alwaysalreadyangry:

alwaysalreadyangry:

one of the best parts of shards of love is when María Rosa Menocal is like, “scholars think that troubadours just came up with the love lyric independently, when love lyrics had been a big deal just down the coast in al-andalus? being sung by performers and women in the street? and likely travelling, as people travel? and just because we don’t have surviving translations of these lyrics from hebrew and arabic and mozarabic/andalusi romance vernacular into occitan you think the troubadours just came up with the idea independently? for fuck’s sake have you ever been to a rock concert IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU DON’T KNOW ALL THE WORDS, YOU DANCE AND SING ALONG AND FEEL IT ANYWAY”

and she’s right!!!!!!!

One of rock’s most striking phenomena is the range of “reading” that can and does take place when poetry is being articulated on a stage with language, body movements, music, and unusually strong thematic expectations. Here is where rock again provides an exceptionally enlightening example, allowing us to see, in action, the amazing–perhaps at some level incomprehensible–spectacle of people singing along to songs in languages they scarcely know, if at all; or–here the paradoxical variant–being moved by songs whose words they can make out only in part…

… it is no less true that language barriers are radically reduced when the medium is a song, when the meaning is also being conveyed in music; and this is directly related to the fact that a precise “understanding” of every word in a song is not at all necessary to understand exactly what is going on in the song…

… In such a context, I think, the whole lot of questions regarding the accessibility of “texts” between languedoc and al-Andalus, are rather radically altered. There was, of course, no reason to have contemporary translations of the muwashshaḥāt, and no reason we should even blink at the contrast that provides with the prodigious translations in other areas: of course you translate philosophy, but why should anyone even imagine doing translations of what those singers were doing up there on the stage? Dante said it explicitly: of course we translate the philosophy of the Greeks–but Homer? Clearly, the discrepancy is appropriate, a necessary difference between two universes with little in common. But the other point is that no translations ever would have been necessary in order to account for other evidence of considerable interaction all along the golden coast of languedoc, which at a certain point becomes al-Andalus. If a vital relationship ever did exist between the songs of the Hispano-Arabic world and those of the troubadours–songs whose refrains were all sung in varieties of intrepid new Romance vernaculars–it took place while the traditions were very much alive, in creative and compelling performance, before either tradition had to be studied in its written form or in a translation, and at a moment in the life cycle of the genre in which the power of a driven human voice and in which the wit and triumph of performance are remarkable translators…

… what is at stake is the fundamental and broad cultural picture we have painted at every level. It is necessary to point out that the shift of the model to the sphere where music is dominant points strongly to the originally Arabic “roots” of a significant part of the vernacular lyrical phenomenon, given the predominance of Andalusian musical instruments, many of whose names are still distinguishably Arabic…

María Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love