The edition is by Graça Videira Lopes, long the most recognized specialist in Portuguese satirical literature, especially with regard to medieval poetry. Poet and essayist, Graça Videira Lopes offers us here a book that was missing and which deals with laughter, love and politics in the world. General Songbookby Garcia de Resende. As he writes in the introduction, «the poetry that was written in Portugal at the time of the great sea voyages of discovery and conquest, that is, from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the first decade of the 16th century, remains, for the most part, little known to current readers.» This is the central objective of this anthology, noting that the so-called General Songbookor «de Resende», is, without a doubt, one of the great monuments of Portuguese culture from the Expansion period and, precisely because it is so, it offers us as a – the most reliable – literary document where satire, loving expression and politics were the subject of literature. Do not forget, in fact, the following: it is up to the Cancioneiro organized by Garcia de Resende to be the repository of a social and historical time that, strictly speaking, is of time, of the time itself of what it deals with. The epic of Camões, from 1572, as Graça Videira Lopes rightly says, talks about successes that happened more than a century before, and the speeches, disputes or controversies of the late 15th century and early 16th century, are in the General Songbook that we will find them. Camões had the privilege of reading from a distance (and inventing from a distance) a time that was not his own, but Resende had the inaugural gesture (read the prologue) of laying down in print what, in those dizzying times, could easily have remained absolutely dispersed.
In this edition we will find compositions of various types. However, it is the loving expression that many will immediately recognize. Poems such as the famous «Lady leave so sad/ My eyes for you, my dear», by João Roiz de Castelo Branco, which explores a topic – the eyes – with deep classical and nouveau style reminiscence (from Catullus to Petrarch); poems by Bernardim Ribeiro and Sá de Miranda (even before the “modernist” revolution of “dolce stil nuovo”, which the sonnet’s introducer imported from his trip to Italy and his reading of Spanish poets); poems of circumstance, troves of «profit and example», political compositions and also erotic lyricism, all of this will be, as a whole, «things of fun and kindness», that is, things that are «the most eloquent testimony of the living, complex and contradictory environment of the Portuguese courts of the time.» (p.12). A fact that, although it can be understood, is still important: the Portuguese courts liked poetry, even if, as the anthologist says, they understood it as a form of entertainment. Poetry of enjoyment, of play, jocular poetry, without a doubt, but poetry where reprimand and criticism were no less important. The approximately 300 authors who make up the General Songbook prove how, in those times, the art of thunder was equally essential to the brilliance of “a great prince”. The poetic technique put at the service of this prince, this is what is also evident in this collection: the cultivated forms are proof that poetry was a «public form of ingenuity», that is, «a form of socialization» where laughter, frolicking, as well as motejar (making poems based on a motto and writing the respective gloss), were training required of any courtier. And note: motejar, which initially has the meaning of responding to a motto, or glossing a motto, will later come to mean “mocking”, which reflects this symbiosis between the trick of knowing how to write verses and the satirical intention that animated that intention.
Graça Videira Lopes, draws attention to collective compositions, at a time when this art seems, he writes, «to be made by everyone»: the poets of the courts of Afonso V, D. João II and D. Manuel I and underlines the fact that it is in this songbook that we find the first reference to the discovery of Brazil, jokingly fixed. Another curiosity about this poetry, which was born in an environment of free circulation of ideas and products, is that it evolves into ambiguous forms of poetry. It is clear that, as we read this anthology, there are areas of silence, or of careful or vigilant messaging. From the reign of d. João II, political matters now demand that we write about them with a certain parsimony, or in a more obscure or difficult key. The danger of talking too much arises: «The news of great weight / you will not expect it from me / because you know that it is closed / whoever is in Almeirim / will have him arrested». However, this does not mean that events such as the murder of the Duke of Viseu at the hands of King D. João II himself were not treated poetically (poem by coudel-mor Fernão da Silveira). It is true that poems with a political content will be the least frequent, but it is worth paying attention to a composition by Luís de Azevedo, one of the oldest at the meeting, where we will read very unflattering verses from the figure of Infante D. Henrique, who would have been deeply involved in the death of D. Pedro, in Alfarrobeira.
Essential and timely book published with the seal of Assírio & Alvim, let us travel to that convulsive and thought-provoking time: our sixteenth century to be measured by the ruler of discoveries. The expulsion of the Jews, by no means consensual, but alongside it the anti-Semitism that we read in Álvaro de Brito Pestana; the verses about the tailors of Lisbon, much of what we read here makes us confront the two visions of History: that of the courts, on the one hand, this official vision; on the other, the unofficial view. The same can be said for the central subject of these reigns and reflected here: the Discoveries, the policy of expansion. On the one hand, the verses of D. João de Menezes, and in response to these, those of Duarte da Gama, without forgetting the letter from João Roiz de Castelo Branco to Antão da Fonseca, a «masterpiece of subtlety and critical intelligence». Living pictures of everyday life, “cosmopolitan and multicolored” Lisbon bursts forth from these pages with singular relevance.
Important note: this is a printed book, at a time of early development of typography in Portugal, despite the first printed book dating back to 1487 (there are reports of books printed in the previous decade). THE General Songbooknow among us, would have had a precedent: the incunabulum that would contain the Coplas of the world’s contempt by Constable D.Pedro, and which Garcia de Resende republishes in his anthology. But the reader should be aware that Resende’s model was General Songbook by Hernando del Castillo; model to which Resende opposes, in this time of competition between us and Castile, this document that is a monument.