Winchester Lady Chapel - Translating the Cantigas

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The Cantiga de Santa Maria of Alfonso the Wise

[lady chapel]
[right upper frieze]
[winchester]

I discovered that Southampton University has transcriptions of the complete set of Cantigas. Sadly, they're transcriptions, rather than translations. I'm not good at languages, although my French and German are probably better than the average Brit. In other languages, including Japanese, Nepali and Spanish, I can order beer and suchlike. Sadly, these are in Portuguese/Galician, and Portuguese is one of those languages where I normally get the wrong number of beers. Imagine a native Spanish speaker with get-you-by English tackling translations out of Geordie and you won't be far wrong. How was I going to go about tackling the originals of the Cantigas? Regular visitors to this site will, of course, guess that I simply cheated.

My aim wasn't to produce a scholarly translation, but simply to get the feel of the stories - and in one case, that of Cantiga 15, to produce a workable play script. In a fit of over-enthusiasm I promised to stage it. The next thing I knew I'd been phoned up and offered three potential dates - none more than three months away. I can see that it's beautiful, but it's going to be difficult to do it justice. It's a 10-9 rhythm, eight lines per verse, the last line of every verse being a rhyme right the way through the poem.

A little more than "In comes I" is called for here, but for the others a simple prose summery will do, so that's where I started.

Normally, I'd use Systran, aka Babelfish, but unfortunately it doesn't handle twelfth century Castilian too well. The results are a bit like asking it to translate lallans dialect into French. However, my secret weapon is that Systran has infinite patience. Paste a verse from the Cantiga into the thing, and ask it for translations from French, Spanish and Portuguese.

This results in three translations with only a few of the words translated in each. Systran makes a stab at the word order as well, so of course there's a lot of fiddling to do between the three versions, but eventually, you can make a reasonable stab at what's going on. You wouldn't want to read it to anyone, but you can at least work out whether the Cantiga might be related to the caption of one of the pictures from the Lady Chapel.

To get any further requires more sleight of hand. There are a few translations around on the web, including one of Cantiga 42. A stroke of good luck, this, because Cantiga 42 happens to be one of the ones I'm interested in. Then again, the fourth volume of the Cantigas in the university library turns out to be a concordance - in Spanish, admittedly, but I can look up different spellings for words like 'knight'.

That's enough to be able to summarise the stories. Or so I thought. I was slightly deterred by the results. Basil and Mercurius are talking about eating hay? A monastery sinks beneath the waves for a year and a day? I spent several weeks puzzling about this, but apparently that's exactly what's happening.

So, welcome to the world of the Cantigas. Demons and angels walk the earth in various guises. Mary and the devil are playing a complex game of forfeits using human souls as playing pieces. The devil gets the souls of people who dishonour Mary, but if he takes one he's not entitled to, She gets it back. Mary is particularly fond of silk, wine and minstrels (of course, since it was the minstrels who composed the Cantigas). The devil is entitled to the souls of those who throw stones at statues, but not people who die when bits of churches fall on them. And of course, Mary wins extra points by protecting unbelievers like Jews and Syrian philosophers.

Now read on... (items without titles are blank links)