Friends in the Times of Troubadours
Part of my class readings for this week’s discussion were hundreds of troubadour poetry, all about love and calling on all the spring time imagery Chaucer’ll riff off of to begin Canterbury Tales, but the point of the matter is one of the other people in the class asked if the fact that all the poets kept referring to their lovers as ‘friends’ was a translation thing or what?
Basically, the answer to that had to do with conceptions of friendship at the time. Common ideas of love that had come into the culture from earlier times included Cicero’s ideas that the best form of love was that of a morally elevating friendship (which he saw could only be b/w two men), so when the troubadours use ‘friend’ to refer to their lover, they are choosing the better term. They’re not distancing the relationship in a ‘oh, we’re just friends’ way, they’re heightening it with a ‘it’s not just physical, we’re achieving an all encompassing connection.’
So the poets would include lines saying “If ever the privilege is granted/Of clasping you beneath the cover,/ Holding you naked as I’ve wanted;” (Raimbaut d’Orange “Non chant per auzel ni per flor”) as well as “And a most precious gift she gave,/ Her loving friendship and her ring” (Guillaume de Poitiers “Ab la dolchor del temps novel”). The friendship is valued more than the sex. In Giraut de Bornelh’s poem “Reis glorios, verais lums e clartatz” all but the first stanza is addressed to either his “sweet friend” or his “fair friend” and the rest of the poem makes it clear that the friendship also includes elements of a physical relationship, but the troubadours just have this view of friendship as better than lust and physical love (I mean, it’s also a major component of love as a thing, and it’s probably very likely that there are translation flaws going on too, but it’s nice to think about that they’d ditched Cicero’s sexist view of friendship as completeness for one that allowed the friendship unity to be with anyone)
