On a Sunday morning, more than a year ago, me and two of my old school friends were walking on the lanes of Old Delhi looking for Daryaganj. The almost fabled book bazaar comprised of some hundreds of bookseller with millions of books sitting on the pavements adjacent to bustling streets. The bazaar is a weekly affair, majority of booksellers sitting with their offering only on Sunday morning. In one of those inexplicable idiosyncrasies of chance, which people call by different names, I came across a huge volume, bearing on its cover a woodcut print of a downcast lady holding a broadsword on one hand and ‘Kelmscott Chaucer’ written above, lying between copies mills and boons and Harold Robbins’. After some bargaining I bought it at mere hundred fifty rupees. I didn’t get time to explore the book till evening as we were soon lost in the labyrinthine lanes of Old Delhi. The unique winter chill and last nights hangover from drinking horrible dark rum only increased our astonishment at almost every aspect of this city of multiple anachronisms.
Later I realized that meeting Chaucer in Daryaganj, a makeshift bazaar where books lying in heap resemble vegetables, was to write in Chaucer’s own tongue, not just ‘aventure’ but a favourable configuration of the ‘wheel of Fortune’. Later that day I was told by a bibliophile uncle that I must be the only software engineer who reads Chaucer. But I hadn’t read him till then and wouldn’t for many a month. Though I loved the book, this soon became the only volume of my collection that I loved to turn pages of, rather than read. This book is a facsimile reprint of famous William Morris’ Kelmscott press edition of all of Chaucer’s writings. Morris designed the whole book himself, from a special typeset called Chaucer to Art Nouveau borders and initials. The woodcuts depicting scenes from Chaucer’s writing was done by a fellow member of Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Edward Burne-Jones.
I always told myself in those innumerable leafing through pages that I would finally read it. But time passed and I read many other things seemingly as distant from Chaucer as I was with him. When I finally started reading for my masters’ course in English literature through a distance learning program, a step that secured my reputation of being mad among many friends, I found Chaucer standing at the gateway. With a deep breadth I plunged into his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. I would have soon given up if it were not for my reader’s ego that refused to cow down. I reflected Chaucer’s apparent insanity of writing in English in an urban aristocratic culture seeped in French and drew inspiration. To start with I found Chaucer’s language a difficult thing to chew, it was full of interesting sounds but difficult words and after reading a rhyming couplet in octosyllabe I found myself having forgotten the previous one. But after a couple of days I became drawn into his writing, I took help of modern English translations now and then through internet, still with some reservations.
The first poem I completed was ‘Book of the duchess’, it got me hooked to medieval romantic poetry or more famously known as poetry of courtly love. Soon I had acquired Norton critical edition of Canterbury Tales having a very helpful glossary that meant I could renounce occasional aid of modern English translations and read Chaucer in original, as I always intended. Before I knew I had got initiated into the odd brilliance of Chaucer’s Middle English. Simultaneously I revisited, with renewed passion Troubadour songs. This second meeting was as fortuitous as the first. Borges writes somewhere that reading a book even multiple times does not imply an encounter between the work and the reader has taken place, it happens suddenly and irrevocably. My reading of Troubadour lyric became such, I was swept off my feet. Modern recordings of Troubadour, Trouvères, Minnesänger and other late medieval European music was filling my hard disk and iPod, Chaucer was carefully kept aside for the time being.
The word ‘Amar’ in Old Occitan (language the troubadours’ wrote in) stands for love. ‘Trobar’ (from which Troubadours’ derived their names) has multiple connotations in different languages. It could be derived from Late Latin tropāre, in turn from tropus, meaning a trope, from Greek τρόπος (tropos), meaning "turn, manner". Or it could be derived from Al-Andalus’ Mozarabic word tarrab, ‘to sing’. Whatever be the etymology, it signified at a primary level the sense of ‘to invent’ or ‘to compose’. Through another possible Latin derivation (from the word turbare) Trobar resonates with later French word trouver, ‘to find’. Trope, to seek, to find, to invent or compose the nebulae of signifiers associated with trobar makes sense only on reading the amazingly rich Troubadour lyrics. And throughout the Troubadour corpus or what survives of it, the words amar and trobar resonate in intricate layers of poetic significance. Dante was hugely influenced by troubadours and wrote about them in multiple places. Chaucer may have not read them in original, but he was a practitioner of a style of poetry, amour courtouis that sought its source in Troubadour lyrics of fin’amor (often translated as true love).
In this blog I want to record and perhaps share some of the joys and pains of reading Late Medieval European writing, chiefly poetry. I want to inscribe in this virtual page some excerpts or words that have astonished me with some personal observations.
