[Wilhelm is an American medievalist and Pound scholar. In the following excerpt from his introduction to The Poetry of Sordello, he speculates that Dante was inspired by the vitality and variety he found in Sordello's works, as evidenced in the invective satire of the troubadour's sirventes, the political diatribe of his "Lament for Lord Blacatz," and the skepticism of his debate poems. Wilhelm also addresses the pronounced influence of Sordello on later poets, including Browning and Pound.]

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT

The poetry of Sordello seems to have been rated more highly by other poets than by critics. Dante, in his De vulgari eloquentia, singles out Sordello as a man who "had great eloquence, not only in the writing of poetry, but also in any number of other forms" (1.15.2), by which he must have meant prose works that did not survive. Dante also mentions that Sordello did not find his native Mantuan dialect conducive to the writing of great poetry, and so he abandoned it for Provençal.

Clearly the most influential work of Sordello was not any of his love poems, but his well-known "Lament for Lord Blacatz" (No. 26). Sordello was not the first person to write a dirge in Provençal; in fact, the first troubadour whose work survives, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, wrote a beautiful and compelling lament on his own future demise (Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz; ed. Bond). The genre of planctus in Latin (planh in Provençal) was already well established, existing as a secular counterpart to funeral services for great men; but the vigor that Sordello brought to this frequently clichéd kind of poem is obvious. Instead of indulging in mere repetitive praise, Sordello boldly turned his poem into a political diatribe in which he railed out against the decadent princes of the world. It was doubtlessly this zeal that won him the role as cicerone for the Vale of Negligent Rulers in Dante's Purgatorio, Canto 7, where Dante also put Charles of Anjou. But since the dirge is so different from Sordello's love poems, which imitate the standard patterns of earlier troubadours, it has always been rated higher.

The twelve surviving love poems of Sordello are, however, anything but trite. It is true that they employ rather fixed styles of expression that had been established in the tradition from the time of Duke William at the turn of the twelfth century onward. The male persona usually laments his bereaved condition, since he is not rewarded by his lady for his "fine love" (fin 'amors), and he almost seems to wallow in a state of masochistic pleasure. This is especially obvious in the third stanza of Poem 7:

I'm killing myself in love and torturing myself
  with grief

For a joy that alienates me, and mercy doesn't
  help;
But I shouldn't complain at all on my behalf
Because, since I'm hers, she can, if she wants,
  do me in;
And if she kills me, she doesn't offend me one
  bit,
Because I'll take all the damages.…

This is the dying gasp of a rhetoric that was once vital, witty, and charged with a dialectic of love that contained much of the wit of Ovid. But by the thirteenth century, after the Albigensian Crusade had reduced the South to misery and servitude, the spirit and the liveliness had disappeared from most Provençal song. The fact that the music did not survive also weakens the case for originality. Still, many of the lines are extremely memorable, as in Poem 3, line 17: "When I think deeply in my rich meditations.…"Poem 1 has a lovely refrain for every stanza. Poem 2 contains the elaborate metaphor of the lady as a lodestar in stanza 3. Everywhere in this poetry, the diction is relaxed and the syntax uncluttered. We should not be searching for inventive metaphors or neologisms here, since Sordello wrote in the style of trobar pla (plain composition), not in the trobar clus (closed or hermetic composition) of Arnaut Daniel and Raimbaut of Orange. Ezra Pound, who was drawn at first to Arnaut, said in the revised edition of his Spirit of Romance: "A more mature judgment, or greater familiarity with Provençal idiom might lead one to prefer the limpid simplicity of some of Sordello's verses". But simplicity is often a difficult thing both to admire and to define.

Perhaps the most underrated parts of the Sordello corpus are his debate poems (tensos, partimens) in which other people supposedly speak (whether other people actually did contribute their parts of the stanzas is a moot point). No. 13, the already mentioned debate with Joan (John), is a hilarious exchange of insults in the jongleur tradition, recalling the patter of modern vaudeville; Joan accuses Sordello, in fact, of being a lowly performer, and Sordello only half-heartedly refutes this. No. 14 concerns the nature of love, in which Sordello takes the role of the hedonist (in direct contrast with the high idealization of his love songs). Similarly, in Poem 17, a debate with Bertran d'Alamanon, Sordello opts for pleasure in love over glory in arms. These poems, along with many of the fragments, offer a pragmatic, even a cynical side to Sordello's character that has to be balanced with the sometimes cloying idealization of the chansons. The dialectic, in short, was no longer in a single poem toward the end of the troubadour tradition, but had gravitated into different genres.

Another group of poems that may well have interested Dante are the sirventes (the moral and political satires). No. 19 is a stern moral warning to Sir Raymond (probably Berengar) to rule his state well. No. 20 is a "Satire Against Three Disinherited Lords," which perpetuates the vigorous role of the secular moralist that had been established by Bertran de Born in the twelfth century. No. 21 extols the chivalric value of mezura (control, temperance), and ties in neatly with the long Ensenhamen d'onor (Instruction in Honor), as well as with Poem 39. No. 22, a diatribe against the evil rich, again sounds like Bertran or Marcabru, while Poems 23 to 25 are three vitriolic attacks on an erstwhile friend, Peire Bremon Ricas Novas, who almost seems to have stumbled into Sordello's disfavor. Here the invective is equal to any to be found in the great Roman satirists, such as Horace or Martial, who were probably as well known to Sordello as they were to Dante, and this bitterness is not at all unlike that to be found in the great Florentine himself.

In fact, if one considers the entire corpus of Sordello's work, it shows that Sordello shared many of the same interests with that later writer of epic: love, chivalry or ceremonious behavior, and morality. It is especially this last category that seems to form a bond. Despite the limited manuscript history of the Instruction in Honor, many people feel that Dante knew this poetic treatise which, like Brunetto Latini's Tesoretto, bridges the secular and religious worlds, just as Dante's Divine Comedy does. In conclusion, although many scholars have puzzled about why Dante should have found Sordello so interesting, if one reads the man's whole work, one sees that there was no one in the Italy of his day who was writing works in any language with such variety and vigor. If one then adds Brunetto's moral epic for the serious dimension sometimes lacking in Sordello, one can see two important foundations for Dante's own work. Sordello is in no way as profound as later poets such as Guido Cavalcanti or Guido Guinizelli, who allied the lyric with Neoplatonic or Aristotelian philosophy, but without Sordello and Brunet-to before him, Dante would have found his career much more difficult to establish.

SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

The sources of Sordello are, as has been said, the whole preceding Provençal troubadour tradition. When Sordello began to write in the early thirteenth century, that tradition, which had flourished in the twelfth, was now on the wane—thanks to the natural attrition of all movements but more cogently because of the brutal Albigensian Crusade, which had been waged by Rome and Paris on the men of the Languedoc. As an Italian, Sordello did not necessarily feel out of place with a language and a tradition where the competition was now decidedly second-class. Instead of viewing him as part of this decadence, however, we should see him as a pivotal figure with respect to the blossoming literature of Italy, since he would be idolized as a local talent who excelled in what had been a foreign endeavor. It is clear that part of Dante's tribute to Sordello stemmed from the fact that the Mantuan had "put the Italians on the map."

Since Sordello elected to write in the "plain style" rather than the "closed style" of troubadour composition, he also helped to set a tone for the future. Following in the footsteps of Bernart de Ventadorn rather than Arnaut Daniel, Sordello must have eventually convinced Dante and his circle that more was to be gained by writing in a manner that was clear, limpid, and easily perceptible than in the difficult, abstruse manner that Dante flirted with in his Rock-Lady Sestina or Guido Cavalcanti in his Donna mi prega. Although some scholars have seen an indebtedness in Sordello to certain passages of Peire Vidal or to Bertran de Born or others, these are isolated and not always authoritatively established. Sordello was too good a poet to be merely imitative, the way Peire Bremon Ricas Novas and Bertran d'Alamanon were in copying his "Dirge for Blacatz."

The influence of Sordello is, in fact, much more interesting to study than are his sources. Obviously his most important influence was on Dante himself, and, through the Florentine, upon later generations of Italians who somehow took the Mantuan to be more important than he actually was, both historically and aesthetically. A prime reason for Sordello's expanded reputation is surely the dramatic way in which he is presented in the Comedy. Vergil and Dante are beginning to climb Mount Purgatory, when they see a shade up ahead who causes Vergil to say:

"But look at that soul there, sitting
All by himself, staring at us both:
He will show us the quickest way."
We walked over to him; O Lombard soul,
Who sat there so high and mighty,
And in the movement of your eyes so noble and
  slow!
He did not say a word to us,
But let us move up, only eying us
The way a lion looks when it is crouching.
Then Vergil drew forward to him,
Asking him to show us the easiest passage up;
And he did not respond to this demand,
But asked him instead where we came from
And how we were; and my beloved leader
  began,
"Mantua …"—when the shade, drawn into
  himself,
Arose from the place where he sat,
Saying, "O Mantuan, I am Sordello,
From your same country!" And the two
  embraced. (6.58-75)

In short, Dante makes Sordello an important link with the Roman past, and he also makes him a patriot of his native country. This identification would not be lost in the next century when one Aliprandi of Mantua would write a rhymed chronicle of his city in which Sordello would emerge as a kind of folk hero, far more a warrior like Ezzelino da Romano than a poet. Dante himself obviously appreciated Sordello's handling of language, as the reference in De vulgari shows, but the moral vigor of the man is what comes through most strongly in the literary portrait, especially since Sordello contrasts with the lazy, negligent rulers whom he points out in the Vale of Princes. As a result, later Mantuan chroniclers would make him more a man of action than a creator of works.

Aliprandi, for example, in his Aliprandina (ca. 1415) has him write a book in his youth called Thesaurus thesaurorum (Treasure of Treasures; obviously modeled after Brunetto Latini's Tesoretto), which may have been the Ensenhamen under a different name; but he goes on to involve Sordello, whom he sees as a member of the Visconti family, in exploits throughout Europe, has him fall in love with a certain Beatrice, sister of Ezzelino, and, after many exploits and escapades, he marries her and settles in Mantua. Then Platina in his Historia urbis Mantuae continued the same tradition, making Sordello the speaker of a famous patriotic address against the incursions of the Paduans. The notoriously fantastic-minded Jehan de Nostredame in his Lives of the Most Famous and Ancient Provençal Poets (1575) clung more closely to the corpus of Sordello's work, and, having his own roots in France, told a story that was much closer to the truth, although sloppy in its dating.

The legend of Sordello continued in the 1600s, but in the Age of Reason, a certain amount of skepticism crept in. The scholar Giovanni Tiraboschi in his History of Italian Literature (1788) complained about the discrepancies in the presentations of Aliprandi and Platina, and this led in the Romantic Era to Friedrich Diez's questioning the whole matter of Sordello's life as traditionally presented. His monumental Leben und Werke der Troubadours (2nd ed., 1882) presented an admirable portrait of Sordello that was far removed from fantasy.

Meanwhile, however, the legend was attracting authors as well as critics and historians. In 1840, the young Robert Browning published his Sordello, which, although it has its roots in Dante, is entirely a production of the imagination. This extremely difficult work, usually considered the most obscure in the Browning corpus, again offers a dashing courtier who is in love with a woman named Palma (a curious change from Cunizza) and who is deeply embroiled in the Guelph-Ghibelline politics of the thirteenth century. The poem is difficult not only because of its syntax but also because Browning, however he interpreted the confusing politics of Lombardy and Romany, did not succeed in making the issues clear to most readers.

Probably the staunchest defender of Browning's Sordello was Ezra Pound, who helped to revolutionize the poetic practices of the twentieth century. In his early correspondence, Pound repeatedly urged people to read Browning's poem, although he did not make the reasons for doing it clear. Pound's own Canto 2 of his Cantos opens with the line "Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one Sordello!" This is actually a rather playful vaunt, in which Pound asserts that his own reading of the man has to stand up against that of all other interpreters. What Pound admires Sordello for is exactly what excites Dante: the man's vigor, and, despite his amatory excesses, his dedication to a life of action.

Pound tries to capture the energy of Sordello's life in lines that close Canto 36, which consists largely of Pound's own translation of Cavalcanti's complex explanation of the nature of love, Donna mi prega. There is then a line in Latin: "Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu" (Sacred, sacred, the illumination in coitus), underscoring the importance of the sexual act, which Pound sees Sordello and Cavalcanti promoting. Then follow two lines from Vida B and a conflated paraphrase of Charles of Anjou's donation of land in the Abruzzi, followed by the line from Song 3, verse 17, that haunted Pound (in English: "When I think deeply in my rich meditations"):

Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana
             of a castle named Goito.
"Five castles!"
"Five castles!"
               (king giv' him five castles)
"And what the hell do I know about dye-
  works?!"
His Holiness has written a letter:
             "CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou.…
… way you treat your men is a scandal.…"
Dilectis miles familiaris … castra Montis
  Odorisii
Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile
In partibus Thetis.… vineland

  land tilled
  the land incult
  pratis nemoribus pascuis

  with legal jurisdiction
his heirs of both sexes,
… sold the damn lot six weeks later,
Sordellus de Godio.
    Quan ben m'albir e mon ric pensamen. (36)

Pound adds Cunizza to the troubadour in a passage that closes Canto 6, along with selections from and the names of witnesses to her famous will that freed some slaves. He opens by quoting Vida B and then closes this portrait with his own translation or free paraphrase of the first stanza of Poem 3, Atretan deu ben chantar finamen:

E lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana,
Son of a poor knight, Sier Escort,
And he delighted himself in chançons
And mixed with the men of the court
And went to the court of Richard Saint Boniface
And was there taken with love for his wife

  Cunizza, da Romano,
That freed her slaves on a Wednesday
Masnatas et servos, witness
Picus de Farinatis
and Don Elinus and Don Lipus
    sons of Farinato de'Farinati
"free of person, free of will
free to buy, witness, sell, testate."
A marito subtraxit ipsam …
    dictum Sordellum concubuisse:
    "Winter and Summer I sing of her grace,
    As the rose is fair, so fair is her face,
    Both Summer and Winter I sing of her,
    The snow makyth me to remember her." (6)

To Pound, Cunizza's great act of generosity redeems a wayward life, just as Sordello's lines of poetry redeem him too.

It is doubtful that, without Dante, Sordello would have been so important to succeeding generations; but with that help, Sordello has become a recurrent factor in Western literature, and he promises to fascinate and inspire other generations in the future.