The twenty-three students of Provençal and the seven people seriously
interested in the technic and æsthetic of verse may communicate with me
in person. I give here only enough to illustrate the points of the
_razo_, that is to say, as much as, and probably more than, the general
reader can be bothered with. The translations are a make-shift; it is
not to be expected that I can do in ten years what it took two hundred
troubadours a century and a half to accomplish; for the full
understanding of Arnaut's system of echoes and blending there is no
substitute for the original; but in extenuation of the language of my
verses, I would point out that the Provençals were not constrained by
the modern literary sense. Their restraints were the tune and
rhyme-scheme, they were not constrained by a need for certain qualities
of writing, without which no modern poem is complete or satisfactory.
They were not competing with De Maupassant's prose. Their triumph is, as
I have said, in an art between literature and music; if I have succeeded
in indicating some of the properties of the latter I have also let the
former go by the board. It is quite possible that if the troubadours had
been bothered about "style," they would not have brought their blend of
word and tune to so elaborate a completion.
"Can chai la fueilla" is interesting for its rhythm, for the sea-chantey
swing produced by simple device of cæsuræ:
Can chai la fueilla
dels ausors entrecims,
El freitz s'ergueilla
don sechal vais' el vims,
Dels dous refrims
vei sordezir la brueilla;
Mas ieu soi prims
d'amor, qui que s'en tueilla.
The poem does not keep the same rhyme throughout, and the only reason
for giving the whole of it in my English dither is that one can _not_
get the effect of the thumping and iterate foot-beat from one or two
strophes alone.