Talk:Cantigas de escárnio e maldizer

Junk

This article is junk - no credit rating could be low enough to describe it. The NOVA site is not a reliable source for the text of the poems and their descriptions of the genres are the scholarly equivalent of garbage. Philologue37 (talk) 13:42, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

You seem really invested in complaining in the English Wikipedia about Portuguese-Galician stuff. I just translated the page from the page on the Portuguese Wikipedia. Not even the page on the Galician Wikipedia is that expanded. Maybe you could complain on any one of those two Wikipedias, since people there would be way more invested in helping, and I suppose you speak one of these languages. What if you actually contribute if you think you can do better than years of user contributions? Also, the article is tagged as Wikipedia:Stub so you can expand it however you want. AnAkemie (talk) 18:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

You need not take it personally. It is simply not worth the trouble to rewrite these articles, especially when that means playing see-saw (with those who undo what I put there and replace it with whatever is available online). You ask why I don't complain on the Portuguese and Galician pages. Why bother doing anything there, when there are so many big fish in miniscule ponds to contend with?

The NOVA edition is largely taken from other editions, without attribution. It is, in my view, deeply dishonest and hopelessly flawed. There is also the new Galician edition of the whole corpus, done by an endogamic group convinced of their omniscience, and not very honest about the sources of their text. Still, incomparably better than the incompetent and shameless NOVA site. https://universocantigas.gal/ Philologue37 (talk) 20:28, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't dislike your contributions; you seem to know the subject, and can be a great help. It's just that you are being more destructive than contributive right now. You don't need to call the article junk, garbage, etc. You can just edit the article with good sources, like you are doing with the Cantiga de amigo (though, honestly, if you are to revert my edits on there, you could at least give an explanation of what the cantiga de amigo is made of; it basically only has explanation about the speakers and few things about its content). I know the flaws in the article already, that's why I added the "stub" tag, so people with good knowledge can expand it. There are other articles on the English Wikipedia that explain the Galician-Portuguese cantigas, but they are also bad, the biggest problem being the lack of sources. That's why I translated this one. I don't know how much guidance we could get on the English Wikipedia about a Galician/Portuguese subject. AnAkemie (talk) 21:15, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry if my comments seem "destructive." My criticism is directed at the sources, not at you. If you want to know more about the cantigas d'amigo, you can definitely find a lot in English - possibly the best stuff. You might begin by reading the introduction to the edition of Pero Meogo cited in the notes. It contains a description of various aspects of the genre (pages 5-14) that is much better than anything I could say (have a look at the bibliography too). And the UniversoCantigas site has, as I recall, a reasonable description of each of the three main genres of the secular lyric. Philologue37 (talk) 22:03, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

You can do a better job at this than me, honestly. You don't even to add that many details, since Wikipedia is supposed to be just a basic introduction. AnAkemie (talk) 22:47, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Since I am not adept at handling wikipedia editing tools, how about I give you the inforation and you edit it and post it? I typed this out. The first part includes some editing; the second part is a verbatim quotation. The reference at the end should be in a footnote.

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(the following is under copyright, so please take care to cite the reference and, as well as you can, edit, paraphrase, etc.

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The cantigas d’ escarnho e de maldizer, about 400 in number, are poetry of insult, mockery and scorn. They are often incorrectly referred to as satire, the difference being that these texts normally insult named individuals, not classes of people. The forms are often complex, there is a variety of personae, and the rhetoric stands roughly midway in complexity between that of the cantigas de Amor and the cantigas de Amigo. Insult or mockery constitutes the essence of this rhetoric, though techniques vary greatly, for instance, praising in order to blame, defending in order to accuse, thanking in order to insult. Obscenity is obligatory in cantigas de maldizer. The physical and social world of the time, almost entirely absent in the other two genres, is present in force, making this genre a mine for the study of social and cultural history. There are sexual themes, mockery of other singers and their songs, social conflicts, legal and political questions, religion (including mockery of the Pope, and blasphemies against Jesus and Mary), and parodies of the other two genres.

In CEM the speaker is usually a man. The addressee may be the object of insult, or a rhetorical ‘you’ serving as a kind of resonating chamber for the discourse, or a party to the action described or enacted. The rhetorical intent is always to insult. The object of the insult is normally an individual, although in some texts a class of people (e.g. infanções) is mocked –and such poems are really satire and not personal insult. The background elements are incomparably more varied than in either of the other two genres, and so too is the present situation and action. The rhetorical techniques by which the insult is articulated are extremely varied, and this allows a brilliant of elocutio hardly possible elsewhere.

The genre that has been left almost untouched by arguments over origins is CEM. Only Lang, among the pioneers, seems to have understood that the poetry of insult must also have had deep roots in Iberia. The question is, how deep? Since the topics are nearly all contemporary (though some might seem ‘timeless’) and the forms as complex as those in Amor (though there are more aaB in CEM than in Amor), how can we address the problem? There is no comparably large body of verse in Occitan, Old French, or Italian; and CEM are certainly not, as Tavani has suggested, a kind of deformation of the sirventes by a people whose ethical and political intelligence was not up to that of poets beyond the Pyrenees. The Galician-Portuguese poetry of insult has nothing whatever to do with the Occitan sirventes, and until and unless a foreign source can be found (which is probably impossible), its roots (as said Lang of Amigo) must be sought ...

at a very deep stratum of Iberian culture. The only explanation for this genre is to see it as a continuation of the Roman customs…

Cohen, Rip (2009). “The Medieval Galician-Portuguese Lyric / The Secular Genres.” In Companion to Portuguese Literature. Ed. Stephen Parkinson, Cláudia Pazos Alonso and T. F. Earle. Warminster: Tamesis, pp. 25-40. Philologue37 (talk) 02:25, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

ps. The only reliable edition to date is: Manuel Rodrigues Lapa, Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer dos cancioneiros medievais galego-portugueses. 2nd edn. Vigo: Galaxia, 1970. // please add that to the reference section. Philologue37 (talk) 02:34, 7 September 2022 (UTC)