British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Juan Carlos Bayo Julve

The Challenge of Editing a Text Marked by its Oral Condition: the Case of the Poem of the Cid

The textual transmission of Spanish medieval epic has been very precarious. The Poem of the Cid is the only remnant from its early times that has come down to us almost complete in poetic form in a medieval manuscript, the Vivar codex. This means that emendation is extremely problematical. Current textual approaches to the Cid are marred by the false assumption that it was composed in laisses like Old French epics, and some editors even indulge in all the corrections that they deem necessary to achieve uniformity of assonance. However, many of the supposed faults were in fact proper to the original system of versification, which produces a poetic discourse punctuated by deictic dissonances which make the Cid a staged text. This technique was no doubt traditional and shows significant structural affinities to forms of popular poetry. Indeed, the Cid was composed in Castile in the late twelfth or very early thirteenth century, at a time when there was no vernacular literature in the strict sense of the word, i.e. works written in the vernacular implying an act of reading, public or individual. Although the Cid was not necessarily composed orally and it has resisted all attempts made to prove such a hypothesis, it was composed to be diffused orally and its form is completely dependent on oral performance. Producing a text both faithful to the old poem and acceptable to the modern reader is a challenge for the editor and poses him a number of problems which will be explained in this paper.

Juan Carlos Bayo wrote his dissertation on the versification of the Poem of the Cid. In 1999-2000 he worked in the University of Oxford as Research Assistant to Professor Ian Michael; their edition of Gonzalo de Berceo’s Miracles of Our Lady is in press with Clásicos Castalia (Madrid). In 2000-01 he lectured at the University of Manchester. Now he holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Exeter. He has written articles on Romance collections of Marian miracles and on Hispanic medieval epic.