Cantiga de amigo

Cantiga de amigo - Cantiga d'amigo in the spelling of medieval manuscripts - literally means friends song and is a popular old Galician-Portuguese cantiga , a woman's or girl's song . Most of the texts are written before 1300. They come from a time when present-day Galicia and Portugal were politically one.

Formal elements and literary motif

Cantigas de amigo are old Galician-Portuguese women's songs , the continuous literary motif of which are the plaintive questions of a girl who longs for her lover. The questions are aimed at the absent friend, mother, friend or the forces of nature (as in the text example below). The content and formal elements of this form of song, repetitions and parallelisms, are extremely simple. The stanzas are three lines and often one verse differs from the other only in one word. The tormenting question returns in the third line as a refrain, thus reinforcing the expression of unfulfilled longing.

The strophic form of the leixa-pren is typical of this type of poetry :

“The leixa-pren as a process of strophic articulation is of extraordinary importance in the parallelistic construction of the galaeco-Portuguese school, especially in the Cantiga de amigo, which is more closely linked to popular tradition . Usually it operates on a distich with a refrain line. The second stanza repeats the text of the first, except for the rhyming words, due to a change in the word order or by synonymic substitution; the third stanza begins with the repetition of the second verse of the first and ends with a newly created rhyming one, the fourth stanza does the same operation with the second verse of the second, and so on, a maximum of eight stanzas long, each stanza referring to the Refrain opens. "

- Roman Jakobson : Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry. All poetry analyzes.

These formal poetic tricks give the linguistically simple Cantigas de amigo their strong magical-suggestive effect.

Text example: Ondas do mar de Vigo

The Cantiga de amigo Ondas do mar de Vigo comes from the Cancionero (song collection) of the Galician trobador Martim Codax (13th century):

Ondas do mar de Vigo

Ondas do mar de Vigo,
Se vistes meu amigo?
E ay Deus, se verrá cedo?

Ondas do mar levado,
Se vistes meu amado?
E ay Deus, se verrá cedo?

Se vistes meu amigo
O por que eu sospiro?
E ay Deus, se verrá cedo?

Se vistes meu amado
Por que ey gran coydado?
E ay Deus, se verrá cedo!

Wilhelm Storck has this cantiga de amigo freely into German nachgedichtet :

Vain questions

In the Vigo Sea you walls
Did you see the journeyman?
Oh God that he was coming soon!

In the Vigo Sea you floods
Did you see the proud?
Oh God that he was coming soon!

Did you see the journeyman?
I look in all places
Oh God, that he would come soon!

Did you see the arrogant?
My heart wants to bleed to death
Oh God, he's coming soon!

Relationship of the Cantigas to the old Spanish Hargas

→ Main article : Chardscha

This early form of Ibero-Romanic poetry is reminiscent of the Mozarabic Chardschas (Spanish 'Jarcha') from the Moorish al-Ándalus (11th century). The hargas are also 'girl songs' and form the highlight of the Arabic and Hebrew muwashshah poetry. Like the Cantigas de amigo , the Jarchas are composed with the same conciseness and folk-toned immediacy.

An example of this is a Harga from a Muwassaha by the Sephardic poet Jehuda ha-Levi , a poem of praise ( Panegyrikus ) for Abu Ibrahim ben Mahagir (11th century). It has been handed down as an Aljamiado text , which means that the old Spanish verses are not represented in Latin letters, but in Hebrew consonant script.

Here first the revocalized transcription of the text after the edition of the Spanish Arabist and Romanist Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes:

Garre, si yes devina
e devinas bi-l-haqq,
garr-me: ¿Cánd me vernad
mon habibi Ishaq?

Translation of the old Spanish text into modern Spanish:

Di, si eres adivina
y adivinas con certeza,
dime: ¿Cuándo me vendrá
mi amigo Ishaq?

Translation to German:

Say, if you are a fortune teller
and prophesy correctly,
tell me: When will
my friend Isaac come to me?

This motif and linguistic-formal relationship between the Hargas and the Cantigas de amigo supports the thesis that the Arab and Hebrew poets from al-Ándalus were inspired by pre-existing, independent Romance folk songs when creating their Hargas.

Web links

• Sung version by Ondas do mar de Vigo from: Johannes Kabatek: Las lenguas de España II Historia del gallego. University of Tübingen winter semester 2005-2006. (PDF; 1.92 MB)

literature

• Dámaso Alonso: Cancioncillas de amigo mozárabes. Primavera temprana de la lírica europea. In: Revista de Filología Española. 33, 1949, pp. 297-349.
• Samuel G. Armistead: Kharjas and Villancicos. In: Journal of Arabic Literature. Volume 34, Numbers 1/2, 2003, pp. 3-19, ( JSTOR 4183474 excerpt).
• Rip Cohen: 500 Cantigas d'amigo: a critical edition. ( jscholarship.library.jhu.edu ).
• Celso Ferreira da Cunha: O Cancionero de Martín Codax. Rio de Janeiro, 1956 ( cervantesvirtual.com in full).
• Thomas Cramer (Ed.): Women's songs - Cantigas de amigo. Hirzel S. Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-7776-1022-4 .
• Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes: Las jarchas mozárabes y la tradición lírica romanica. In: Pedro M. Piñero Ramírez (ed.): Lírica popular, lírica tradicional: lecciones en homenaje a Don Emilio García Gómez. Universidad de Sevilla 1998, ISBN 84-472-0434-0 , pp. 28–53 ( limited preview in Google book search).
• Ingrid Kasten: Women's songs from the Middle Ages. Bilingual. Reclams Universal Library 8630, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-15-008630-2 .
• Henry R. Lang: The Songbook of King Denis of Portugal. Georg Olms, Halle 1892 ( limited preview in Google book search).
• Pilar Lorenzo Gradín: La canción de mujer en la lírica medieval. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela 1990, ISBN 84-7191-641-X .
• Ramón Menéndez Pidal: Cantos Románicos Andalusíes, continuadores de una lírica latina vulgar. In: Boletín Real Academia Española, 31, 1951, pp. 187-270.

Footnotes

1. ^ Roman Jakobson: Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry. All poetry analyzes. 2 volumes. Gruyter Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-018362-7 , p. 430 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
2. ↑ Ondas do mar de Vigo - The cantiga in the annotated full text from: Celso Ferreira da Cunha: O Cancionero de Martin Codax. Rio de Janeiro, 1956.
3. ^ Wilhelm Storck : Hundred old Portuguese songs . 1885, No. 65, p. 70
4. ↑ Alma Wood Rivera: Las jarchas mozárabes: Una compilación de lecturas . Diploma thesis 1969. Jarcha N ° 2 ( Memento of the original from October 2, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes: Las jarchas mozárabes. Forma y significado . Barcelona: Crítica, 1994, ISBN 84-7423-667-3 , p. 38 and p. 190.
6. ↑ Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes: Las jarchas mozárabes y la tradición lírica romanica. In: Pedro M. Piñero Ramírez (ed.): Lírica popular, lírica tradicional: lecciones en homenaje a Don Emilio García Gómez. Universidad de Sevilla 1998, ISBN 84-472-0434-0 , pp. 28–53 ( limited preview in Google book search).