Abstract:

Struck by the solitary beauty of the nightingale’s song, poets and musicians across the literatures of Renaissance Europe drew on an ancient literary topos to contemplate its meaning. Lamenting a lost love, grieving chicks fallen under the plow, puffing and strutting on the springtime prowl: whatever it was, the little bird became an emblem of the work of poetry itself, transmuting experience into song to be captured and transcribed. Yet a parallel branch of this tradition was attracted to another quality of the nightingale’s song—to its pure vocality, its very senselessness. Rather than hear birdsong as a kind of human speech, this countertradition was prompted instead to hear human speech as a kind of birdsong. From Greek to Latin to Italian to English, the nightingale topos became a coded invitation to translingual wordplay, sonic experimentation, and, at its limits, the dismissal of sense entirely in favor of a poetics of pure sound.

This description sounds distinctly modern; musicologists and theorists of translation have begun only recently to look beyond the sense of language to what has been called “the material presence of its signifiers.” This essay makes a first attempt to show, however, that these acoustic phenomena in verse have been mostly overlooked by criticism precisely because of their diffidence toward the work of making sense. Virtuosic displays of sound over sense were not only audible in poetry before the Romantic period (where much recent commentary on lyric imitation has congregated) but even familiar, as a game played on the borders between speech and song, written lyric and musical setting, and the polyglot lyric cultures of Renaissance Europe.