Arnaut Daniel was born into a noble family at the
castle of Riberac in Perigord, France. He was a
member of the court of Richard Coeur de Lion and
was highly regarded as a Provençal poet and TROUBADOUR.
Troubadours flourished from the late-11th
to the late-13th century in southern France and in
northern Spain and Italy, and they acquired a social
influence unprecedented in the history of medieval
poetry. They generally employed complex poetic
structures to explore the theme of love, as Arnaut
does in his poem “Anc ieu non l’aic, mas elha m’a”
(“I don’t hold it, but it holds me”):
. . . I tell a little of what’s in my heart:
fear makes me silent and scared;
tongue hides but heart wants
what on which, in pain, so broods
I languish, but I do not complain
because so far
as the sea embraces the earth
there’s none so kind,
actually
as the chosen one
for whom I long. . . .
This, like many troubadour songs, would have
been set to music and performed in noble dining
halls.
The poetic style of Arnaut’s poems is called the
trobar clus, which used intricate rhymes and complex
metrics.Words of the trobar clus were chosen
more for their rhythmic and rhyming functions
than for their meaning. In terms of form, Arnaut
wrote most of his poems in sestinas, six unrhymed
stanzas of six lines each that involved elaborate
word repetition. He was, in fact, credited with inventing
the sestina.
Arnaut was admired by Petrarch and greatly influenced
DANTE, who imitated his sestina form,
dubbed him the “best crafter of the mother
tongue,” and gave him a prominent place in the Divine
Comedy. In the 20th century, interest in his
work was revived by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,
who translated several of his sestinas.
Only about 18 of Arnaut’s poems survive, and
they are among the best examples of troubadour poetry.
Arnaut is remembered for his ability to write of
love in language that was also flavored by religion,
eroticism, and humor, and to set all of his words to
music that gave his songs complex metrical schemes.
An English Version of Works by
Arnaut Daniel
The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel. Translated by James J.
Wilhelm. London: Taylor & Francis, 1983.
A Work about Arnaut Daniel
Wilhelm, James J.Miglior Fabbro: The Cult of the Difficult
in Daniel, Dante, and Pound. Orono,Maine:
National Poetry Foundation, 1982.