death, a monument to the moral achievement of victor and vanquished alike." (34)
But this is an ideal, not the real... "even there [the imagery] is characteristically removed from full realization by being expressed as a possibility, in the conditional tense, or as a hope, in the future tense. The martial panorama in poem 30 springs from the poet's imagination - Be'm plai lo gais temps de pascor, "The gay time of spring pleases me well"; whether he describes factual events which please him, or the pleasure which he takes in the thoughts of events he has imagined, one cannot say." (35)
"Bertran's pervasive allusions to the chansons de geste [author has given examples of battle imagery previously] not only enrich the diction and heroic sense of his work, but also, as an index of literary self-consciousness, situate his art within the mythic space of epic." (40)
But "Unlike the epic poet who sings blindly of the glorious past, Bertran speaks as a satirist who engages in continuous self-conscious scrutiny of the present. Because of the structuring role of the speaker's voice, which distinguishes his discourse from that of the epic, it was inevitable that Bertran de Born should employ lyric form." (43)
"It was apparently Bertran, in the absence of earlier known cases who first practiced the kind of structural imitation which was to become one of the notable characteristics of the troubador lyric as an art-form. [...] The verbal elements of such structural imitation were three: the abstract rhyme scheme, the number of syllables in each line, and the particular rhyme sounds. These three imply a fourth dimension of the song, the melody; by adopting the three verbal elements of his model's structure the poet assured that his words would fit the model's music. However, while we can easily compare any surviving poems with respect to rhyme scheme, syllable count, and rhymes, melodic transcriptions have survived for only about 10 percent of the extant troubador compositions, so that it is rarely possible for us to verify in detail that structural imitation extended to the melody." (45)
"Bertran's key innovations were two: it was he who first used the same rhyme sounds as he found in his model, thus developing the principle of imitation to the full; and it was he who freed imitation for thematic constraint by restricting it to the purely formal dimension. The latter innovation was a crucial preliminary step towards the development of such fixed forms as the sonnet." (45-46)
This song (a sirventes) appears to follow a canso (it was usually the case that the sirvente would be modeled on a canso, not the other way around) but we can't date the canso in question. (47)
"Bertran was instrumental in the creation of several minor but hardy genres. The enueg, or enumeration of annoyances, with its complement the plazer, or enumeration of pleasures, was invented by the Monk of Montaudon, but the Monk was probably inspired by Bertran's antithesis of annoyance and delight, developed in such poems as 6, 13, 24 through 28, 30 and 40. [B'em plai is 30.] [...] Bertran's plazer de guerra, poem 30, must have contributed particularly to the creation of the Monk's more general plazer." (66)
Poem dates to 1184-1188 (325)
"The attribution of this song to Bertran cannot be regarded as certain, since the MSS are far from unanimous. Yet we judge him the most probably author of the whole poem, as have all earlier editors, and accordingly we consider him the probably author of the stanzas on love (6, 7, 8), which are included in only a few MSS and earlier editions. [Wilhelm does not translate these.]
The inclusion of these stanzas changes the poem from an ode to war into a celebration of elan in war and in love, themes that intertwine throughout Bertran's work. Both are implicit in the first stanza, which transforms the sentimental delicacy of the conventional spring setting into martial vigor." (334)
"Perhaps imitated from Guiraut de Borneill" (335)
"Melody: Preserved with two other poems in the same metrical form: with the supposed original and source of our transcription in Guiraut de Borneill 242,51 No pose sofrir, MS R 82; and in a slightly different version, with Peire Cardenal 335,7 Ar mi posc, MS R 72." (335)
MS R is "Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 15211"
Music is given on pages 495-498 as staffless noteheads. No barlines are given, nor meter. Notes are tied to show melismas.
