In the preface to his Six Troubadour Songs, W. D. Snodgrass writes: "In the last two decades, our vision of the Provençal Troubadour and his songs has almost completely changed. Gone is the wistful figure singing sweetly in the twilight of his spiritual devotion to a far-off, idealized lady. Under the impact of certain crucial musicologists and performers—especially Thomas Binkley's Studio for Early Music in Munich—we have accepted a heavy Arabic influence in this music; nowadays, our performances sound more and more like belly-dance music or, more accurately, the Andalusian music of North Africa. Our sense of the texts has altered comparably. By now, we are almost ready to say that Troubadour songs have only two subjects: one, let's go Crusading and kill lots of Moors; two, let's go get in the boss's wife."

Now this is ridiculous on several counts. Naturally in recent studies of medieval Occitanian literature and music we have experienced a movement toward deromanticization similar to what we know in other sectors of scholarship; but no serious student would go as far as Snodgrass suggests. In the first place, what's wrong with Arabic music?… I know nothing of Thomas Binkley, but if he has discovered a Moorish explicit element in Mediterranean art, thought, and life, he has discovered what has been know to everyone concerned for hundreds of years. (p. 383)

The first translation in Snodgrass's booklet is of the famous "L'Aventura del Gat," by Guilhèm de Peitieu, which is uncharacteristic of the poetry as a whole. It is out-and-out bawdry…. But bawdry it may be, sophisticated vulgarity it is not—and the difference is essential. (p. 384)

[Snodgrass's translation] is much too overwritten…. But mainly the tone is wrong. I don't think it is simply the similarity of stanza forms that makes me think of Robert Burns; not the Burns of the lovely folk restorations, but the Burns of the comic narratives, epistles, and satires. Yet it's a lang, lang way from 12th-century France to 18th-century Scotland. And the translation shows further overlays as well: Byronesque irony, the jiggery of The Ingoldsby Legends, something of Carroll and Lear, a good deal of the archness of Samuel Hoffenstein and Noel Coward; in short, the culture of "high pops" for the past two hundred years. So it goes throughout Snodgrass's versions.

Toward the end of the poem Guilhèm says, "Tant las fotèri, m'ausiretz, / cent e quatre-vint uèit fes." Snodgrass writes: "I screwed them, fairly to relate / A full one hundred eighty eight." Forget "fairly to relate" and "a full"; forget the jingly meter; "fotèri" means "fucked," a good old Indo-European word (see Partridge, Origins). Why does Snodgrass write "screwed"? I presume exactly because it has the quality of cute sophisticated vulgarity which he likes but which has nothing to do with Guilhèm's straightforwardness or with the practice of trobadors in general.

As for the musical part of Snodgrass's work, since far fewer tunes than poems survive from the culture of Languedoc, he has shifted melodies which originally went with other poems to the poems he has translated and then to his own translations as well. The first part of this seems more or less reasonable; the old texts are singable in the tunes he has given them. But the second part? Why translate the texts but not the music? In fact Snodgrass's lyrics would go much better to something by Cole Porter than they do to the old Catalan airs. (pp. 384-85)