The Song of the Cid

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

THE SONG OF THE CID

BURTON RAFFEL is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities Emeritus and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His many translations include Cervantes's
Don Quijote
, Rabelais's
Gargantua and Pantagruel
(winner of the 1991 French-American Foundation Translation Prize), Chrétien de Troyes's
Arthurian Romances
, Balzac's
Père Goriot
, and Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
. His translation of
Beowulf
has sold more than a million copies.

 

MARÍA ROSA MENOCAL is Sterling Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. Her books include
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
and, as coauthor,
The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture
.

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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2009

 

Translation copyright © Burton Raffel, 2009

Introduction copyright © María Rosa Menocal, 2009
All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-02914-5

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Introduction

It begins with weeping, the open sorrow of a man riding into exile. Soon we hear its distinct echo: the weeping of those who remain behind, and who line the streets to see our hero and his band of loyal followers, all men forced to abandon their homes, and their homeland. There is more weeping: the good citizens along the route openly lament the injustice of it all, and they decry the irascibility of their king, who, they say, has not only banished from the kingdom a better man than himself, but also threatened to rip their eyes out from their heads should they open their doors to these fugitives, this company of sixty men who ride out with their proud banners, following the man they call Cid.

But the king cannot prevent the men and women from opening their hearts to the Cid. Just what has so angered the king, just what the Cid has done to earn himself this calamitous sentence, is never mentioned, and will never be explained, but from this dramatic and poignant beginning forward there is never any question of where our sympathies lie. For the length of three cantos, out of the old Castilian capital of Burgos and into the proverbial deserts of exile—which here means all that lies beyond the Castilian frontier—we follow Rodrigo Díaz, our hero. We are often reminded that he is from Vivar, a small town some five miles to the north of Burgos. This is very much the heart of Old Castile, the Christian kingdom that ultimately conquers the lands of the peninsula that had long been Islamic territories. But Rodrigo Díaz is known mostly by his unambiguously Arabic name: Cid is a direct rendering into Castilian of
sayyid
—Lord, or Commander. Sometimes he is also called by his strongest epithet,
Cid Campeador
—the Champion, or the Warrior. By any and all of his names, from the start there is no doubt he is our hero, as we listeners, or readers, are easily welcomed into his first little troop of lucky few, who so possessively, and with such palpable endearment, often call him
mio Cid
—my Cid.

 

The
Cantar
or
Poema de Mio Cid
has survived some eight hundred years as a written poem, and perhaps decades longer than that as part of an oral poetic tradition. Long regarded as Spain's national epic, it recounts the clearly fictionalized life and deeds of a charismatic historical figure who played a role in some of the dramatic episodes of the tumultuous eleventh century.
The Cid
has particularly strong kinship with other national epics (including the American Western) that recount mythologized historical events believed to be vital to the formation of a people or a nation. Central to many of these is an acting-out of the passage from the almost wild universe of unruly frontiers and their attendant injustices to the new world—the new community, the new nation—where a newly crystallized society is instead governed by laws, and where justice reigns.

The Cid
's roughly 3,700 lines are divided into 152 stanzas (called
tiradas
in Spanish, and
laisses
in French, and sometimes in English) of irregular length. These are in turn part of three major subdivisions called
cantares
, powerfully suggesting the work's inextricability from the tradition of singing (
cantar
); in English,
cantares
is easily translated as “canto.” Much else about the poem's form—its single lines broken into half lines, its oft-repeated formulas, its irregular meter, its use of assonance—also suggests that the poem that comes down to us was composed and performed orally, and transmitted orally for some time, before being committed to writing. But the poem's occasional learned and ecclesiastical expressions, and its detailed understanding of important legal traditions, suggest instead that there were written sources of various sorts at play in the creation of the poem, and perhaps even that the version we read today is a text originally composed as a written poem.

In either event, one of the poem's most distinctive features is its relative proximity to the historical events narrated. The roughly contemporary
Song of Roland
recounts the overtly mythologized story of Charlemagne and his troops crossing the Pyrenees in 778, returning to France from Spain after the siege of Saragossa—events removed from the mid-twelfth-century audience's lifetime by some four hundred years. Regardless of whether the
Cid
poet was a wandering and illiterate blind bard, whose masterpiece was most canonically performed in the last decade of the twelfth century before being recorded by a scribe, or instead a cultured lawyer, who had studied in France and even read some of the French epics, such as
The Song of Roland
, and who finished writing his text in 1207, he was evoking a past that was not far beyond living memory, and that was still well enough known that any number of its salient historical milestones did not need to be retold in the poem in order to be understood.

The historical Cid died in 1099. He had lived out his life of military prowess and fame during a particularly momentous period of Spain's history: The last quarter of the eleventh century was pivotal in the Iberian peninsula, much of which had been an Islamic polity for nearly four hundred years. After several centuries of grandeur and cultural achievement, the Caliphate of Cordoba collapsed at the beginning of the eleventh century, torn apart by civil wars provoked by crises of succession, as well as a series of ideological rifts—contemporaries poignantly called this era the
fitna
, or times of troubles. What remained after the demise of the once powerful central state of Cordoba were dozens of often warring city-states, called the Taifas, from the Arabic
muluk at-tawaif
, meaning the kingdoms of divided parties, or factions. Although they continued and even expanded many of the great cultural traditions of the past, especially poetry, these fractured kingdoms became increasingly vulnerable to the military incursions and ambitions of the various relatively small Christian kingdoms of the north.

These now-expanding Christian polities—Asturias, Galicia, León, Navarre, Aragon, Barcelona, and, of course, Castile were the major ones—often regarded one another as rivals, and most of them had long had all manner of contacts with the Islamic world that lay just over porous and ever-shifting borders. There were military confrontations, perhaps most famous among them the incendiary attack on the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela in 997 by the infamous usurper al-Mansur, a pivotal figure in the downfall of the caliphate. But the complex relations between Islamic and Christian states also included much that was not hostile, including alliances of one Christian kingdom with the Islamic state against their Christian rivals, as well as intermarriages of royal and other important families across the Muslim-Christian divide. And beginning in the Taifa period of the eleventh century, when the events of
The Song of the Cid
take place, weakened Taifa cities began paying
parias
, or tribute money, to Christian kingdoms, in return for protection against all enemies, Christian or Muslim.

At his death in 1065, Ferdinand I of Castile and León—father of Alfonso VI, the king who exiles the Cid, in both history and our poem—was receiving occasional tribute money from the large and important Taifas of Seville and Valencia, and quite regular
parias
from others: Saragossa, Badajoz, and Toledo. The abundant tribute, paid in both coin and goods, as our poem insistently details for us (the Cid collecting such tribute at every turn, as kings did), made some of the Christian kings and kingdoms ever wealthier, and increasingly powerful. And none more so than the Castilians.

Here was a land poised for far-reaching changes, with dramatic shifts of power around almost every corner. Despite the fact that Ferdinand had spent his life and kingship struggling to unite various rival Christian kingdoms, he ultimately chose to leave the land as a divided inheritance to his three sons: the youngest, García, inherited the least central and least desirable kingdom, Galicia; Alfonso, the middle son, received León, considered the richest prize; and Castile went to the eldest brother, Sancho, whose entourage, the historical record reveals, included a rising star, the prominent warrior and courtier Rodrigo Díaz. Not surprisingly, the brothers were not content to share what they had already seen could be a formidable unified kingdom, and they spent most of the decade after their father's death in a series of few-holds-barred struggles against one another. When the dust settled it was not Rodrigo Díaz's sovereign, Sancho, but rather the middle brother, Alfonso, who emerged as the victor, and who was able once again to create a single united Christian kingdom. But this was achieved only at the expense of his brothers and, in fact, not until Sancho was murdered in 1072, while putting down an insurrection in the dramatically sited city of Zamora, the inheritance and the dominion of Ferdinand's daughter, Urraca. Some believed that Alfonso—who at the time was in exile in Toledo, driven there by Sancho—was directly implicated in the regicide of his brother, perhaps even in collusion with Urraca. These melodramas go unspoken in the poem but are nevertheless understood as the causes behind the exile of the Cid, an exile that is not only the dramatic opening but also the very heart and soul of the poem itself.