Novel Sur les pas des troubadours en pays d'oc Ezra Pound (1912)

Ezra Pound’s walking trip in the south of France in 1912. While going through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a whole batch of notebooks dating from the summer of 1912, during which, as a young man, he had walked through the troubadour landscapes of southern France. Pound had always been fascinated by the poetry of medieval Provence. His attempts to recreate the complex lyrical forms of Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and other Oc language poets appear in his earliest poetry collections; his scholarly research on this subject is found in L’Esprit des littératures romanes, written in 1910, and the mystique of the troubadours was to become one of the richest harmonics in the Cantos. For those of us who live in the shelter of our homes, or who are simply equipped with good raincoats, the weather is of little importance; but how much these verses take on life and force if we remember that they were sung by men for whom the atmospheric conditions determined to a very large extent every act, every pleasure of existence. Thus the mention of the weather, at the beginning of each song, becomes a natural thing: it reflects a very real situation. The supreme pleasure, when one walks with a pack on one’s back, is the moment when one puts it on the ground, or when one lets oneself lie against it as if on a pillow. But this is a luxury that only applies in good weather. One feels a personal malice in the rain when one is tired beyond a certain point, or soaked to the bone.