TROBAR CLUS

Trobar clusis a style of TROUBADOUR poetry that is characterized by deliberate obscurity, metrical complexity, allusive and difficult language, and intricacy of rhyme schemes. It is a closed or hermetic style of writing practiced by poets who wished to communicate mainly with those in the courtly audience they deemed intelligent, initiated, and therefore worthy of the troubadour’s song. The term combines the Provençal wordstrobar, or the composition of poetry, andclus, meaning “closed.” The invention of thetrobar clusstyle is often credited to the early 12th-century Provençal poet MARCABRU, though the term was not known in his time. The attitude toward the audience implied by the style goes back even further to the first troubadour, WILLIAM IX, duke of Aquitaine, who ends one of his poems with the comment:

Concerning this vers, I tell you a man is all the more noble

As he understands it, and gets more praise

(Goldin 1973, 39, ll.37–38)

But RAIMBAUT D’ORANGE is probably the key figure in the development and definition of thetrobar clusstyle. In a famousTENSO, or DEBATE POEM, with his contemporary GIRAUT DE BORNELH, concerning the relative merits of different poetic styles, Raimbaut defends his use of theclusstyle by saying that many among his listeners are uneducated, and that to write in a style that pleases all of them would be to lower his standards:

I do not want my songs turned

into such a lot of noise; . . .

fools will never

be able to praise them,

for such have no taste and no concern

for the worthiest and most precious things.

(Goldin 1973, 203, ll. 15–21)

It was a matter of pride, then, for the poet to write in a style inaccessible to the vulgar. Giraut, on the other hand, defends the easier style called theTROBAR LEU. In a study of troubadour eloquence, Paterson generalizes that, after looking at what a number of the troubadours actually say abouttrobar clus, it is impossible to give a very specific definition of the style: “trobar clusis flexible and treated differently by different poets” (Paterson 1975, 93). But the exclusive nature of the verse was influential on DANTE, who speaks with Arnaut Daniel in thePurgatorio, and on later poets like Pound and Eliot.

Bibliography

■ Goldin, Frederick, ed. and trans.Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.

■ Paterson, Linda M.Troubadours and Eloquence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.