Translators of medieval texts--and texts in general--deserve more credit and praise than they too often receive. This is especially true for those daring souls that attempt to translate a variety of authors into an anthology, given the inherent challenge of tracing the authorial eccentricities of the original text and finding some measure of comparable form to render into the target language. Richard Zenith’s other work as a translator and scholar of Lusophone literature has already earned him a lifetime’s worth of praise (perhaps two or three), but this revised and expanded edition of his corpus of 113 poems (originally published by Carcanet in 1995) from Galician-Portuguese troubadour songs might add another layer to his well-earned celebratory cake.
The readability of the translated poems is clearly the work of a practiced and celebrated translator. In many instances, I found myself reading the translation, turning to the Gallego-Portuguese text, puzzling over the line’s feeling, and, after a bit of concentrated effort, arriving at very similar conclusions to Zenith. Even in the case of the selected poems from the work composed around Alfonso X of León-Castile, the translations are fluid enough that they fit with the generally accepted “feel” of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, difficult as that often is to describe in a scholarly fashion. In the more adult-themed cantigas de escárnio, Zenith does not censor or wander in circumlocution over the spiciness of the text but presents in bald-faced modern English. Doing so makes its contents more accessible and readable for students and makes it clear that medieval authors were not always singing about the Virgin Mary but operated on a range of literary registers.
The range of the poets selected, within the linguistic confines of the volume, was particularly useful, since more than forty different troubadours are represented in the anthology. Having a broad sample to illustrate the nuance of different genres of poem makes this collection particularly handy for courses on medieval literatures, medieval Iberian studies, or even more focused courses on troubadours and popular culture. Given how affordable the volume is, this recommends it even more for a teaching context. As noted above, the variety of poems and their readability makes it all the more likely that, with such an affordable option that presents the medieval world so openly, students may actually pick Zenith’s volume up and turn more than a single page.
The introductory essay to the volume is quite strong on the genres and style of troubadour poetry but falls a bit short on the historiographical elements that contextualize the same subject. Far too often, one sees the word “Moor” repeated uncritically and the repetition of now-discarded historiographical constructs like “Reconquista” are given no couching or contextualization. Despite these unfortunate oversights--themselves perhaps a holdover from the 1995 edition, when scholarly investigation had not exposed those elements for what they were--the influence of contemporary Andalusi literatures in Arabic is still given a reasonably fair shake in the treatment of the introduction. Of course, the intercommunicability of contemporary Arabophone poetry was more likely at courts with more diverse artistic presences, but these elements are notoriously difficult to trace, even for medieval specialists. It is particularly admirable that Zenith’s introduction is as good as it is, and this is doubly so for him, noting that his training as a modernist would have made much of this scholarship more remote from his usual thought-space.
The notes and appendix of troubadour authors is useful but brief. The descriptions of what is generally known about each of the authors whose work is translated in the volume are readable and straightforward. In a few of the better-documented cases, it might have been useful to include more scholarly references about the authors in a more expansive bibliography. Still, volumes must be affordable, and one suspects that the brief bibliography and lack of references to scholarly material in the biographical appendix was a decision made by the press rather than an explicit authorial choice. Fortunately, the bibliography itself presents the entries for a number of critical editions of the work of many of the troubadours in question, often themselves contained in thecancioneiros that compiled their work in the late medieval period. While one might prefer that that bibliography be a bit more robust, exhaustive bibliographies in volumes that have a clear trajectory of making material accessible rarely survive the editing process. The supplementary material that one would like in a volume as a scholar is rarely that which is looked for by students and causal readers; the same is usually true as an author.
Overall, this is a very nice addition, especially for those whose teaching includes even a share of medieval Iberian literatures. It remains to be seen how much more material might be discovered in the codices of medieval archives that might present yet more material to translate, but the editing of medieval Gallego-Portuguese songs and their availability on the Universo Cantigas project (https://universocantigas.gal/) makes clear that a third edition anthology would be a bigger task still. Of course, as with all anthologies “enough is never enough” for scholarly appetites, even when it satisfies the purposes of the volume that was actually printed. This contribution by Zenith of so many translated poems makes a body of literature (that even some medieval literature specialists might have never considered for their own research) more available to a wider public. That alone would have been a satisfactory addition to a library, but this second expanded version of Zenith’s project is better still.