trobaire.org

a collection of literature from poets, bards, songwriters, and skalds in the SCA

Me trob lonh en un regne estranh

olivier's picture
olivier
Poem (Canso): 
Me trob lonh en un regne estranh;
N’ai nien mai m’abit et mon cor.
Le ciel ne.m done mai planh:
Mas me mantene en route m’amor.
Com rennemb printems can en pre
Nos paissem et nos plazem ben.
I’err en une riba fere, sans fe;
Me mirara, volerai pen!
Bel crei que ton gentil baizer
Qu’esper a rendre gai a te.
Preg que me pensaras en ser;
Me visitaras en reve.
Translation: 
Now I am in a foreign land, away from home;
I have no possessions but the coat I wear and the heart within.
The stars above offer me no guidance, but rather lament:
Yet my beloved keeps me upon the road.
How I recall the warm spring, when on the grass
Well did we have our fill of food and pleasure.
Now I am cast onto a distant shore, despairing;
Had I your eye upon me, love, how I would want for nothing!
Fondly do I think upon your gentle kiss,
Which I hope to return joyfully to you.
I pray you think of me in the evening
And visit me in a dream.
Documentation / Explanation (Razo): 

This is the second of several troubadour love poems written for my (at the time, good friend; now, wife) Benefse al-Rashida. The idea behind these poems was to write standard troubadour poems but basing their imagery on Arabic love poetry from the same timeframe; a number of studies in the past fifty years have suggested that the earliest troubadours (like William IX of Aquitaine) were influenced by eastern music and poetry - most especially that the 'unattainable' women in troubadour poems could refer to Muslim women that would be socially untouchable by the troubadours, on both sides of the equation.

My first exposure to this idea was in Lynn Ramey's Christian, Saracen, and Genre in Medieval French Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001) though the idea has been proposed by various scholars for several decades (along with the notion that the 'lady' in troubadour love poetry is just an allegory for salvation in the Holy Land or a quest to discover one's own self).

A slightly Middle English-icized version of the poem exists in a 15th c. (or so) book I made as Now am I in a stronge land.