Lyricism in Sappho and Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poetry: Aesthetic Connections

Abstract

This article investigates the resonances between Sappho’s archaic lyric poetry and the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition, foregrounding lyric expression as a musical and relational performance. It examines how configurations of the lyrical subject and the tensions of unrequited love, shared across both traditions, articulate affective experience through formal and rhetorical strategies. Drawing on Haroldo de Campos’s notion of a “synchronic poetics,” the study traces the transhistorical circulation of motifs, figures, and structures, thereby situating medieval lyric within a continuum of classical inheritance. Engaging theoretical perspectives from T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, the analysis emphasizes aesthetic convergences while interrogating the mediating role of language in shaping symbolic representations of desire and longing. Ultimately, the article underscores the constitutive importance of classical tradition in the emergence of troubadour poetics, while highlighting the persistence of lyrical strategies that negotiate the paradoxes of love, time, and subjectivity across historical epochs.