Sicilian School

From Freepedia

In a literary context, the term Sicilian School identifies a small community of Sicilian, and to a lesser extent, mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his court, the Magna Curia. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than three-hundred poems of courtly love between 1230 and 1266, the experiment being continued after Frederick's death by his son, Manfredi. This school included Enzo, king of Sardinia, Pier delle Vigne, Inghilfredi, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, Jacopo d'Aquino, Giacomino Pugliese, Giacomo da Lentini, Arrigo Testa and Frederick II himself.

These poets drew their inspiration from the troubadour poetry of Southern France, which applied the feudal code of honor to the relation between a man (acting as the vassal) and a woman (acting as king or superior). This is a reversal of the traditional role of women, traditionally dependent on men, and marks a new awareness in medieval society: the decadence of feudalism with the increasing power of the middle class, causes a shift in the reading public. More women were reading books than ever before and poetry tried to adapt to the point of view and more active role in society of this new readership. These features are also shared with French poetry, then very influential in Italy. What distinguishes the Sicilian school from the troubadours, however, is the introduction of a kinder, gentler type of woman than that found in their French models; one who was nearer to Dante's madonnas and Petrarch's Laura, although much less personal and more conventional than these later types. The poems hardly characterise real, individual women, but the style and language is new, since the Sicilians (as Dante called them) invented an entirely new language, one that can be called national and that is further enriched by new words of Latin and French origin.

Contents

The work of a roving school

"It is lyric poetry to be in the forefront of literature, inspiring a widespread enthusiam whose effects will be felt for centuries. The initial boost given by the Sicilian poets from the Svevs' court, the first to use a standardised vernacular to make art poetry will be passed on to many others: and all of them, not just the pedantic imitators of the Siculo-Tuscan school but also Guinizzelli, the poets of Dolce Stil Novo and more widely all writers of verse, will have to deal, though by different degrees, with the Sicilian models, so that some peculiarities will be assimilated into standard usage of Italian poetry." (Bruno Migliorini, Storia della letteratura italiana)

Though yet confined to a few notaries and dignitaries of the emperors, such poetry shows for the first time uniform linguistic traits and a richness in vocabulary far exceeding that of the Sicilian dialect(s) by which it was inspired. TheMagna curia was not based in any given city, but always moving across Southern Italy, a fact which helped the school avoid the temptation of choosing any local dialect as the starting point for their new language. That is why the new standard turned up to be a koinè, a melting pot of many different vernaculars.

Style and subject-matter

Though the Sicilian School is generally considered conventional in theme or content it rather "stands out for his refined lexicon, near to the style of trobar clus and for the wise treatment of figures of speech and metaphors of stylnovistic taste taken from natural philosophy" (Cesare Segre). There is a visible move towards neoplatonic models, which will be embraced by Dolce Stil Novo in the later 13th century Bologna and Florence, and more markedly by Petrarch. Unlike the Northern Italian troubadours, no line is ever written in French. Rather, the French repertoire of chivalry terms is adapted to the Siculo-Italian phonetics and morphology, so that many new Italian words are actually coined, some adapted, but none really loaned. A most famous specimen is Io m'aggio posto in core by Giacomo da Lentini, who apparently ispired the movement. Giacomo da Lentini is also widely credited by scholars (as Francesco Bruni, Cesare Segre et. al.) for inventing the sonnet, a literary form later perfected by Dante and, most of all, Petrarch. He uses it in a number of poems. We quote here the most famous that probably inspired the whole school:

Io m'aggio posto in core a Dio servire,
com'io potesse gire in paradiso,
al santo loco c'aggio audito dire,
o' si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso.
sanza mia donna non vi voria gire,
quella c'ha blonda testa e claro viso,
che sanza lei non poteria gaudere,
estando da la mia donna diviso.
Ma no lo dico a tale intendimento,
perch'io pecato ci volesse fare;
se non veder lo suo bel portamento
e lo bel viso e 'l morbido sguardare:
che 'l mi teria in gran consolamento,
veggendo la mia donna in ghiora stare.

Translation:

I have a place in my heart for God reserved,
So that I may go to Heaven,
To the Holy Place where, I have heard,
People are always happy and joyous and merry.
I wouldn't want to go there without my lady
The one with fair hair and pale complexion,
Because without her I could never be happy,
Being separated from my lady.
But I do not say that with blasphemous intent,
As if I wanted to sin with her:
If I did not see her shapely figure
And her beautiful face and tender look:
Since it would greatly comfort me
To see my woman shine in glory.

The downside of Sicilian poetry

The less remarkable feature of the Sicilian poetry was probably the political censure imposed by Frederick: literary debate was confined to courtly love. In this respect, the poetry of the north, though stuck to the langue d'oïl, provided fresher blood in the field of satire. The north was fragmented into communes or little city-states which had a relatively democratic self-government, and that is precisely why the sirventese genre, and later, Dante's Divina Commedia bloomed and prospered. A sirventese is, in effect, eminently political: it usually refers to battles and military or social enemies, the author often being the soldier or the knight involved in the strife. Though he lived later, and wrote in Italian, Dante belonged to this environment: his Commedia will be full of invectives against contemporary leaders, princes and popes as Boniface VIII, largely responsible for his exile from Florence and the feuds that tore it apart.

Realism and parody: Cielo d'Alcamo

Though lyric poetry prevailed at Frederick's (and later Manfredi's) court, it is at this time that we have an interesting exception in Rosa fresca aulentissima (transl: "Fresh good-smelling rose"), widely known as Contrasto and attributed to Cielo d'Alcamo, about which modern critics have much exercised themselves. This Contrasto is written in a Sicilian dialect close to that spoken in the city of Messina. The subject is a humorous fight between two young lovers, a kind of poetry quite common in the middle ages (as contrasti or pastorelle). It is about a young suitor who sneaks into the garden of a young lady from a rich Sicilian family and secretly declares his love to her. He then tries to seduce the girl with his one-liners; she berates him for his "ill" intentions and keeps him at bay to protect her honor, but her prudeness proves eventually to be just a love game: she gives in completely to his bold advances. However, the language uses much of the courtly language of lyric poetry and the result is a parody of the Sicilian School's clichés. The Contrasto belongs to the time of the emperor Frederick II (it can be dated between 1230 and 1250, but probably closer to the latter), and is also important as a proof that there once existed a popular, independent of literary, poetry prior to Frederick's times. Now most critics agree that the Contrasto of Cielo d'Alcamo is probably a scholarly re-elaboration of some lost popular song. It is perhaps the closest to a kind of poetry that has perished or which was smothered by the Sicilian literature of Frederick's. Its distinguishing feature was its hilarity and down-to-earthedness as opposed to the abstract verse of the Sicilian School. But it has been argued that its style betrays a profound knowledge of Frederick's movement and some critics have hinted the man who penned it must have been acquainted with or even been part of, the court itself. Given the highly satiric and erotic vein Cielo d'Alcamo may well be a fictitious name. His Contrasto shows vigor and freshness in the expression of feelings: Such "low" treatment of the love-theme shows that its subject-matter is certainly popular. This poem sounds real and spontaneous, marked as it is by the sensuality characteristic of the people of southern Italy.

Linguistic notes on the Sicilian standard

The standard of the Sicilian school combines many traits typical of the Sicilian, French, Latin and to a lesser, but not negligible extent, Apulian and certain southern dialects. Such a melting pot greatly helped the new Italian language: the French suffixes -ière and -ce, for example, generated hundreds of new Italian words in -iera and -za as it. riv-iera ("river") or costan-za ("constancy"). Such affixes would be then adopted by Dante and his contemporaries, and handed on to future generations of Italian writers. Dante's styles illustre, cardinale, aulico, curiale were partly developed from his close study of the Sicilian School which he quotes widely in his studies, especially in his De Divina Eloquentia. The Sicilian school was later re-founded by Guittone d'Arezzo in Tuscany following the death of Manfredi, Frederick's son, so many of these poems were later copied in manuscripts that widely circulated in Florence. This first standard in which they were written, was, however, modified in Tuscany. In fact, Tuscan scriveners perceived the five-vowel system used by southern italian dialects (i, e, a, o, u) as a seven-vowel one (i.e. i, é, è, a, ó, ò, u). As a consequence, many texts Italian students read in their anthologies today contain lines that do no longer rhyme with each other (sic. -i > tusc. -é, sic. -u > tusc. -ó). Tuscans also changed words as gloria [pron. glòreea] to ghiora, aju [pron. àyoo] ("I have) to aggio [pron. adjo] etc. Though some original texts have been restored to their original Sicilian, we must see such remakes only as tentative reconstructions of originals that, unfortunately, may have been lost forever. Dante and his contemporaries would take this newborn language a step further, expanding and enriching it with even more words of Latin and French, and Florentine origin, carefully working on the style to create volgare illustre, a higher standard quite close to today's polite Italian.

See also

References

  • Migliorini, B., Storia della letteratura italiana. Firenze, Sansoni, 1987
  • Giudice A., Bruni, G., Problemi e scrittori della letteratura italiana. Torino, Paravia, 1983.
  • AA.VV., Antologia della poesia italiana, ed. C.Segre and C. Orsola. Torino, Einaudi, 1999.
  • Bruni, F., L'Italiano: testi e documenti. Torino, Utet, 1984.
  • AA.VV. Rimatori del '200 e del '300, ed. M. Vitale. Torino, UTET, 1989.
Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Sicilian_School.html"


Views
Personal tools
In other languages
Similar Links