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Old Provençal ab so que Introducing a Main Clause

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Kurt Lewent*
Affiliation:
New York, N. Y.

Extract

Giraut de Bornelh liked to discuss the question of whether a poet should make the products of his muse understandable to everybody (trobar leu), or adhere to a more obscure, hermetic type of poetry accessible only to a few adepts (trobar clus). In none of his poems is he so positive about the preferability of a simple style as in the well-known tenso with Linhaure and the song A penas sai comensar (Gr. 242,11; ed. Kolsen, No. 4). It is probably the latter that caused his princely interlocutor to start a poetical controversy on this topic with the troubadour, the above-named tenso. In fact, three stanzas of Gr. 242,11 deal with this problem. It is the third of them that interests us here, because it contains the phrase ab so que. It runs thus in Kolsen's edition:

      Ja, pos volrai clus trobar,
      no cut aver man parer
      3 ab so que ben ai mester
      a far una leu chanso;
      qu'eu cut c'atretan grans sens
      6 es, qui sap razo gardar,
      com los motz entrebeschar.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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