Jarcha

A jarcha —from the Arabic خرجة (jarja), that is, exit or final— is a brief lyrical composition that closed the poems in Arabic called moaxajas, written by Andalusian Arab or Hebrew poets in Al-Andalus. The jarcha was generally written in colloquial Arabic, but in some cases it was written in the Romance language (Mozarabic), although there is no agreement on the number of jarchas of this second type.

This is a composition of a loving nature to which a relationship has been sought with primitive Hispanic lyric of popular origin, such as cantigas de amigo and carols.

The oldest jarcha seems to be from the middle of the 11th century and the most modern one from the first half of the 14th century. Frequent especially between the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th, most of the jarchas are composed in the colloquial Hispano-Arabic dialect, but a small part is in the Romance language used by the Andalusians; as a consequence, they constitute the oldest known examples of poetry in the Romance language.

They were written by educated Arab and Jewish poets, who could have taken traditional Romanesque lyric as a model, either collecting them from popular folklore, or adapting them to their metrical needs (since they had to be integrated into the moaxaja), or composing them from a new creation, from traditional moulds.

Definitions

The moaxaja (from the Arabic موشحة muwaššaḥa (or muwashshaha), which means necklace) is a type of cultic strophic poem written in classical Arabic that had its moment of splendor in Al-Andalus between the 9th and 12th centuries. Its creation is attributed by different scholars to Muqaddam ibn Mucafà al-Qabrī, and by others to Muhammad ibn Hammūd al-Qabrī, the blind man from Cabra. In addition, the possibility that its strophism has a Romanesque or Hebrew heritage has been pointed out, while others maintain that it is the result of the evolution of the casida. This lyrical model was brought by the Arabs in the fourth century. The casida consisted of long monorhyme paired verses, suitable for oral transmission by the teacher, and is the type of verse in which the Qur'an is written. The moaxaja is written in short verses, due to influences from popular lyrics, but with very complex themes and structures. In each of its stanzas there are two parts: one with independent and peculiar rhymes in each case, which is called bayt (or moving), and another with rhymes common to the entire poem, sometimes which is called quful or return. Before the stanzas there may be a quful, which is called matla^c or prelude; if it is missing, we are dealing with a moaxaja aqra^c, bald or headless. In the last stanza, the bayt is established as a transitional element towards the ending of a poem, not as a new quful, but as a short text in direct style. This final little poem is known as jarcha.

The jarcha is the most important part of the moaxaja, since it is a previous element, it is created before the other stanzas. As they become popular, they are not always the work of the same author, as they appear repeatedly in various compositions, both Arabic and Hebrew, in which the speaker is a girl with whom the author compares himself. In addition, the thematic connection between the central body and its top is very tenuous and is established by the words of transition, that is, the last move. Therefore, everything indicates that it existed before the moaxaja and that it is a poem in the public domain.

According to José Domínguez Caparrós in his Dictionary of Spanish metrics, it is a stanza of two, three or four verses of variable length. It serves as defined in the Hispano-Hebrew and Hispano-Arabic muwassahas —or moaxajas. It is in Mozarabic dialect.

Demetrio Estébanez Calderón, for his part, points out in his Brief dictionary of literary terms that it was an Arabic term used by the poets of Al-Andalus to designate a kind of refrain (markaz ), composed in Mozarabic dialect or in Arabic, with which the last stanza of the moaxaja ended. The jarcha or "Mozarabic song" was made up of a variable number of verses (although four predominates), it formed the basis of said poem, which, in the opinion of Emilio García Gómez, was composed to frame a pre-existing jarcha. It had a varied metrical structure: more than half are in the form of a quatrain, whose verses generally only rhyme in pairs, although there are eight cases with an embracing rhyme abab and one with a common rhyme aaaa . Others constitute a couplet, or else a triptych; there are two cases of sextina, and one of quintilla, septina and octave, respectively. The most frequent type of verse in these songs is the hexasyllable, followed by the octosyllable, heptasyllable and pentasyllable (J. Solá Solé).

Victoria Reyzábal indicates that it is one of the first manifestations of peninsular lyric, since it is believed that the oldest jarchas date from 1050. It constitutes the final stanza or chorus of a moaxaja, written in Mozarabic following the popular tradition. She also points out that it is made up of a variable number of verses and is the essential part of the entire composition, where love is the most common theme.

History of composition: discovery and dating

As stated by Pedraza and Rodríguez in their Manual of Spanish Literature, since the 19th century the possibility of a Romanesque lyric or with Romance elements having existed in Al-Andalus has been studied. They remember that Menéndez Pelayo in 1894 in his article "On Semitic Influences in Spanish Literature" indicated that the first known-name Castilian poet was most likely Judá Leví, who is known to have versified in Hebrew, Arabic and in the vulgar language. of the Christians.

Kharchas were first discovered and translated by the Hebrew scholar Samuel Miklos Stern. Successive interpretations by different experts over the following years provide us with the texts available today. Given the ambiguity of the writing of the Semitic languages, and that they lend themselves to multiple interpretations, the kharchas continue to constitute a reason for debate and specialized research. The jarchas are imbricated in the moaxaja as a chorus of few verses in Romance, Hebrew or Vulgar Arabic at the end of it. Another poetic manifestation with similar characteristics, the zéjel, differs by dispersing the verses throughout the poem.

Over the years, the jarchas found have been studied and compiled. The current corpus of Romance jarchas is around seventy poems, although it is difficult to calculate it because scholars do not always agree on when we are facing a Mozarabic text or when we are facing an Arabic jarcha that adds spellings of the Arabic aliphato or Hebrew aliphato (aljamiada literature) with some Romanesque elements. The fundamental collections are those of Samuel Miklos Stern, Emilio García Gómez (The Romance jarchas of the Arab series in its framework), Klaus Heger (Die bisher veröffentlichen Harǧas und ihre Deutungen) and José María Solá-Solé (Corpus de poesía mozárabe. Las hargas andalusíes).

And, regarding their provenance, Pedraza and Rodríguez also point out that there is no agreement among the different scholars and, when assigning them as the exclusive fruit of the Mozarabic or Christian world, one must be very cautious. On the one hand, there are those who consider them to continue a vulgar Latin lyric, as is the case of Menéndez Pidal. Meanwhile, the Spanish Arabist García Gómez recalls that there are many more jarchas in vulgar Arabic than in Romance and that they represent the same type of poetry.

Regarding their dating, the preserved Romance jarchas are included in moaxajas, some anonymous and others by poets who flourished between the 11th and 13th centuries. One of the oldest and most prominent moaxajeros was Yōsef al-Kātib "the scribe". He draws attention because his moaxaja deviates from the theme of love and establishes itself as a eulogy dedicated to two brothers. The death of one of them occurred in 1042, which helps us to date it as before this date.

Theme, metrics and rhetoric of the jarchas

The jarchas, generally, put in the voice of a woman the experience of loving suffering. The dominant theme is the absence of the beloved or habib in multiple variants. Sometimes the pain due to the illness of the loved one is exposed, other times they lament that he has gone to another place or they are asked not to go, and they even complain about the impetuosity of the beloved, or imprecate time for its slowness in pass etc The presence of the spy or guard who prevents the happiness of the lovers is also very common. The interlocutor is the mother, who normally does not speak. In some cases the lament of the woman is addressed to the beloved, but he does not speak either. Along with the jarchas of a loving nature, there are a few whose central theme is the praise of a well-known character, such as the one that alludes to the visit of Yosef ibn Ferrusiel, Alfonso VI's doctor, to the city of Guadalajara, which usually both can be dated between 1091 and 1095.

The loneliness of the young woman in love is made more evident by the absence of a physical environment; the landscape counts for little or nothing, there are no birds that announce spring, nor does love appear as a consequence of the entrance of the month of May, all the more Easter is remembered). The jarcha takes place in an urban environment (its stage cities are Guadalajara, Seville or Valencia). And if ever a trade is alluded to, it will not be that of a shepherd or a miller, but that of a merchant or a goldsmith.

Its most outstanding stylistic features are the abundance of exclamations and interrogations that contribute to underlining the direct and colloquial tone of the jarcha, which is emphasized by the abundance of vocatives. Also striking in them is the use of a colloquial and affective vocabulary, accompanied by the use of diminutives, as well as the presence of imperative verb forms, which highlight the immediacy of the versified feelings. Likewise, other rhetorical resources appear, such as anaphoras, repetitions, antitheses and images.

Regarding the metric of the jarchas, it seems to announce the typical rhythms and combinations of traditional Castilian songs. Solá-Solé has quantified that of the 60 jarchas, 34 are quatrains, although 24 of these are anisosyllabic. Most of them have a consonant rhyme, although there are imperfect consonances similar to assonance.

Examples

From the brief corpus of conserved jarchas, we will mention below the most remembered ones, cited both in literature manuals and textbooks, etc. Currently, a large corpus of jarchas with different transliterations extracted from original manuscripts and translations into different languages. The following examples of jarchas include in the first column an interpretation of the aljamiado text, which is generally somewhat speculative, due on the one hand to the lack of vowels in the writing, and on the other hand to the little correspondence between the Arabic and Romance consonants.; in the 2nd column a possible translation is given:

Tant' amáre, tant' amáre,

habib, tant' amáre!
Nurseron welios nidios

e give them so málē.

So much love, so much love,

beloved So much love!
They've been sick before they're healthy.

And now they hurt a lot.

Yosef al-Kātib Jarcha

Lower mew quorażón de mib.

Yā Rabb, ši še me tōrnarād?
So māl gave me li-l-habīb!

Sick yed: Kend šanarád?

My heart is leaving me.

Oh, sir, I don't know if he'll come back to me!
It hurts so much for the beloved!

He's sick, when will he heal?

Jarcha de Yehuda Halevi

Garīd boš, ay yerman ēllaš

kóm kontenēr-hé mew mālē,
Šīn al-ḥabī bnon bibrēyo:

Ad ob l' voyy demandāre?

You decide, woe sister,

How am I to cut my evil?
Without the beloved I cannot live:

Where should I go find him?

Jarcha de Yehuda Halevi

The jarchas and their relationship with the other compositions of primitive popular Hispanic lyric

The jarchas have always been linked to cantigas de amigo and carols by an obvious relationship that, as Menéndez Pidal pointed out, leads us to think that they all stem from a “common trunk”. The coincidences are numerous and decisive. For example, the jarchas, like the cantigas and many carols, are love songs for women, on the sustained theme of the absence of the friend / beloved / habib, and with the frequent presence of the mother as her confidant. Metrically they are the jarchas and the villancicos, the shortest poems, with a small number of verses, in very similar combinations. They seem further removed in this from the cantigas de amigo with a parallel structure, although the parallelism seems not to have been completely ignored by the jarchas. Despite this evident relationship, it is obvious that the jarchas do not reflect all the themes or all the characteristics of the cantigas and villancicos. Following the discovery of the jarchas, some critics believed that they were looking at the earliest lyric in romance (not only the oldest conserved), and the similarities between them and the rest of the lyrical poetry of the peninsula made them think of an effect of direct influence. As Alan Deyermond points out, it would be surprising in general terms for one popular lyric tradition to influence another in such a way, especially when the hypothetical source was located in Muslim Spain, and when it should also have influenced Italy and northern Spain. France. A summary consideration of a chronological nature is what solves the problem. Popular Andalusian lyric appears in writing (in the case of the jarchas) when educated poets capable of making use of it appeared in the indicated region; no one actually wrote down a poem from the oral tradition during the Middle Ages, unless it could serve some practical purpose. The popular lyric appears in writing in Galicia, in a reworked way of course, as soon as the educated poets begin to write under the pressure of the Provencal influence. Educated lyric appears late in Castile in terms of consolidated tradition, but very shortly after educated poets introduce the custom of writing their lyric in Spanish, Christmas carols appear in writing. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the written appearance of popular poems in each of these regions so closely follows the rise of learned poets who could make use of them. If the arguments established above are accepted, according to Deyermond the conclusion appears very clear that the three indicated areas of the Peninsula had poetic traditions of equal antiquity (the same as Provence, northern France and Italy) and that the jarchas do not constitute the most old lyric in romance as far as its composition is concerned, but rather the first to appear in writing.

From all of the above, it can be deduced that the jarchas, the cantigas de amigo and the villancicos are really three branches of the same poetic trunk, that of traditional Hispanic lyric, whose roots are lost unknown in the depths of the centuries.

The jarchas as a source of information about the Mozarabic dialects

Another aspect of the study of the jarchas is that they can inform us about the characteristics of the Mozarabic dialects spoken in Muslim Spain. However, this runs into several problems:

• Aljamiated writing is misfitting an Romance language and it is very difficult to know the exact pronunciation hidden behind the texts.
• There is no guarantee that the jarchas reflect the dialect of one or another region of Al-Andalus, as they could be taken from the folklore of an area other than the birth or life of the author.
• There is also no guarantee that the jarchas reflect the romance of their time, as they could include arcaisms already missing from the speech when they were written.