Brittanie Jones Is

Brittanie Jones

September 26, 2010

Response to The Women Troubadours

As I read through the poems, I found it hard to grasp the full poetic impact of the words, due to the very literal translation. When I attempted to read through the originals, I found that not having a background in anything, excepting Spanish, made them less than helpful for sleuthing out any of what I felt the translations lacked.

Aside from my issues with the translation, I found a vein of commonality embedded in the work. Because these poems are the only examples of troubadourism that I have read, however, I wasn’t able to determine if the commonality was a theme of the troubadour tradition, an expression common to the women of the era, or a coincidence.

These women seem to take their power in life through courtly love. They seem to not be able to have a choice in choosing their own husbands, yet the way these poems are worded it seems as though they have control in accepting or denying a lover. They play to the medieval ideal of being weak and needing the men, however in some examples its evident that they are still able to end the relationship.

I still find it difficult to make any judgments about the poetry without a broader spectrum of work to choose from. It’s hard to compare and contrast amongst these 23 poems.