ABSTRACT
In the final lines of her canso, Clara d'Anduza laments an absence that has affected her process of composition. Here, her translator notes several absences that loom over the work of translating the poem. The lack most keenly felt is that of the music that would have accompanied her song. Then there is the loss of Clara's "unisounding" rhymes, mnemonic notes that shape her stanzas, binding them together on the page and in listeners' minds. Virtuosic rhyming was the essence of any claim to practice the art of trobar, but attempts to reproduce that rhyme in modern English entail unacceptable losses and distortions. I also sigh for the absence of a Romance system in which common nouns and adjectives have gender, so that abstractions like dol (sorrow, m.) and ira (anger, f.) join with amicx and amiga, with proper nouns and pronouns, in a dance of masculine and feminine. Most of all, the contemporary translator misses a shared cultural lexicon that allowed Clara d'Anduza's public to sense the sparks of anger in a phrase like abaissador dejoi e de joven "bringers down of joy and youth", and savor juxtaposed opposites like amicx/enemicx friend/enemy, amador/trichador lover, traitor, veser/departir to see/to part, and remirar/lonhar to gaze/to separate.
