In a previous
entry, I had lamented the fact that I hadn’t come up with a
plausible set of words for van Eyck’s En fin
l’Amour. One of the places I reported having looked was in Ruth
van Baak Griffioen’s book about van Eyck, and she read the blog and
wrote me the following explanation:
About the mention on your site of the facsimile of a setting of the
“En fin l’amour” tune in the Van Eyck book: the reason I did not
translate the Dutch text for that song is because the Dutch text is
just a text found in a Dutch songbook along with instructions to sing
it to the tune “En fin la’mour”. But that Dutch text has no actual
relation to the original French text; it’s not a translation of it,
or a paraphrase. If Van Eyck had chosen to identify the tune by this
or any other Dutch contrafactum text, I would have provided a
translation. But Van Eyck refers to the song by the French original,
and that text hasn’t been found (yet). I only translated the Dutch
texts when they matched the title used in Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and
the reason is that once you simply pick one contrafactum text like
the one shown in the facsimile, you’re into a pretty random selection
criterion. For example, look at the top of page 173, just to the
right of the facsimile you mention: a dozen or so *other* Dutch
contrafactum texts are listed, all of which were meant to be sung to
the “En fin” tune. Again, Van Eyck’s piece is known by the French
‘ancestor’ text to all of those, not to any of the Dutch knock-off
texts. Almost every one of the songs on which the Lust-hof
variations are based have anywhere from a handful to a hundred of
such contrafactum possibilities, so the only really sensible way to
go about providing texts is to give the ones that match the title Van
Eyck uses, or sometimes a 17th-c singable direct Dutch translation
thereof. Hope this explains why I left off the Dutch translation
you wanted to have! It’d kind of be like printing the text to “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” when what was
really meant was the actual original “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Or, even more directly, any one, say, of a hundred French social
satire song texts meant to be sung to that tune, none of which had
anything to do with the Civil War or the Second Coming and none of
which became well-enough known to supplant the title “The Battle
Hymn…”
Sorry for the long explanation; I didn’t have time to write a short one.
LayMusic.org 