3 - Contrafacture and Translation: The Prisoner's Lament

Summary

The thirteenth-century double-texted, bilingual song known as ‘The Prisoner’s Lament’ (‘Eynz ne soy ke pleynte fu’/ ‘Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non’) is one of those chance survivals that seem infinitely precious. It gives us not only a single witness of a particular song but also, potentially, a teasing glimpse of a whole musical, poetical and cultural practice associated with it. I say ‘teasing’ because, surviving as a single addition to an apparently unrelated manuscript, it is, on the other hand, confoundingly context-less, yielding few clues as to why it was written down, who sang it, how and to whom. This may well explain its relative neglect by musicologists and literary scholars alike. I would like to explore one way in which it can be made to speak to us – apart from its not inconsiderable charm as a song to perform and hear. What it offers us is a French and an English lyric that are close and nonetheless idiomatic translations (and contrafacts) of each other: a relative rarity in this time and cultural context. Both together, in turn, are a contrafact, but not strictly speaking a translation, of the well-known, internationally famous Latin lament of the Virgin under the cross, ‘Planctus Ante Nescia’ (henceforth referred to as ‘Planctus’). Given its isolated standing, we cannot hope to derive a coherent paradigm of language use and poetic translation from the ‘Prisoner's Lament’ (henceforth ‘Lament’). But close attention to the song, and the various transformations it encodes, nonetheless provides us multiple opportunities to glimpse thirteenth-century translation practice by and for multilingual speakers. By extension, it also suggests that the common medieval (and later) practice of contrafacture – the re-texting of an existing melody – might be a fruitful area of study for historians and theoreticians of translation. In this case, I would argue that the contrafacture is in fact crucial to the translation: the tune provides a necessary intermediary, a catalyst for making the linguistic transfer happen at all.

Translations, transmissions, transpositions of various sorts are of course ubiquitous in medieval culture, even foundational to it: the idea of translatio studii is, after all, one of the chief ways in which medieval intellectuals conceive of their own culture. It also stands to reason that in a polyglossic language environment like post-Conquest England, some form of inter-lingual translation must have happened routinely in most people's daily lives, including in contexts where precise equivalence was not only aimed for but absolutely crucial, such as