For reasons unknown to me, Portuguese-language literature has been sadly neglected in the greater world. Portuguese is easy to learn for anyone who knows Spanish or even French, and its literature, especially its poetry, has a distinct flavor of its own which makes the small effort well worthwhile.

Portuguese-Galician was the first vernacular literary language on the Iberian peninsula, and up until about 1350 was the primary literary language in Spain as well as Portugal.  Galicia is now part of Spain, but the local language is closer to Portuguese. During the period of the Reconquest, Galicia was one of the major European cultural centers, and for a thousand years Santiago_de_Compostela in Galicia has been one of Europe's most important pilgrimage destinations.

The Portuguese-Galician poetic tradition traces back to the kharjas of Muslim Andalusia -- short romance refrains attached to poems written in Arabic or Hebrew. (Presumably there was also an autonomous Romance poetry, but only these refrains have been preserved.) The Galician poetic style is one of the original sources of European poetry, independent of the Provencal and Italian traditions, and its influence has never entirely disappeared from Portuguese and Spanish poetry. Poems in the old Portuguese-Galician style (and the descendant poems in modern Spanish and Portuguese) have a lightness, quickness, and sharpness which is a welcome relief from the sludgy Italianate poems which are so unfortunately common in every European language.

Dom_Dinis of Portugal (1261-1325) was not only a great king, but also was one of the first great poets of the Portuguese language. His poem below (Cohen, #17, p 55) is one of my favorite poems in any language.

Appendix II

It's time to repeat my standard grumble about academic writing and publishing. Cohen's book has been invaluable to me, but it's not really accessible for someone who doesn't have a pretty good reading knowledge of Portuguese-Galician, as well as a rudimentary knowledge, at least,  of structuralist poetics. Cohen gives a lot of attention to questions of genre which are only  of academic interest, and only to those academics who are interested in producing a cross-cultural structuralist theory of literature.

Like Cao Chi and Aloysius Bertrand, Dom Dinis is a distinctive, powerful poet whose work is almost unknown in the English-speaking world. Cohen could have written a much better book which included everything in this book, but which added 50-100 pages including more complete translations of the poems, helpful comments on their language, and background information on Dom Dinis, the Galician-Portuguese school of poetry, and the delightful cancions d'amigo genre. His scholarly achievement would have been in no way diminished by these additions, but non-specialist readers would also have a book introducing them to the poet Dom Dinis, who deserves a bigger audience than he as yet has had. There is no good reason the better book was not written.

As always, I excuse Cohen personally, subject to correction, on the grounds that this is probably the write-up of his dissertation. PhD candidates are of unfree status, like serfs and helots,  and they cannot be held entirely responsible for their actions.  The problem lies with the academic establishment, which enforces toxic methodological rules banning appreciation, popularization, and humanism from literary studies.

Appendix III

Silmarrillion at Après moi le deluge (a wonderful site for anyone interested in literature, especially early Romance-language literature) has linked and has given me some new information. Here and here are two excellent sites dealing with the jarchas (kharjas above) -- the original texts are included.

Here is a pdf of an earlier poem by Pero Meogo upon which Dom Dinis drew. (Here is the html version). In this poem a deer surprises the girl, instead of the wind doing so. To me the king's poem is much subtler, more delicate, less formulaic, less predictable, and more mysterious than Pero's.

Here is a fascinating piece about the role of deer in pagan ceremonies --  tending toward orgy --  which survived into the Christian era. Deer play a sexual role in Chinese and Mongol symbolism too, though in Asia the deer seems to be female, whereas the European deer seem to be stags. (The most ancient Mongol ancestor was a fallow doe married to a grey wolf.)

Pero Meogo:

Levóus'a louçana

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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