The Most Delectable of Languages

Daniel Heller-Roazen

Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 32-41 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dph.2012.0000

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Daniel Heller-Roazen Princeton University

The Most Delectable of Languages

This essay explores the ways in which a single tongue can be said to be, in Brunetto Latinis phrase, at once delectable and common. It is argued that such titles are suited to medieval texts that trouble the limits of individual languages and, further, that they pertain in exemplary fashion to a restricted but complex corpus of medieval poems that are written in several languages at once.

Before finding his way to the third ring of the seventh circle of the Inferno, the Florentine encyclopaedist Brunetto Latini achieved renown through writing and, above all, through writing the unique compendium of late medieval knowledge that is Le livre dou Tresor. That book is distinguished by a striking trait: although the work of an Italian writer who in his lesser composition, Il tesoretto, wrote in the language of his fellow Florentines, Le livre dou Tresor is unmistakably in Old French. At the inception of his summa, Brunetto anticipated the bewilderment his choice of idiom might provoke. In the first chapter of book 1, he therefore declared:
If anyone should ask why this book is written in Romance, according to the French usage, since we are Italian, I would say that it is for two reasons: one, because we are in France, and the other, because this idiom is the most delectable and the most common to all people.1 (Latini 6; bk. 1, ch. 1)

On this point, at least, Brunetto leaves no room for doubt: the language of his work cannot be explained solely with reference to geography. Brunettos resolution to commit his work to Romance, according to the French usage (en roman selonc le patois de France) may be justified, as he states, for its own sakeand indeed, for at least these two reasons: because this idiom is the most delectable of tongues, and 32

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because it is the most common to the peoples of all languages (por ce que la parleure est plus delitable et plus commune a touz genz, or a touz languaiges, according to some manuscripts). What might it mean for an idiom to be the most delightful and, at the same time, the most common of all? And what might these titles have to do with works of medieval literature that trouble the limits defining single tongues, as well as the conventions dictating which authors may lay claim to them? The distinction that Brunetto blithely accords to le patois de France, of course, certainly could and can be contested, as the authorevoking the readers doubts while also seeking to dispel themhimself suggests. If one believes Andr Pzard, Brunettos choice to bestow such honors upon the tongue of Gaul was soon to cost him no less than literary sempiternity: in Inferno 15, his own pupil, Dante, would have condemned Brunetto, through the veil of sodomy, for the betrayal of the mother tongue recorded in the pages of the Tresor. Brunetto would, then, have set aside the idiom of his first nurses for that of his schoolmasters, rejecting the locutio prima he once acquired by imitation, for a locutio secunda learned through discipline and the arts of grammatical instruction.2 Yet Dante himself was familiar with the doctrine that the Romance of France might be particularly delectable in itself. More strikingly, he espoused it. Evoking the relative merits of each of the three branches of the lingua tripharium in De vulgari eloquentia, Dante recalls that each tongue lays claim to particular eminence on account of the works committed to it as well as on account of its intrinsic qualities. The language of oc has excelled in the compositions of Peire Alvernha and other ancient masters (Petrus de Alvernia et alii antiquiores doctores), just as the idiom of s has distinguished itself in the works of Cino da Pistoia and his friend (Cinus Pistoriensis et amicus eius). The discourse of ol, we read in book 1 of this treatise, adduces on its behalf that everything that is recounted or invented in vernacular prose belongs to it (De vulgari eloquentia bk. 1, ch. 10, par. 2; Botterill 22-23; Allegat ergo pro se lingua ol, quod propter sui faciliorem ac delectabiliorem vulgaritatem quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est). And if one considers the intrinsic properties of each of the three tongues, one will conclude that the language of the troubadours displays the qualities of sweetness (dulcitudo) and perfection (perfectio), even as the idiom of the Scuola Siciliana and the Stilnovo boasts a greater subtlety (being subtilior) and an unmatched proximity to classical grammatica. The variety of speech in which one encounters compilations from the Bible, histories of Troy and Rome, beautiful

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tales of King Arthur, and many other works of history and doctrine has a different nature. This languagethe Romance of Francemay lay claim above all to delectability (and, one might add, a greater fluency or facility: Allegat ergo pro se lingua ol quod propter sui faciliorem ac delectabiliorem vulgaritatem quicquid redactumest). This particular quality was noted more than once by the authors of the age. As evidence, it suffices to recall the words with which Martino da Canal, in the same years, noted the commonality of the langue franceise, which runs through the world, being more delectable to read and hear than any other (Por ce que langue franceise cort parmi le monde, et est la plus delitable a lire et a or que nule autre; bk. 1, ch. 1, par. 5). Dantes theory of the pleasures of a single tongue finds its fullest exposition in book 1 of the Convivio. There he argues that the uniqueness of each idiom constitutes the basis of a poetic institution, which he calls the musical tie. Dante explains that one fact bears witness to the existence of this tie. It is the absolute impossibility of transferring a poem from one language to another, without thereby destroying all the sweetness, music and harmony that it once possessed.
Let everyone know that nothing which is harmonized by the musical tie can be changed from its speech into another, without breaking all its sweetness and harmony. And this is the reason why Homer was not changed from Greek into Latin, like the other writings we have of the Greeks. And this is the reason for which the poems of the Psalter are without sweetness, music and harmony; they were transmuted from Hebrew into Greek and from Greek into Latin, and in the first transmutation, that sweetness disappeared. (Convivio bk. 1, ch. 7, par. 14-16)3

It has been observed that these lines allude to a passage of the praefatio to the second book of Eusebiuss History, in which Jerome evokes the incommensurability of languages. Like Dante, the Patristic translator grasped this linguistic impossibility: neither the rhythms of Homer nor those of the Psalmist may be fully heard in Latin. Yet Dante takes a further step, since he explains this fact with reference to a thing which Jerome nowhere mentioned: il legame musaico, the musical tie by which poetic compositions may be best harmonized. The identity of this tie has continued to trouble critical interpretation, starting with the meaning of its defining attribute: musaico. At least two hypotheses have been proposed. The term may derive from the noun Musa: the link would then be essentially poetic in kind. The adjective, however, may also be referred to the noun musica: then the tie would be strictly

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musical in nature. Both positions are philologically well-founded, and each has its learned defenders. This much, however, is certain: whether it pertains to the Muse or to music, the tie that bears witness to the untranslatable in poetry cannot, itself, easily be translated. Its name is in the image of what it signifies; in the passage from one idiom to another, its sense cannot but be dispersed. Few, today, would doubt the difficulty of defining the principle that lends to each language its pleasing qualities. How might one derive, from a set of texts in a given language, any criterion or set of criteria that would determine the beauty that such works share by virtue of being committed to one idiom? Yet the task of grasping something such as a musical tie in poetry grows far subtler if one considers a class of literary compositions seldom studied as a whole: those, namely, whose language, strictly speaking, is no one given language at all. How might one measure the delectability and the harmony of medieval works written not in a single language, but in many, all at once? When referred to the literatures that emerged in France in the High Middle Ages, the question grows particularly acute. One might well argue that linguistic diversity profoundly marked Romance literatures as a whole, from the time of their earliest dated emergence, in Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebrew muwashshah t, to later forms of verse and prose in a Western Europe. Yet the langue dol and the langue doc offer some of the most striking examples of the harmonies and disharmonies of poetic multilingualism. From the earliest age of vernacular writing in France, one finds examples of a literary contrast, which sets the nascent vernacular against the Latin of the Church and schools. As an example, one may take the strophic composition now generally known as the Aube of Fleury, which has been dated to the second half of the tenth century. Here an unknown Romance tongue appears in a text consisting largely of Latin rhythmic verse. The modern editors of this text have concurred in seeing in this work three strophes, which possess a similar poetic form. Three generally trochaic Latin lines are followed by two recurring lines of verse in another language, which sound a refrain: Lalba par umet mar atra sol / Poypas abigil miraclar tenebras (Zumthor, Archasme et fiction 295). The exact meaning of these lines is far from certain, if only because scholars have yet to reach any consensus about the identity of their language. Among philologists, to be sure, answers are hardly lacking. It has been said the couplet is in Old Occitan (albeit older than the language of the troubadours by a good century); that it is derived from a Latin original; that it is in Rheto-Roman; that it is in a vulgar Latin

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with occasional Occitan intrusions; or, finally, that it is most likely an unusual rendition of a vulgar Latin original (Camilli 340). It is clear that the interpretation of this text presupposes the identification of its language, since it is by attributing to the idiom its grammatical nature that it becomes possible to determine its meaning. Occasionally, the enigmatic lines have also become the objects of literary readings. Orienting himself above all with respect to the Latin verse, Michel Zink argued that the Romance refrain evoked the slowness of awakening, half-way between waking and dreaming. (116). It has also been argued that the lines announce the dawn of the Romance vernaculars themselves, being as inceptive, as inchoate, as indistinct from Latin as the first rays of light in the night (Heller-Roazen esp. 86-87). In the centuries following this mysterious Aube (or alba), the poetic interlacing of Latin and vernacular in French letters became ever more frequent. Reworking a distinction proposed by Benvenuto Terracini, Paul Zumthor long ago suggested that one speak of vertical bilingualism in such cases, where the two languages put in contrast are markedly distinct in both status and function.4 Examples of other works following a structure similar to that of the Aube de Fleury are far from uncommon: in the eleventh and twelfth century, one often finds vernacular lines inscribed in Latin poetry as refrains or recurrent terminal elements (Grnewald). Yet the forms of poetic multilingualism were soon to become more diverse and more complex. In a canticle of the Sponsus once called the Mystre des Vierges sages et des Vierges folles, which most likely dates from the end of the eleventh century, one finds stanzas of four lines, of which the fourth, in Latin, remains identical; the first three lines, by contrast, vary, from stanza to stanza, being once in Latin, then in the vernacular, according to a fixed form (Thomas 196). Throughout the thirteenth century, one encounters works in which vernacular phrases, inserted in the position of refrains, punctuate poems composed principally in Latin. In the Carme ad Abelardo attributed to Hilarius, each stanza is composed of four lines in Latin, followed by a terminal element in Old French (Raby 2: 115). Outside France, such procedures may also be found, as shownto cite but one examplein the Carmina Burana (e.g. 123). Poetic multilingualism did not wane and vanish with the flowering of literatures in Old French and Old Occitan. On the contrary, it became more refined. The play of two languages, one classical, one vernacular, gave way to subtler procedures, which yoked not two but many idioms in the service of a single poetic end. The vertical bilingualism that had opposed Latin and Romance then came to be followed by new and

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richer forms of horizontal bilingualism. There is no more brilliant witness to such poetic procedures than the one invented by Raimbaut de Vacqueiras in Eras quan vey verdeyar, the first example of that curious form of poetic deformation that is the descort. In the last lines of the first cobla of this canso, we learn that the poet wishes to begin a discord (vuelh un descort comensar), by making words, sounds and languages discordant (per qu ieu fauc dezacordar / los motz els sotz els lenguatges; vv. 7-8). It has been noted more than once that the lexicon of the text is hardly univocal. What is the nature of this discord between motz, sotz els lenguatges? Any consideration of the poem must begin from the consideration of certain basic formal facts in its composition. The song is divided into five coblas, followed by a tornada or envoi. In the first five coblas, one finds eight heptasyllables, which follow a constant rhyme scheme: abababab. A more minute examination, to be sure, reveals a calculated variation: in each stanza (except for the fifth), the syllable count displays a regular alternation of oxytonic and paroxytonic endings: in stanzas I and IV, a is oxytonic, while in stanzas II and III, b is oxytonic. Nonetheless, the first discord is elsewhere, beyond the rhythmic art of the poem. It is lodged in the lenguatges of the work. The five coblas are written in five different languages: cobla I is in classical Old Occitan; cobla II, in Italian; cobla III, in Old French; cobla IV, in Gascon; and cobla V, in Galician-Portuguese. Such analysis remains incomplete, however, as long as it does not take into account the structure of the poetic envoi, for the tornada turns the form of the poem on its head. First, this strophic unit recalls the rhyme pairs of each of the preceding stanzas, one after the other: inevitably, the tornada is therefore composed not of eight lines, like the coblas, but of ten. Second, since it echoes each of the ten rhyme sounds of the preceding stanzas, the sixth strophe consists of ten lines that cannot rhyme among themselves. As the authors of the Leys dAmors would say, it is made of rims estramps, unrelated rhymes. Yet this tornada is above all striking on account of its linguistic nature, because its lines recall the five languages that preceded it, in five unrhymed couplets: the first two are in Old Occitan, the third and fourth are in Italian, the fifth and sixth are in Old French, the seventh and eighth are in Gascon, and the ninth and tenth are in Galician-Portuguese. In other words, it is not only in its rhyme structure that this strophic unit constitutes the abbreviated repetition of those that preceded it; in its languageor languages it also commemorates the other coblas, to the point of constituting, in itself, a Babelic whole. Deprived of an intelligible rhyme scheme and deprived even of a single language, the stanza might well be judged

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disharmonious, at least at first. It might well untie the art of the poemwere it not, in truth, its sole unifying element. For if the various coblas of this song are in any way in accord, if the five lenguatges, their sotz els motz, constitute the elements of a single ensemble, it is thanks to this extravagant envoi. In the thirteenth century, the two medieval bilingualisms came to be joined. The old vertical variation in idiom merged with the more recent horizontal one, and, as a consequence, one fundamental formal distinction between linguistic differences in medieval letters began to come undone: the distinction, namely, between roman and lati, on the one hand, and that between the many varieties of roman, on the other. The first text to announce this development was most likely the work of the thinker who, more than any, defined the terms of medieval linguistic diversity: Dante, whose treatise De vulgari eloquentia first conceived the conceptual difference between locutiones and ydiomata. In an extraordinarily complex poem of disputed authorship from the end of the thirteenth century, we find neither Latin and a vernacular, nor various vernaculars, but rather Latin, Old French, and Italian. The work opens with the following lines:
A faus ris, pour quoi trahs avez Oculos meos, et quid tibi feci Che fatta mhai cos spietate fraude? Iam audivissent verba mea Greci. (Dante, Rime 510-12) Alas, false smiles, why have you betrayed my eyes? And what did I do you, that you should trick me with such cruelty? Even a Greek would have listened to my words.

At first glance, it seems that the structure of Raimbauts tornada is here generalized. None of the three stanzas of this multilingual text is written in a single language; from line to line, the idiom of discourse changes, almost continuously. But closer consideration reveals that the order of the rhymes within each stanza remains intact. In perfect counterpoint to the troubadours descort, each line here rhymes with another line in the same languageand with it alone. Thus the poem summons language and rhyme to form an unheard alliance: in its rhyme sound, every Old French line recalls and announces every other Old French line; every Latin line, every other Latin line; every Italian line, every other Italian line. Yet the analysis of the poem must go further. One capital question can hardly be avoided: Why is it that a given language occupies a given

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position in the stanza? In other words, why does the second stanza begin in Latin, while the first stanza begins in French, and the third stanza, for its part, begins in Italian? One cannot hope to find the reason for this order within any one of the stanzas of this poem. Here we reach this compositions true novelty, with respect to the entire tradition of multilingual composition in the Middle Ages: the principle that regulates the distribution of languages in the poem exceeds the limits of the single strophe, being rigorously meta-strophic. In the three stanzas of this poem, no language occupies the same position moreor lessthan once. One may also formulate that fact positively: in this poem, each language occupies each rhyme position once and only once.5 Hence the rules of the peculiar harmony and disharmony of this song. From stanza to stanza, a single rhyme structure is required, yet the superimposition of languages is forbidden. In short: the order of the succession of rhymes remains identical, but the order of the succession of languages varies incessantly. May one find in this trilingual composition the trace of a musical tie? One might certainly choose to answer in the negative. If one holds that Dantes legame must articulate a poetic work in a single language, one will doubtless conclude that here, the crucial tie has been broken. But such a conclusion would be hasty. This composition is indeed harmonized, albeit not in the sounds and grammar of a single tongue. Ordered both in that which it draws from the Muse and that which it owes to music, the song displays the strictest linguistic and rhythmic articulation. At least one consequence follows from this fact. The poem may not be translated. For there is no language more resistant to metamorphosis than one that, in itself, is already multiple. Hence the striking future announced in the envoi to this poem:
Cianson, povs aller pour tout le monde, namque locutus sum in lingua trina, ut gravis mea spina si saccia per lo mondo. Ognuomo senta: forse piet navr chi mi tormenta. (Dante, Rime 512) Song, you can go throughout the whole world; this is why I have spoken in a threefold languageso that my harsh thorn may be known throughout the world. May everyone listen: perhaps the one who torments me will feel pity.

Integrally multilingual, not a work in three languages but a work in a single lingua trina, this poem was to achieve the oft-cited dream of the

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idioms of medieval France: to go throughout the world, aller pour tout le monde, as the poemnot accidentally, in Old Frenchitself insists. A unique incarnation of the ideal of being most common to all peoples and languages, this song, therefore, never met the literary fate decried by Dante: unlike the works of Homer, or the Psalter, this cianson could not and would not to be transmuted despite itself. The threetongued work exhibited a musical tie that could never be undone. In its sotz, mots els lenguatges, this song was therefore to remain delectable, and its language, in its uniquely discordant accord, perhaps the most delectable of all.

Notes
1. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. Se aucun demandoit por quoi ceste livres est escrit en roman selonc le patois de France, puis que nos [so] mes ytaliens, je diroie que ce est par .ii. raisons: lune que nos [so]mes en France, lautre por ce que la parleure est plus delitable et plus commune a touz genz, or a touz languaiges. 2. See Pzard, and cf. Alison Cornishs stimulating argument (126-157). 3. Sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzato si pu de la sua loquela in altra trasmutare, sanza rompere tutta la sua dolcezza e armonia. E questa la cagione per che Omero non si mut di grco in latino, come laltre scritture che avemo da loro. E questa la cagione per chi li versi del Salterio sono sanza dolcezza di musica e darmonia; ch essi furono trasmutati debreo in greco e di greco in latino, e ne la prima transmutazione tutta quella dolcezza venne meno. 4. On vertical bilingualism as opposed to horizontal bilingualism, see Zumthor, Un Problme desthtique. As Zumthor notes, the distinction owes much to Benvenuto Terracinis linguistic research. 5. For an illuminating analsysis, see Brugnolo 127.

Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. Cesare Vassoli and Domenico de Robertis. 2 vols. 1988. Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1995. Print. . De vulgari eloquentia Ed. Pio Rajna. Florence: Succesori Le Monnier, 1896. Print. . De vulgari eloquentia Ed. and trans. Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. . Rime. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Print. Brugnolo, Furio. Sulla Canzone trilingue A faux ris attribuita a Dante. Plurilinguismo e lirica medievale, da Raimbaut de Vaqueiras a Dante. Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Print.

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Camilli, Amerindo. LAlba del codice vaticano reginense 1462. Studi di filologia italiana 12 (1954): 335-344. Print. Carmina Burana. Eds. Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1930. Print. Cornish, Alison. Vernacular Translation in Dantes Italy: Illiterate Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Da Canal, Martino. Les estoires de Venise: Cronaca italiana in lingua francese dale origini al 1275. Ed. Alberto Limentani. Florence: Olschki, 1972. Print. Grnewald, August. Die lateinische Einschiebsel in den deutschen Gedichten von der Mitte des 11. bis gegen Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts. Gttingen: E. A. Huth, 1908. Print. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Des Altrits de la langue. Plurilinguismes potiques au Moyen ge. Littrature 130 (2003): 75-96. Print. Latini, Brunetto. Tresor. Ed. Pietro G. Beltrami, et al. Turin: Einaudi, 2007. Print. Pzard, Andr. Dante sous la pluie de feu: Enfer, Chant XV. Paris: Vrin, 1950. Print. Raby, Frederic James Edward. A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957. Print. Thomas, Lucien-Paul, ed. Le Sponsus: Mystre des Vierges Sages et des Vierges Folles. Paris: PUF, 1951. Print. Vaqueiras, Raimbaut. The Poems of the Troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras. Ed. and trans. Joseph Linskill. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Print. Zink, Michel. Plurilingualism, Hermeticism, and Love in Medieval Poetics. Comparative Literature Studies 32.2 (1995): 112-130. Print. Zumthor, Paul. Un problme desthtique mdivale: Lutilisation potique du bilinguisme. Le Moyen ge 66 (1960): 303-336, 561-594. Print. . Archasme et fiction: Les plus anciens documents de langue romane. La Linguistique fantastique. Ed. Sylvain Auroux, et al. Paris: Denol, 1985. Print.