Love Lyrics from the Carmina Burana.

P.G. Walsh has published extensively on the medieval Latin lyric. In the present volume, his latest work in the area, he brings his considerable expertise to bear on a selection of books from the famous - even notorious - Carmina Burana, a collection of twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrics from the Codex Buranus, a manuscript which first came to light in the monastery of Benediktbeuern in 1803 and is now in Munich. The collection as a whole totals 228 poems. Of the approximately 120 love poems in the collection, Walsh presents 60, giving the Latin text painstakingly edited, an effective English prose translation next to the Latin, and extensive explanatory and interpretive notes.

These poems are well known today partly because of Carl Orff's percussive musical setting of them. Yet they are also useful for pedagogical purposes because of their appealing simplicity of syntax and vocabulary, combined with the inherent interest of their subject matter, a celebration of the physical pleasures of life, in particular wine and love. It is on the latter that Walsh's collection focuses.

But this apparent simplicity is often deceptive, as Walsh's introduction explains and as his detailed notes show in considerable detail. These texts were created for purposes of literary amusement by clerics who were quite sophisticated in their literary tastes, and who were among the most learned men in the culture of their time. One level of complexity arises out of the tensions between the Christian view of the world which constituted the cultural horizon of the poets, and the pagan Roman authors their poems are full of echoes of and allusions to. Walsh shows, for instance, how two poems (nos. 49 and 58) which describe the beauties of the poet's beloved, acquire an ambivalent resonance when one sees how heavily they borrow from the rhetoric of the praise of the Virgin. Such stylistic features can at times be understood ironically, and not all who have studied these texts have resisted the temptation to read certain of them allegorically. The careful stylistic analysis which Walsh provides convincingly shows how artful many of them are.

Walsh is an aggressive editor, but the often garbled state of the texts in the Codex requires such an approach. He does not hesitate to use better readings from other manuscripts which contain versions of these popular poems. His aim is not so much to present a perfected state of his excerpts from the Carmina Burana as it is to give us the best version of each individual poem. He is scrupulous in pointing out his debts and divergences with respect to the work of previous editors, and a reader interested in textual questions can easily follow Walsh's own work of emendation.

The translations which Walsh provides here are also impressive. While they are, as he says in his preface, "literal translations . . . not to be judged as literary artifacts" (ix), they are quite sensitive to the Latin and manage to convey in clear and unstilted English something of the flavor of the text as well as the literal meaning. Walsh avoids the trap of excessive literalness inherent in plain prose translation, which in the case of translation from the Latin can often result in a marmoreal ponderousness which would certainly be inappropriate to texts such as these. As always, certain renderings can be quibbled with, but more often I was impressed by the skill and tact with which Walsh has found just the right English phrasing to get across an idea easier to express in Latin than in English.

The selection of poems here, relentlessly focusing on the subject of love, does run the risk of a certain uniformity of tone. The variety of the whole of the Carmina Burana is not reflected here. But the poems Walsh has chosen each has its individual interest, which he illuminates in his commentary. It is hard to imagine a selection of Latin lyrics more expertly presented. Teachers, students, and any reader interested in medieval lyric will find this volume a clear and useful approach to intrinsically interesting texts.

FRED J. NICHOLS City University of New York, Graduate Center