1
Farai un vers de dreit nien (I will make a poem about absolutely nothing)
GUILHEM DE PEITIEU
(ca. 1100)
"For moderns to imitate the ancients is not very difficult; for the ancients to imitate the moderns is almost impossible, but when it happens it is a prodigy." That is what happens with this verse by Guilhem de Peitieu, which initiates troubadour lyric, the origin of modern poetry according to some, and it does so under the sign of negation: about nothing, neither of him, nor of anyone, nor of love, to conclude that "the poem is already made," that is, the pure poem, without references, only phonemes, words, words.2
Negawakuwa / hana no shita nite (I wish to die / in spring)
SAIGYO
(ca. 1180)
The poem belongs to the Hermit's Songs of this 12th-century Japanese monk. Its beauty comes from its extreme simplicity. Even when read in translation, the reader senses that each of the words that compose it occupies the right place, that none of them could find its synonym, that nothing could be added, that nothing could be suppressed. One is tempted to repeat it again and again, in the conviction of invoking something essential and absolute.3
Song of Songs
(4th-5th centuries B.C.)
The entire poem is an explosion of the senses. Its reading traverses the most varied aromas, from myrrh and frankincense to spikenard; diverse tastes, wine, honey, milk; textures of lips, of skins; images of bodies, of animals like the gazelle, the fawn; and all that richness of the external world, that intense sensualism and eroticism, we know can turn inward and, reversibly, open us to another, invisible world: the world of the spirit.4
Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night)
NOVALIS
(1799-1800)
Darkness, shadows, clouds: a whole Christian mystical tradition worked with these negative images but with a positive meaning. Within it, the Hymns must be placed, although they involve a re-elaboration of content: the feeling of joy sinks here into negativity. In the third hymn, when the poet stands before the tomb of his beloved Sophie, vision and dream transfigure the landscape, which will now be an unavoidable reference for the other great hymn to the night that is the second act of Wagner's Tristan.5
Can vei la lauzeta mover (When I see the lark move)
BERNAT DE VENTADORN
(ca. 1150-60)
It beginstiredtroubadour-like with a prodigious image, that of the lark approaching the sun's rays, forgetting itself, falling, falling. In the first stanza, everything conspires to build a sound (lauzeta / chazer / ses /oblid.es / laissa /) in which the sensation of melting is reproduced, very close to the liquefaction of the soul that mystics speak of. In this case, it is the heart that melts with desire.6
One Art
ELIZABETH BISHOP
(1976)
The art the poem speaks of is the art of loss, a concept that must be understood in the sense of practice. One must practice loss, from the most insignificant to the greatest, that is, from the keys to your house door to the loss of entire cities and kingdoms, and as it repeats in the last lines of several stanzasis no disaster(it is not a disaster). The will of the exerciser collapses in the last stanza, in what must really be admitted as a disaster. Brilliant is Bishop's irony in this poem.7
Lanquand li jorn son lonc en mai (When the days are long in May)
JAUFRÉ RUDEL
(ca. 1120-40)
This poem by the prince of Blaia, from the second generation of troubadours, is built on the sonority of the termlonh(far), which appears asmot refranh(in the rhyme place of the second and fourth verses of each stanza).Love from afar(love from afar) is the expression to refer to love never seen. It is, therefore, dreamed love. Rudel is the poet of the unreality of love.8
Bronwyn's Quest
JUAN EDUARDO CIRLOT
(1971)
The forest of the Arthurian novel, where not a single tree is ever described, achieves verbal texture here: we enter a universe made of alliterations ("A noise has left me among the ruins" is the first verse of the poem) and images of absolute unreality ("Transparent castles that do not exist"). The wandering constantly stumbles upon the impossibility of conquering the object of the search, of thequesttoo many are the dimensions and planes of reality or unreality that compete in it. Nevertheless, the poem concludes with some verses that produce a sensation of ecstasy achieved in the combination of words: wings, waves, souls.9
A tant s'an va chascuns par lui vv. 710-724 del Chevalier de la Charrete In this each one goes his own way, from the Knight of the Cart
CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES
(1179)
Considered as a roman(novel), although some maintain the term poem for being written in octosyllabic verses and in rhyming couplets, this work by the 12th-century Champagne writer contains some passages that clearly constitute a lyrical pause within the narrative flow. The 14 chosen verses geometrically perfect a figure, that of the courtly lover: a solitary wanderer, pensive, forgetful of himself, of his name, of his weapons, concentrated on a single thought: the lady.10
Byzantine Diary
CRISTINA CAMPO
(1977)
"Due mondi –e io vengo dall'altro" (Two worlds –and I come from the other): this is the verse that begins the poem, and that is repeated two more times, and that I always feel resonating within me before a sudden feeling of foreignness. The author, who would have liked to have written less than she did, composed essays that probably constitute the best Italian prose of the 20th century, but also some poems like this one, in which contact with the sacred is experienced. The threshold does not separate soul and body, but soul and spirit, and everything happens before the thousands of eyes of the cherubic angel.