The Oxford Book Of Portuguese Verse

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Oxford University Press

London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai

Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University

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The Oxford Book Of Portuguese Verse

XIIth Century-XXth Century

Chosen by Aubrey F. G. Bell

Oxford At the Clarendon Press 1925

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Printed in England

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Á Illma. Exma. Sra. D. CAROLINA MICHAËLIS DE VASCONCELLOS A QUEM TANTO DEVEM A LITERATURA E A LINGUA PORTUGUESA

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INTRODUCTION

Portugal only began to exist at the end of the eleventh century (1095), and the first century of its existence was tentative, since it was occupied in disengaging itself from Galicia in the north and in extending itself over the south, held by the Moors. The Cid had fought and died and the Poema de mio Cid had been written before Portugal became a separate kingdom. Thus a nation did not properly exist to sing the epic deeds of Afonso Henriquez (who was making a new nation) and other heroes, and the legends of the battle of Ourique (1139) were handed down orally, to be chronicled later in prose. Portuguese literature opens without epics. The lyric poetry of the troubadours came to Portugal as it went to Sicily and Spain, about a century after it had begun to flourish in Provence. The founder of Portugal had been a French prince of the House of Burgundy. Whole colonies of Frenchmen settled in the new country and helped to drive the Moors southward, and the Benedictines of Cluny played no small part in its affairs. Portugal, by its geographical situation, its

extensive seaboard, and the neighbourhood of Galicia with the world-famous pilgrimages to Santiago, was peculiarly exposed to foreign influences and also received many crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, not a few of whom settled in the country. It is, therefore, not surprising that Portugal had close relations with France [viii]and was not ignorant of the poetry of the trouvères of the north, from which some of the Portuguese pastorelas may have been directly imitated. It was, however, the poetry of the troubadours of Provence that predominated, and this came to Portugal through Spain and the courts of Aragon, León, and Castille, with which that of Portugal became intimately connected by dynastic marriages. Unhappily, this poetry lost heavily in exportation to Portugal as to other lands, and although it was cultivated by Court poets with uncommon zeal, it grew up white and insipid, like a plant in a cellar. Despite astonishing technical excellence, the Portuguese-Provençal cantigas de amor lack variety and character. It was only the

satirical cantigas de maldizer that were as coloured and personal as any sirventès of Provence. Perhaps it was the very monotony of the cantigas de amor that caused another kind of lyric to flourish side by side with the imported Provençal. This indigenous poetry is confined in Portugal to the region north of the Tagus, and King Dinis, the last poet to patronize it keenly, was the first king to establish his court so far south as Lisbon. The first specimen that we have is by King Sancho I, an earlier Dinis, and dates from 1199, ten years after the first recorded poem in Portuguese (Galician). During the period between 1220 and 1280 the indigenous poetry was cultivated abundantly, by noble trovador and humble jogral, by priest and soldier, in Portugal and Galicia, and by foreigners who composed their lyrics in Galician, the language of the new kingdom of Portugal. Other literatures offer no parallel to these strange, exquisite cossantes, as it is convenient to call them (always remembering [ix]that the Spanish cossante was by no means confined

to the parallel-strophed lyrics); nor were it easy to find poems of such freshness and grace elsewhere. Portuguese literature is thus opened with a golden key. That we are privileged so to open it is due to the researches of recent years, which constitute, in the words of that great scholar Menéndez Pelayo, ‘one of the most splendid achievements of modern learning’. These researches were mainly those of foreigners. It has ever been a characteristic of the Portuguese, in their love of new things, to neglect their past, as the minhotos whitewash their ancient shrines; although a brilliant group of modern scholars, with Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos at its head, is now making up for past remissness. Writers of the sixteenth century, if they knew of these ancient lyrics, were half ashamed of their roughness and rusticity, and it was left for the nineteenth century to re-discover them in the Vatican Library at Rome. Even so, the full appreciation of the value and beauty of these poems has been reserved for the twentieth century. Together with the Portuguese-Provençal

poetry they are preserved in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (1875), Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti (1880), and Cancioneiro da Ajuda (1904), fascinating song-books which are the most striking commentary on the statement of the Marqués de Santillana that it had been customary for poets throughout the Peninsula to compose their lyrics in Galician; for we have here not only poems by Galicians and Portuguese, King of Portugal or Canon of Santiago, but those of high-placed trovador, poor segrel, and lowly jogral from León and Castille and other parts of Spain. Although the earliest cossante we have belongs [x]to the end of the twelfth century, they were in all probability of immensely older date in Galicia, and whatever influence may be assigned to the Arabic poetry of the south of Portugal must have been derivative, having been received originally from Galicia. Of Oriental origin in so far as they were copied from the psalms and hymns of Church services, the cossantes are Celtic (a term perhaps more convenient than scientific in this connexion) in

spirit, and in tone and structure belong to the people. They consist of two, four, or more distichs with a refrain, of which the second and fourth, while often altering the sound from i to a (pino to ramo, amigo to amado), repeat the sense of the first and third, the first line of the third taking up the last of the first, and so on to the end, where the position of the song (always accompanied by its music—son) is found to be very much the same as it was after the first two verses, as far as the sense is concerned. They were dance-songs (bailadas), danced by the peasants in the villages de terreiro or before pilgrimage shrines; alvoradas (songs of dawn); pilgrimage songs (cantigas de romaria); shepherds’ hill-songs (serranilhas), boat-songs (barcarolas); songs of ría and sea (marinas). Those that we possess are not anonymous, although many of their authors are obscure. As a rule these cantigas de amigo are placed on the lips of a love-lorn girl waiting or mourning for her lover, and it is scarcely doubtful that in the twelfth

century they were copied by the jograles from the songs composed and sung by the women in Galicia. The happy result for us is that this neglected literature yields at the outset something new and entirely charming, which lovers of poetry can as ill afford to neglect and ignore as [xi]the poems of Chaucer or any other priceless heritage of song. That they were danced by the peasants or sung as a glee by shepherds on the hills does not belie the religious origin of the cossantes, since dancing itself was primarily religious and to sing was the shepherd’s form of prayer. The fact merely indicates their immeasurable antiquity. A song, perfectly grave and melancholy, such as King Dinis’s Ai flores, ai flores might be sung by a solitary maiden in the gloom of the pinewoods or danced by pilgrims in the courtyard of a shrine.

The world-wide cult of St. James of Galicia certainly had much to do with the fact that Alfonso X, the Learned, who had nobly laid the foundations of Castilian prose, wrote his hymns to the Virgin in Galician. He may have learnt it as a boy, he certainly, himself, wrote the greater part of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which were first printed in 1889 and will be far more widely read when they are published in a more accessible edition. The king spread his net for miracles in many lands, and he claimed no originality of theme, but he could clothe the more beautiful legends in verse which preserves their beauty, and if his care for rhyme sometimes led him astray, he always retained the popular atmosphere of the miracles and often a word here and there belonging to the land of their origin. Some of those which interested him less he may have entrusted to the jograles at his Court, a few may have come to him already versified; but the majority are his own, and place him very high among early singers—not as a great original poet or a master of

technique, but as a conscientious and delightfully eager craftsman who realized the poetry inherent in these simple [xii]stories. He has a genuine sympathy for the humble types described in many of his cantigas: reapers, fishermen, monks, nuns, poor old peasant-women, the little Musa garridelinna. Alfonso X wrote a few profane poems, one of which is in the stirring metre of the famous Leonoreta song composed by Joan de Lobeira in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Pai Charinho, Lord High Admiral of Castille under Alfonso X and a more delicate poet than his master, wrote no religious verse, but his cossantes, with the lyric of another Galician, Roy Fernandez, are the most beautiful, hauntingly beautiful, of the early poems relating to the sea.

A Portuguese writer of the seventeenth century, Antonio de Sousa de Macedo, says point-blank that he saw and read sacred poems by King Dinis in the Escoriai, and describes the codex. If in his youth the king, at the exhortation of his grandfather Alfonso X, wrote such verse, it has now disappeared, and among the 138 poems preserved under his name is none of a religious character. They comprise Provençal love-poems and cantigas de amigo,⁠[1] and some charming specimens of the cossante, in which he shows that he had inherited King Alfonso’s fondness for popular themes, whether he himself composed these delicious cossantes, or, as may appear more probable, merely collected them. He also wrote a few satirical poems. Satire had gone hand in hand with lyrism in Portugal from the first, and was considered one of the most important functions of poetry. The cantigas de escarnio and de maldizer, although often exceedingly [xiii]coarse, form, historically, one of the most interesting sections of the early song-books. King Dinis was a true

poet, even a great poet, although his inspiration may not have been as genuine as that of Airas Nunez, priest of Santiago. He strove with success to play the part in Portuguese literature that Alfonso X had played in Castille, encouraged the writing of Portuguese prose, and gave a last prosperity to Portuguese-Provençal song, which he himself wrote with conspicuous skill. It was characteristic of his national policy that he, the prince so carefully trained in Provençal song by his father Afonso III, who had returned from a long sojourn in France to usurp his brother’s throne, should so actively encourage the indigenous cossante, as did also one of his sons, D. Afonso Sanchez. It was a late harvest, and after King Dinis’s death a jogral of León tells us that the troubadours of Portugal and León, Castille and Aragon were silent: ‘nunca pois de sa morte trobaron’, and the jograles no longer received presents or money.

A long gap follows in Portuguese poetry, although a thin aftermath of Galician song continued in Spain up to the very threshold of the Renaissance. Macias, ‘the Lover’, composed verse and inspired poetry in others, but neither he nor any other of the Galician-Portuguese contributors to the Cancionero de Baena, the celebrated Villasandino, the less prosperous scapegrace Garci Sanchez, the jovial Gonzalo Rodriguez, Archdeacon of Toro, were poets of the first order. To Casquicio and to Vasco Perez de Camões (ancestor of Luis de Camões), since we possess none of their poems, it may be charitable to give the favour of a doubt. The [xiv]Galician Joan Rodriguez del Padron, or de la Cámara, wrote in Spanish, and, indeed, when the Marqués de Santillana addressed his famous letter to D. Pedro, Constable of Portugal, son of Pedro Duke of Coimbra and nephew of Prince Henry the Navigator, Galician poetry in Spain was practically dead. Nor had the attempt at a religious-erudite poetry, made by the first princes of the House of Avis, prospered in Portugal, its most individual

product being the short poem by João I’s granddaughter, D. Philipa de Lencastre. During the close relations between Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth century, the idea of uniting the two crowns was often in men’s minds. When the national spirit of the Portuguese people and the genius and energy of the Master of Avis and Nun’ Alvarez had prevented that union by the campaign of Aljubarrota (1385), a reaction followed in favour of Portuguese literature, but it mainly took the form of prose, and was expressed in the incomparable chronicles of Fernam Lopez. This lost opportunity of reviving the national poetry paved the way for the return of Castilian influence. This was many-sided, and of such force that the tables were completely turned and Castilian now became the more universal language. It was the brother of D. Philipa de Lencastre, the Constable D. Pedro, the prince of the strange, romantic career, poet, exile, and finally king in a foreign land, who brought back new metres from Castille and himself wrote his prose works as

well as his long Menosprecio del Mundo in Castilian. Another even more significant and more popular importation from Spain was that of the romances, the growth of Spanish influence in Portugal happening to coincide with [xv]the increasing vogue of the romance in Spain. The Portuguese wrote romances in Spanish, which they considered the proper language for this form of poetry, and it has been suggested that some of the loveliest and most wistful of the Spanish romances were written by Portuguese or Galicians. In Portugal the epics out of which the Spanish romances sprang did not exist, and a large number of Portuguese romances show clear traces of their Spanish origin, but the Portuguese, with their power of rapid assimilation, also composed a considerable number more Portuguese in theme and treatment, their vague melancholy contrasting with the dramatic vigour of the Spanish, so that many romances are found not only in Tras-os-Montes bordering on Spain but as far west as the Azores.

Spanish influence is prominent also in the collection of poems embracing some three-quarters of a century (1445-1516) and published by Garcia de Resende in 1516 as a Portuguese Cancioneiro Geral. This vast repertory of Court verse contains the poems of some two hundred authors written in Spanish and Portuguese. Their poems have this much in common, that they are mainly artificial in metre and commonplace in theme. For the rest they vary greatly: there are cantigas, esparsas, and vilancetes, which consist of a few neatly turned lines containing a courtier’s compliment or jest or sigh; there are trovas de arte maior which were reserved for the poeta as opposed to the mere trovador; there are a few poems of true inspiration, such as that of the obscure Francisco de Sousa, and others in which the influence of Italian poetry, but once removed, coming, that is, through Spain and the Marqués de Santillana, is apparent. It is easy [xvi]to see that their compiler was a courtier, and in fact Garcia de Resende was brought up at the palace of King

João II, who appreciated his talents in drawing, music, and poetry, and he spent his whole life at the Portuguese Court, except when he was sent on friendly missions to other princes. His trovas on the death of Inés de Castro show that he could write with a fine simplicity and pathos, but everything genuinely popular was excluded from his collection, and it might well seem at the end of the fifteenth century that the indigenous poetry of Portugal had been definitively relegated to the hills.

But just when this poetry seemed—or to us it seems—to have disappeared, hustled out by the Court poets of the Spanish school, with no King Dinis to defend it from oblivion, the great events of 1490-1500, the discoveries and conquests in Africa, America, and Asia stirred Portugal to its depths and brought the popular poetry once more to the surface. Not a peasant, not a shepherd but dreamed of migrating to Lisbon to serve the King or to the Indies in search of gold. The songs of the people, the old parallel-strophed cossantes of the early Cancioneiros reappeared at Court, and their spirit was embodied in his plays by Gil Vicente, a great poet by reason of his devoted attachment to the soil, his sincerity, his divine lyrical gift. How far he improved on the real songs sung by the peasants and shepherds we cannot know, but judging from his very natural presentment of peasant types, his persistent realism, which disdained neither incorrect and coarse phrases, nor any of the most ordinary features in the life of the mountain villages

which he knew so well, we may assume that such songs [xvii]were really to be heard among the hills of Portugal and may believe that, had the taste of the time encouraged him, he might have collected a song-book of unparalleled interest and beauty, and perhaps with a surer instinct than three centuries later Almeida Garrett, whose impulse was to polish. We must be content with the lovely fragments and specimens of this lyrical poetry which his plays contain, and with the even more fragmentary gleanings in Barbieri’s Cancionero Musical. It was a short-lived opportunity; the people under the new conditions soon lost their songs, or rather they lost their simple gaiety and exchanged the native flavour of the cossante for what was considered a more refined melancholy. During the last years of his life Vicente was fighting an up-hill battle against the new influences and the Latinizers of the Renaissance. He had himself composed many of his plays in Spanish as the Spanish vogue grew and prospered. In 1490, when he perhaps first came to

Court, on the occasion of the marriage of João II’s son Prince Afonso to a Spanish princess, all the devices for the great tournament at Evora were written in Spanish, with the exception of that of the King and one other. Indeed, only the death of the infant Prince Miguel prevented the consummation which occurred two generations later, when Philip II of Spain became Philip I of Portugal. But these two generations were of vital importance to Portugal and gave time for the fruit sown and so strenuously tended during the two centuries from Dinis to João II to reach its full maturity, so that Portugal could thereafter never suffer a loss of independence other than temporary and superficial. Nevertheless, about the [xviii]year 1520 one might have looked forward to a second long blank in Portuguese poetry such as had occurred two centuries earlier—another Spanish blank. It was due to the personal triumph of one man, Gil Vicente’s rival, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, that this disaster was averted and that, when the national poetry which had momentarily