Quan Vei Lauzeta Mover

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Paraphrase of a lyric by the twelfth century troubadour, and admirer of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Bernart de Ventadorn, by Giles Watson.

QUAN VEI LAUZETA MOVER

When I see the hovering lark
Spire the sky for joy and art,
He seems compelled to so embark
On flight by his delighted heart,
And envy grips me that this smudge
Of feathers, lit with solar fire,
Flies so lightly. I begrudge
His bold, precipitate desire.

I, who thought myself well-versed
In love, am but a novice still:
I can't forbear to love, though cursed
With wants that she will not fulfil
Although she owns my heart and life
And at her whim she keeps the world.
Apart from her, and wrought with strife,
Wantonly my hopes are hurled

Around a firmament so wide
I lose myself. Before me pass
Those memories -- cruel they abide --
Of how I glimpsed her in the glass.
The glass entrances now as then,
And its enchantments all are cruel,
So I am held, hopeless as when
Narcissus gazed into a pool.

I've done with ladies, I like to say --
More likely they have done with me --
I once stood for them in the fray
But now I shrug and let them be.
Since none of them will help me scale
Her heights, I reach their depths and plumb
My foolery. In short, I fail:
Through singing high I am struck dumb.

And where has Pity flown? This bird
Flits by with greater weight upon
Its wings than she; no poet's word
Can move her, for she has none.
Pity save me, I stoop, I trip
To catch her footfalls, trap her breath
Yet never have it in my grip.
I long for life; she chooses death.

With her, it's valueless to pray;
My supplications drip like rain.
She looks displeased, and turns away,
So I shall not beseech again.
This fool desists, and longs to die,
Interred in some cold, secret place
And like the bird, takes wing to fly
From love and loss and dull disgrace.

Tristan, find a fool or king
To make your verses and adore
This lady. Or let the skylark sing:
He is a better troubadour.

Source material: Paraphrase of a song by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn , who was born c. 1130-1140 at the castle of Ventadorn in Limousin, apparently the son either of a baker or a foot-soldier. He entered the service of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and later, of Raimon V, Count of Toulouse, before retiring to a monastery and dying in the last decade of the twelfth century. There are 45 surviving poems by Bernart, 18 of which have extant musical scores. A marvellous interpretation of this song, sung in the original Occitanian language -- and far more up-beat than might be expected -- can be heard on the Naxos CD, Music of the Troubadors, Ensemble Unicorn, 1999. In the interests of retaining at least some of a modern audience's sympathies for the poet, I have truncated the fifth and the sixth stanzas of the original into one verse. The abridged section insists that in proving untrustworthy, the poet's lady "does show herself true woman": a notion which was not uncommon in the twelfth century, but which Bernart would no doubt himself have jettisoned were he alive today. Paraphrase by Giles Watson, 2009.