Robin wrote:
>> As to sexualised flowers, there's the medieval quatrain (I quote from
>> memory):
>>
>> All nicht bi the rose, rose
>> All nicht bi the rose I lay I lay
>> Ich dar noght the rose steal,
>> And yet I bure the flower away.
Good cross-referencing between rose and cherry-tree (_Prunus_ being of the
rose family), Robin, and the conventional image of deflowering has a long
traditional association with both the tree (in flower--a puberty image) and
the cherry itself (as hymen). The opening couplet of "The Cherry Thief" is
similarly conventional, with its balladic-sexual allusions ("long before
cockcrow"--ahem!), though whether that's also the case in the German I have
no idea. It doesn't really make sense to analyze Brecht's poem (what's its
German title, btw?) in English translation or to assume an English source
for it, but the translator seems to have picked up on or introduced real
song echoes, especially in those first two lines. At the same time, the
scene and tone seem ostentatiously artificial, as if Brecht's commenting on
their very traditionality in that old defamiliarizing way of his, so the
poem has a strong "moon over alabama" resonance for me.
Erminia wrote:
> I would like to understand what "cherries", as a symbol, stood for
> (primarely sex or money?), in medieval times; who were the authors who
> first used this proverb in literature (in German literature and in the
> English one); whether it happeared first in ballads or tales - (Brecht
> made a wide re-use of the themes and the style of the ballads, for istance,
> and was deeply interested in folk tradition).
Ballads _and_ proverbs (_Spruches_), right? I'd guess that both figure in
here, depending on how close this translation is to the original. (Martin:
Can you say more about your dissatisfaction with the trans. and maybe
provide the German?)
I'll say what I can about the medieval associations, but I'm not sure why
Brecht's poem is presumed to have any (did I miss something
cockamamie-loik?). The folk associations with the cherry-tree are both
sexual and of a pubescent innocence, depending on how the de/flowering
aspects are handled, while the cherry (w/stone fruit) signifies (lost)
virginity even now in such expressions as "popped her cherry." What I'm
saying is that Brecht didn't need to get medieval in 1938 in order to write
a sexy little number like "The Cherry Thief." He no doubt knew the song "I
Gave My Love A Cherry," for instance, just as most of us know of it at
least. It's source is a c. 13th-century lyric known as "I Have A Young
Sister," which nicely captures both the innocent love (the sister's
gift-giving) and sexual longing (the "lemman's" desire/lack/"want")
associations of the cherry. The speaker's sister sends him (from "fer
beyonde the see") a series of riddling "drowries" that amount to (slyly?)
wise advice on his love life: a cherry with no stone, a dove with no bone,
and a briar with no brambles--the latter with the admonition to love his
"lemman" (mistress) "withoute longinge." Following the "how sholde" queries
(any cherry be without stone, any dove without bone, any briar "withoute
rinde"), the lyric concludes with the conventional answers to these riddles:
Whan the cherye was a flowr
Thanne hadde it no stoon,
Whan the dove was an ey [egg]
Thanne hadde it no boon.
Whan the brere was unbred [ungrown]
Thanne hadde it no rinde,
Whan the maiden hath that [what] she loveth
She is withoute longinge.
I got interested in this poem when I found a cherry-tree in Prynne's rune
poem (the only instance of it, so far as I know), although the choice of
tree may well have been dictated solely by the alliterative and/or
runic-pictorial demands at that point in the poem. The Anglo-Saxon word for
cherry-tree is "ciris- (or cisir-) beam," and most of Prynne's alliteration
there is on "b." Many tree names in A-S end with "beam" ("tree" or "cross"),
though, so I puzzled over what else he gained with his "ciser" (variant "e"
included). One thing was a torch (the C-rune)--each of the 3 middle rune
rows has one, while the identical first and fifth rows don't.
Then, because at least one other runic/A-S text is referenced (quoted, in
fact) in the rune poem, and I couldn't find any other cherry-trees in
Prynne's corpus, I went looking for a medieval one and found "I Have A Young
Sister," with its stunningly suggestive (for my purposes) title and not only
a cherry but also a dove and an egg, all of them riddled.
None of which probably has anything to do with Brecht's poem.
Candice
|