Fatrasie is a Medieval French poetic genre that emerged in the 13th century in the Artois and Picardy regions of France. Only two examples survive to the modern period: eleven poems that constitute les Fatrasies de Philippe de Beaumanoir composed by the trouvère Philippe de Rémi and fifty-five poems titled les Fatrasies d'Arras. The genre died out with the close of the 16th century and only became an area of renewed study with the Surrealist movement's championing of the genre and academic research beginning in the 1960s.
Definition A fatrasie is a poem in which the sense takes secondary importance to sound, structured in particular using a system of the repetition of syllables. This accumulation of phrases and resonances of sound sometimes contains satirical critiques of political figures. It has been suggested that the origins of the metrical and stylistic contraints of the genre lies in deliberate parody of medieval Latin hymns. The genre also shares much with broader currents of the medieval Grotesque, leading André Malraux to write that 'The audience of the medieval fatrasie was no less than that of Hieronymus Bosch'.
Fatrasies are characterised by a fixed form: this form contains eleven verses whose first six lines have five syllables and whose last five lines have seven. The form is written entirely based on two rhymes, according to a strict scheme of aabaabbaba.
Examples
Below is an example in Old French drawn from the Fatrasies d'Arras:
In modern French, it reads:
As translated by Ted Byrne and Donato Mancini, the poem reads: A handsome headless man laid on a great feast just to eat pebbles It took a proud beast to call off this show one Thursday at Méaux Four skinless donkeys had the time of their lives peeling off all their clothes so a tub on two barrels could sing songs of their deeds.
An additional example of a poem similar to a fatrasie can be found in La Farce de maître Pathelin, in which a character sings a macaronic song whose form resembles the Old French genre.
References
Further reading