Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems ed. by Richard Zenith (review)
2023; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 106; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/hpn.2023.a913722
ISSN2153-6414
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Iberian Studies
ResumoReviewed by: Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems ed. by Richard Zenith Silvia Oliveira Zenith, Richard, editor and translator. Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems. Princeton UP, 2022. Pp. 363. ISBN 9780691179407. Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems by Richard Zenith is a bilingual edition in Galician-Portuguese and English, of 124 troubadour poems (cantigas) dated from the 12th to the 14th centuries and expressed in the dominant language of those centuries, Galego-Português, in northwestern Iberian Peninsula—comprising today's northern Portugal and the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain. American-Portuguese critic and translator of Portuguese and Brazilian poetry and prose, Richard Zenith, is a renowned Pessoano whose Pessoa: A Biography (2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography; and whose Fernando Pessoa & Co.—Selected Poems (1998) won the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In 2006, Zenith was the winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translation of Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto's Educação pela Pedra (1966): Education by Stone: Selected Poems (2005). In Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems Zenith returns to the corpus of his first bilingual edition of 113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems (1995), now expanded to 124 [End Page 697] poems. Over 300 pages of poetry in bilingual parallel text provide a visually pleasant reading experience and require none of the readerly dexterity that is necessary for appreciating critical editions of the troubadour poetry. Zenith's translations omit all critical apparatus within the space of the poem in the page, and assign only nine pages to endnotes, seven pages for short biographical information on the poets, and three pages for selected critical bibliography. Zenith's approach to translating the Galician-Portuguese troubadour poems (a corpus of 1680 cantigas registered in three Cancioneiros—Ajuda, Biblioteca Nacional and Biblioteca Vaticana) echoes the Azorean poet and editor Natália Correia's 1970 defense of poetic interpretations of the cantigas, in order to sustain the intensity of passion of the poems in a readerly text for a 20th century reader (and beyond) whose cultural heritage the poems reflect. Natália Correia's beautiful Cantares dos Trovadores Galego-Portugueses (Lisboa: Estampa, 1970) is a parallel text edition of 70 cantigas rendered in modern Portuguese—an accomplishment arguably only possible by a great poet. The challenge, for Zenith, of translating these poems into English, a language with a different cultural heritage from the departure text, was "to make them simply sing" (3), for "[w]hen translating a poem, one must first identify where the poetry is" (3), and in the cantigas "the poetry clearly resides in their formal aspects—meter, rhyme, musical repetitions, and so forth" (3). Zenith's poetic achievement is well illustrated in the rendition of Meendinho's famous cantiga below, particularly in the chorus: 67. MEENDINHOcantiga de amigo Sedia-m'eu na ermida de San Simionecercaron-mi as ondas, que grandes son.Eu atendendo meu amig', eu atendendo. Estando na ermida ant'o altarecercaron-mi as ondas grandes do mar.Eu atendendo meu amig', eu atendendo. … . (200) 67. MEENDINHOSong of a Girl Still Waiting Sitting in the chapel of San Simón,soon I was surrounded by the rising ocean,waiting for my lover, still waiting. Before the altar of the chapel, waiting,soon I was surrounded by the ocean's waves,waiting for my lover, still waiting. … . (201) The descriptive titles added by Zenith to each one of the 124 cantigas of this edition are a departure from the traditional critical edition approach of categorizing each cantiga by their genre (cantiga de amor, cantiga de amigo, cantiga de escárnio, cantiga de mal dizer; and also, the sub-genres tençon, serventês, cantiga de amor de meestria, cantiga de amor de refran, etc.). The titles summarize the thematic content of each cantiga to the benefit of a wider readership in the 21st century not necessarily conversant with this poetic tradition and its conventions. Zenith's source for the poems is itself the most complete philological and critical editorial project to date, the online database titled Cantigas Medievais Galego-Portuguesas coordinated by Graça...
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