Arnaut Daniel

Arnaut Daniel
Background information
Born	Ribérac, Périgord
Origin	Occitania
Occupation	Troubadour
Years active	1180-1200

Arnaut Daniel(Occitan:[aɾˈnawddaniˈɛl];fl.1180–1200)was anOccitantroubadourof the 12th century, praised byDanteas "the best smith" (miglior fabbro) and called a "grand master of love" (gran maestro d'amore) byPetrarch.In the 20th century he was lauded byEzra PoundinThe Spirit of Romance(1910) as the greatest poet to have ever lived.

Life

According to one biography, Daniel was born of a noble family at the castle ofRibéracinPérigord;however, the scant contemporary sources point to him being a jester with pernicious economic troubles:Raimon de Durfortcalls him "a student, ruined by dice andshut-the-box".

Work and style

The dominant characteristic of Daniel's poetry is an extreme obscurity of thought and expression, a style calledtrobar clus('hermetic verse').He belonged to one school of troubadour poets that sought to make their meanings difficult to understand through the use of unfamiliar words and expressions, enigmatical allusions, complicated meters and uncommon rhyme schemes.Daniel further invented a form of stanza in which no lines rhymed with each other, finding their rhymes only in the corresponding line of the next stanza.

Daniel was the inventor of thesestina,a song of sixstanzasof six lines each, with the same end words repeated in every stanza, though arranged in a different and intricate order.Henry Wadsworth Longfellowclaims he was also the author of the metrical romance ofLancillotto,orLauncelot of the Lake,but this claim is completely unsubstantiated; Dante's reference to Daniel as the author ofprose di romanzi( "proses of romance" ) remains, therefore, a mystery. There are sixteen extant lyrics of Arnaut Daniel only one of which can be accurately dated, to 1181.Of the sixteen there is music for at least one of them, but it was composed at least a century after the poet's death by an anonymous author. No original melody has survived.

Legacy

Daniel's attempt to avoid simple and commonplace expressions in favor of striving for newer and more subtle effects found an admirer in Dante who would imitate the sestina's form in more than one song.Petrarch also wrote several sestinas as the form later gained popularity with Italian poets.

In Dante'sDivine Comedy,Arnaut Daniel appears as a character doing penance inPurgatoryfor lust. He responds inOld Occitanto the narrator's question about who he is:

Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman,

qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;

consiros vei la passada folor,

e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper, denan.

Ara vos prec, per aquella valor

que vos guida al som de l'escalina,

sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor.

(Purg., XXVI, 140–147)

Translation:

"Your courteous question pleases me so,

that I cannot and will not hide from you.

I am Arnaut, who weeping and singing go;

Contrite I see the folly of the past,

And, joyous, I foresee the joy I hope for one day.

Therefore do I implore you, by that power

Which guides you to the summit of the stairs,

Remember my suffering, in the right time. "

It is not believed that it is a coincidence that Dante wrote about Daniel in eight lines, as that was the favored amount of lines per stanza that the troubadours preferred to write. Dante also replicated that style and stanza length in six out of the eleven Occitan poems that Dante references in hisDe Vulgari Eloquentia.

Throughout the entirety of theDivine Comedy,Dante upholds the ideas of Italian superiority extending from theRoman Empireinto that of "modern" language. This is displayed in his writing of Arnaut Daniel in Occitan thus, in one commentator's opinion, mocking the closed and difficult style of troubadour poetry (trobar clus), compared to the open sweetness of Italian poetry.

In homage to these lines which Dante gave to Daniel, the European edition ofT. S. Eliot's second volume of poetry was titledAra Vos Prec.In addition, Eliot's poemThe Waste Landopens and closes with references to Dante and Daniel.The Waste Landis dedicated to Pound as "il miglior fabbro" which is what Dante had called Daniel. The poem also contains a reference to Canto XXVI in its line "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" ( "Then he hid in the fire that purifies them" ) which appears in Eliot's closing section ofThe Waste Landas it does to end Dante's canto.

Arnaut's 4th canto contains the lines that Pound claimed were "the three lines by which Daniel is most commonly known" (The Spirit of Romance, p. 36):

"leu sui Arnaut qu'amas l'aura

E chatz le lebre ab lo bou

E nadi contra suberna "

Translation:

"I am Arnaut who gathers up the wind,

And chases the hare with the ox,

And swims against the torrent. "

References

• Pound, Ezra (1910).The Spirit of Romance.New Direction Books (1968 reprinting).
• Smythe, Barbara (1911).Trobador Poets Selections from the Poems of Eight Trobadors.London: Chatto & Windus.
• Smith, Nathaniel B. (1980) “Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio: Dante's Ambivalence toward Provençal.” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, no. 98, 1980, pp. 99–109. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40166289.
• Eusebi, Mario (1995).L'aur'amara.Parma: Pratiche Editrice.ISBN88-7380-294-X.
• Hollander, Robert (2000–2007).Purgatorio 26. 115–116,Dartmouth Dante Project.

External links

http://trobar.org/troubadours/arnaut_danielComplete works, with English translations