Fatrasia

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Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal , Paris, manuscript no.3114

Fatrasia and the resulting Fatras are medieval forms of nonsense poetry that appeared in France from the 13th century.

Fatrasia

The fatrasia consists of eleven verses that are rhymed according to the scheme aab aab babab . The first six verses had five, the last five to seven syllables. The first examples included the anonymous Fatrasies d'Arras , a 13th century collection of fifty-five poems preserved in a single manuscript. A second corpus consists of the eleven Fatrasias of Philippe de Beaumanoir .

The name Fatrasie goes back to the Latin words farcire (stuffing) and farsura (filling), from which the farce also originates, but a corruption of fantasy is also suspected (from Greek-Latin phantasma / phantasia ).

Everything that happens in the fatrasia has to be "impossible" or "unreasonable". The rigid laws of time and space are abolished, objects, animals and people perform a grotesque dance. The lyrical and the delicate can be found alongside the rough and the obscene, the barriers between the high and the low are deliberately abolished. The poems rank nonsense and absurdities ( paradoxes , oxymora ), their aim is to arouse amazement, confusion and laughter. They are an expression of the “upside down world”, the “carnivalistic” laughing culture in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin .

Fatras

In the 14th century, the genre was further developed into Fatras ( French: fatras "Plunder, mess"), primarily by Watriquet Brassenel de Couvin (around 1325), of which thirty Fatras, some of which are obscene and scatological, have been preserved. The Fatras follows the rhyme scheme [AB AabaabbabaB], ie there are now 13 verses. First a lyrical two-line line is prefixed as sweetly and kitschy as possible, followed by the actual Fatras, which still consists of 11 verses. Thereby 9 verses are inserted between the two verses of the two-liner, which parody the content of the distich through comical contrasts.

An example from the Fatras Watriquet de Couvins:

Doucement me reconforte
Celle qui mon cueur a price.
Doucement me reconforte
Une chate a moitié morte
Qui chante touz les jeudis
Une alleluye si forte
Que li clichés de nos porte
Dist que siens est li lendis,
S'en fu us leus si hardis
Qu'il ala, maugré sa variety,
Tuer Dieu en paradis,
Et dist: «Compains, je t'aporte
Celle qui mon cuer a price. »
Gently comforts and encourages me
You who captured my heart.
Gently comforts and encourages me
a half-dead cat,
so loud every Thursday
a hallelujah sings,
that the handle on our door
says that monday belongs to you
and a wolf came here so daring
that he was against his will
jumped off to kill God in paradise
and said: "Buddy, I'll bring you
You who conquered my heart. "
A.
B.
A.
a
b
a
a
b
b
a
b
a
B.

In the 15th century a distinction is made between the “impossible”, irrational Fatras and the “possible”, which now mainly conveys religious and edifying themes. Baudet Herenc ( Doctrinal de la Seconde Rhétorique , 1432) and Jean Régnier (1432/33) are the last representatives of the irrational Fatras, which followed the original celebration of nonsense.

The French surrealists valued this form of poetry, even if few examples were known in their epoch. Paul Éluard included some samples in his First Living Anthology of Poetry of the Past ( Première Anthologie vivante de la poésie du passé , 1951), Jacques Prévert named one of his volumes of poetry Fatras (1966). One of the roots of modern poetry and absurd literature was suspected to be in the fatrasia and the fatras ( see Ralph Dutli , 2010).

Settings

In 2011/2012 the song cycle “Neuf fatrasies” for soprano and piano (duration approx. 20 minutes) by the young German composer Johannes X. Schachtner was created . The setting, which particularly emphasizes the bizarre, dramatic and out-of-the-way elements, is firmly anchored in contemporary musical vocabulary, but without foregoing historical allusions. The cycle was premiered by Monika Lichtenegger and Rudi Spring.

literature

  • Lambert C. Porter: La fatrasie et le fatras . Geneva 1960
  • Martijn Rus: The fatrasy: a little unknown to the French nonsense poetry of the Middle Ages . In: Th.Stemmler, Stefan Horlacher (ed.): Sense in nonsense . Tübingen 1997, pp. 43-56
  • Patrice Uhl: La constellation poétique du non-sens au moyen age: Onze études sur la poésie fatrasique et ses environs . Paris 2000
  • Sylvie Mougin, Marie-Geneviève Grossel (eds.): Poésie et rhetorique du non-sens. Littérature médiévale, littérature oral . Reims 2004
  • Gisela Febel: Poesia ambigua or from the alphabet to the poem. Aspects of the development of modern French poetry in the grands rhétoriqueurs . Habilitation thesis. Frankfurt 2001
  • Poésies you non-sens. XIIIe-XIVe-XVe siècles. Tome I: Fatrasies. Fatrasies de Beaumanoir. Fatrasies d'Arras. Edited, translated and commented by Martijn Rus. Orléans 2005
  • Ralph Dutli : In sleep we make the pancake out of nothing . At the end of the thirteenth century, Surrealism was invented in the northern French city of Arras. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Pictures and Times, July 17, 2010, No. 163, p. Z3
  • Ralph Dutli: Fatrasia. Absurd poetry of the Middle Ages . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010 (includes - old French and German - the anonymous Fatrasias from Arras, the Fatrasias from Philippe de Beaumanoir, the Fatras from Watriquet Brassenel de Couvin, Anonymus, Baudet Herenc and Jean Régnier).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dutli: Fatrasien 2010, p. 111
  2. ↑ Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal , Paris, manuscript No. 3114
  3. ^ Bibliothèque nationale de France , Man. fr. No. 1588
  4. ↑ Dutli: Fatrasien 2010, p. 112
  5. ↑ Dutli: Fatrasien 2010, p. 122
  6. ^ French text and translation from Dutli: Fatrasien 2010, p. 79
  7. ↑ Johannes X. Schachtner's “Gretchen im Zwinger” and “Neuf fatrasies” are premiered. sikorski.de/, accessed on April 23, 2013 .