Le néant et la joie - Guillem d'Aquitaine

Le néant et la joie - Chansons de Guillaume d'Aquitaine

Nothingness and Joy - Songs of Guillaume d'Aquitaine


Introduction and translation of Katy Bernard


Guillaume, Guillem in the language of his songs, the occitan language, is the seventh count of Poitiers and the ninth duke of Aquitaine. He is the grandfather of Alienor, the great-grandfather of Richard the Lionheart and John the Groundless, the ancestor of Louis IX (called St. Louis). He is also the first troubadour of history.

The troubadour prince, the first troubadour, experimented with many poetic paths: farewell song, singing song, song of love, song of pure nothingness. These multiple experiments of the duke, finally, constitute less a contrasted and paradoxical origin of the trobar than its most beautiful syncretism.


Eleven songs remain of him. They make us travel, between fin'amor and paillise, farce and renunciation, joy and nothingness, in a universe with facets at the heart of which imposes the atypical personality of this great lord singer with the spirit of avant-garde.

Extract:
Farai un vers de dreit nien :
Non er de mi ni d’autra gen,
Non er d’amor ni de joven,
Ni de ren au,
Qu’enans fo trobatz en dormen
Sus un chivau.

           Je fais un chant de pur néant :
           Il n’est de moi ni de nul autre,
           Il n’est d’amour ni de jeunesse,
           Ni de rien d’autre,
           Puisqu’il fut trouvé en dormant
           Sur un cheval.

           I make a song of pure nothingness:
           It is neither of me nor of any other,
           He is neither of love nor of youth,
           Nor of anything else,
           Since he was found asleep
           On a horse.


Poems translated from Occitan by Katy Bernard, Occitan lecturer at the Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux 3.

 

Occitan-French bilingual edition: presentation and biography of Guillaume d'Aquitaine (in French), presentation of each song (in French), Occitan text of the songs with French translation opposite.

Editions Fédérop, Occitan Literature collection "Troubadours".