On “Song of a Girl Going to Bathe”

“Song of a Girl Going to Bathe” belongs to a genre of troubadour poetry, the cantiga de amigo (roughly translatable as “song concerning a boyfriend”), which is practically unique to western Iberia. The cantigas de amigo, about five hundred of which have survived, are narrated by women but were composed by men, who co-opted a preexisting oral tradition of women’s song. The young women alternately recall their latest trysts, lament the absence of their boyfriends, who may be off at sea, or consider how they might arrange another meeting soon. Sometimes, on the contrary, they coyly mock their boyfriends and play hard to get. The mothers of the young women sometimes dialogue with their daughters, either warning them against the wiles of young men or else helping them further their romantic interests.

Little is known about Estevam Coelho, the grandson of a better-known troubadour and active at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He was one of the last troubadours to write in Galician-Portuguese, the language that evolved into modern Portuguese and modern Galician (spoken in the area of Spain north of Portugal). There are also hundreds of satiric and sometimes quite bawdy cantigas, as well as the cantigas de amor, which are from the man’s point of view and imitate the sophisticated Provençal canso.

The cantigas de amigo are stylistically more simple, relying on repetitious turns of phrase, but musically more compelling, even haunting. Reading them, we can easily imagine the illiterate young women who, while washing clothes and doing other chores, sang songs that other women or they themselves invented, recording them only in memory.