Raimon Jordan

Raimon Jordan (fl. c. 1178–1195) was a Toulousain troubadour and the viscount of Saint-Antonin in the Rouergue near the boundary with Quercy. His poetry was in Old Occitan.

There is a vida of Jordan which exists in several manuscripts, some with an accompanying razo. At some point he had a love affair with Elis (Lucia) de Montfort, wife of Guillem de Gordon (c. 1165) and then Bernart de Casnac (c. 1214). He may have received a near fatal wound on the same campaign in which the Young King died in 1183. Jordan's own wife fell in with "heretics" (ereges), certainly Cathars, though one document calls them Patarics. They include eleven cansos and one tenso (and possibly a sirventes). The incipit found at the end of a razo introducing one of his cansos says maintas bonas chansos fetz: "he made many good cansos." The melody of Jordan's Vas vos soplei, domna, premieramen also survives. It was copied by the later troubadour Peire Cardenal for his Rics homs que greu ditz vertat e leu men. The most recent modern edition of his works is Il trovatore Raimon Jordan edited by Stefano Asperti (Modena: Mucchi, 1990).

Jordan's work is generally ahistorical and his poetry "suggests a jazz musician working over well-worn themes to move inexorably deeper into the poetic imagination." His innovations have led to comparisons with Thelonious Monk. Though Jordan is not usually regarded as a master by modern standards, the Monge de Montaudon, writing in the 1190s in the generation after him, gave him a high place in his Pos Peire d'Alvernh'a cantat.

In another passage, Jordan explains that his song is an "interpreter" of his sorrows to the lady for whom he is suffering: Si saubes cilh don m'agr'ops mantenensa Tan coralmen me destrenho.l cossir. . . Mas ma chansos li sera latiniers, A leis per cui fatz tan greu abstenensa.

Indeed, his devotion to a lady knew no bounds and he was a sacrilegious poet. In one of his more famous passages he exclaims that he would give up eternity in Paradise for one night with a certain lady: Que tan la desir e volh Que, s'er'en coita de mort, Non queri'a a Deu tan fort Que lai el seu paradis M'aculhis Com que'm des lezer D'una noit ab leis jazer. Jordan wrote one canso for performance by women. In it he attacks the misogyny of earlier troubadours (antic trobadors) who have "slandered and misled women in their love poems". The song also attacks a satirist for "adopting the manner of a preacher" for the express purpose of criticising women publicly. In the last stanza of the canso, the female performer says: Que quascus hom deu razonar son fraire E queia domna sa seror . . . E s'ieu per so velh far razonamen A las domnas, no m'o reptes nien.For each man must reason with his brother, And every woman with her sister . . . And if I wish to reason with women, Don't reprove me for it at all.

Otherwise, his work is characterised by "striking feudal metaphors."