I am eleven years into
retirement. That’s long enough to allow
me to make a provisional judgment of how things are going. In a word, or rather two words, things are
going just fine, if you discount certain medical inconveniences. And that is because I recognize the fact that
I am retired. I don’t really understand
the mentality of retirees who insist on still going into the office each day at
the age of ninety or who love to boast that they have never have been so busy
as they are now. I certainly don’t go
into the office every day, and I am much less busy than I used to be. The things I miss about the old professional
life are, on the whole, more than compensated for by the greatly expanded
opportunities to travel and to spend time with family members, especially
grandchildren.
There is nonetheless one aspect of
my old regime for the loss of which I occasionally breathe a metaphoric sigh,
and that is regular attendance at specialized academic conferences. I used to participate in several each year, and
at some annual meetings I was a regular.
It was a wonderful way to keep up, to some degree, with interesting work
in medieval studies, and to keep alive personal relationships with distant
friends and colleagues. It was with real
pleasure, accordingly, that I received notice, a few months ago, that a
conference was coming to me, so to speak.
A general mailing from the Princeton Latin American Studies program
announced its sponsorship, in April of 2018, of a conference called “De
Canciones y Cancioneros: Music and Literary Sources of the Luso-Hispanic Song
Tradition.” It invited the submission of
abstracts for proposed papers—the academic equivalent of a theatrical audition.
The title uses terms from the early
Iberian literary vocabulary. A canción is a song or lyric poem. A cancionero
is a collection or anthology of such poems, a song-book, generally
bringing together pieces by a variety of authors, to be circulated privately
among a group of friends. The concionero was the way that poetry was “published”
before the age of printing and in many circles for a century or more into that
age. Now I make no pretense of being a
scholar of Latin American Studies, and I know not a single one of the
conference’s organizers. But I did feel
that, unbeknownst to said organizers, it had been invented especially if not
exclusively for me. I had after all very
recently published a whole book on a song by the Portuguese poet Luís de
Camões, a song that can reasonably claim to be the most famous lyric of the Iberian
Renaissance, the first partial text of which appeared in an important
sixteenth-century cancionero owned by
one Cristovão Borges.
Well, I made the cut in the chorus
call, which was good; but it is now suddenly April of 2018, which is slightly
worrying in that I have seventy-two hours to finish off a twenty-minute talk to
be delivered on Saturday. I’m just
kidding about the worry. It is really
rather exhilarating to be in this situation.
I once wrote a whole twenty-minute paper while sitting on a toilet seat
in a San Francisco hotel, and my problem here is not finding enough to say but
finding a way of reducing too much to a mere genteel sufficiency.
The Camões poem, often called by
its Portuguese incipit “Sobôlos rios,
” is a complicated “version” of and commentary upon the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the waters
of Babylon”, number 137 in the King James numeration.) The psalm Super
flumina already had a particularly rich exegetical history. The tradition held that all the psalms had
been written by David. But this psalm,
the obvious setting for which is the Babylonian captivity, hundreds of years
after David’s reign, presented difficulties.
The solution of the rabbis was to regard the content of the psalm as
proleptic and prophetic, the content of a future event presented as though
current. For European literary history
the peculiar and unique literary power of the Psalter lay in the fact that while it
was at the center of the corporate prayer life of the universal church, and
especially of the corporate life of the religious orders, each individual psalm
lent itself to personal and private appropriation. Not every penitent had orchestrated the death
of his own army general in order to cover up his adultery with the man’s wife,
as David had; but every penitent could and did sing or say the Miserere (Psalm 51, the most famous of
the penitential psalms) in response to his or her own particular moral
situation. “Miserere” is the first word
spoken in dialogue by the pilgrim Dante in the Commedia, and no other word could be more appropriate to his
situation. The psalm Super flumina Babylonis likewise has
many personal and adaptive remakings in secular and vernacular literature, but
no other is so extraordinary as “Sobôlos rios”.
This “pearl of all poetry” does indeed seem almost prophetically written
with this conference in mind, for the poem's principal subjects are music and song,
and more particularly the Luso-Hispanic tradition of amatory song of which the
poet has been one of the great practitioners and acknowledged masters, and
which he now in palinode must reject.
For me there will be an additional
pleasure quite beyond that I shall doubtless find in the learned musicological
papers. The event will take place in the
Taplin Auditorium, a venue frequently used for student music recitals. Think of it perhaps as the “off Broadway” of
the Princeton music scene. I knew Frank
Taplin—a wealthy and generous philanthropist, and a fine pianist—fairly
well. He had been a Rhodes Scholar just
before the second World War, and among the many cultural contributions of his
later years was his service as President of the Metropolitan Opera, where he
was among other things a notable fund-raiser. I never thought I must one day perform in his
auditorium.
