The Shakira and BZRP song has reached 100 million views on YouTube in three days (and counting); it has been on the cover of newspapers and has opened newscasts; has broken records on Spotify and has become the ubiquitous topic of conversation. The journalist Jordi Évole even claimed that the Spanish government declared a public holiday so that they could discuss the song quietly, without having to pay attention to work.
Different media have echoed a large number of love-spite songs, sung by both men and women. Thus, Shakira joins names of such tradition as Raffaella Carrà, Rocío Jurado, José Luis Perales, María Jiménez or Paquita la del Barrio. However, this long tradition goes back a long way… to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
From ‘monotony’ to Catullus
Shakira has dedicated several songs with autobiographical elements to love and breakup. It is what we could call a cycle. We find something similar in the love poetry of antiquity. the roman poet catullus He also reflected in his poetry the different phases of his love affair with Lesbia (Clodia’s pseudonym). Let’s look at some parallels.
The song I congratulate youwhich includes amatory topics of classical origin such as the love wound (vulnus amoris) and love blindness (caecus love), focuses on the disappointment in love, with the game between appearance and reality. In his poem 72 Catullus also referred to the true self of his beloved (I never knew you“now I know how you are”).
Monotony is a real renounce love (a love break poem), reminiscent of the Poem 8 by Catullus. There is a contrast between past happiness (“what we once were”, in the case of Shakira; “luminous suns shone for you one day”, in the case of the Roman poet) and the present moment (“there is nothing anymore” /”now she doesn’t want to anymore”).
At that moment in the love cycle of the breakup, there is still an internal struggle between love and reason. The poet speaks to himself, urging himself to stand firm, and says goodbye to his beloved (“goodbye, girl, Catullus stands firm already”). In Monotony there is also a struggle between love and reason. The Colombian artist acknowledges that she is still in love (“I love you”), but that it is “a necessary goodbye”.
Shakira’s latest installment goes one step further: “There is one step from love to hate,” says the singer. But Catullus already said it in a more summarized way in his memorable hate and love:
I hate and I love. Why am I doing this, you may ask.
I don’t know, but I feel that it is so and I torture myself.
The poet also launched a direct and virulent attack on his beloved, accusing her of promiscuity (poems 11 and 58).
also the poet Propertius takes revenge for the infidelity of Cintia (again, a pseudonym) in his elegy II 5. In elegies III 24 and 25 announces the end of the relationship. Once again we find the contrast between the past and the present; her farewell and her invective—that is, her violent speech against her—(this time in the form of a warning about the ravages of her age). Nor is the rival free from the furious attacks of the poet throughout his work.
A scorned Greek man
Six centuries before Catullus and Propertius lived in Greece Archilochus of Paros. The best known of his work, preserved very fragmentarily, are the verses that he wrote against Licambes and his family. Tradition tells us that Licambes promised Archilochus the hand of his daughter Neobula, but he later broke this engagement and, as a consequence, Archilochus composed hurtful poems against Licambes and his family.
The best known of all of them is fragment 196a, known as the “Cologne Papyrus”. It narrates a meeting between the poet and a young girl, Neobula’s sister, with a dialogue between them. The poet manifests her rejection of Neobula and justifies her contempt with the worst accusations against a woman: her age, her loss of virginity, her uncontrolled sexual appetite and her disloyalty.
However, the differences with respect to Shakira’s latest songs are evident: the poetic voice is masculine, the break was due to the intervention of the girl’s father and his accusations seek to dishonor the girl and her entire family. With the attack on Neobula, the poet also intended to seduce the young woman with whom he maintains a dialogue, which he finally achieved.
The names that appear in these compositions –Licambes, Neobula, Anphimedo– have been interpreted as “speaking names”, that is, they would not be the real names of the people mentioned, but names that mean qualities (or defects) of them to avoid identify them by name, if these people actually existed. But this is another question.
Shakira’s songs, both BZRP Session #53 Like other previous ones that are part of this same cycle, they are autobiographical and contain explicit allusions that allow identification. In this last song, and although it is not strictly speaking names, the singer uses puns (cramps) to refer to people without naming them (“sorry if I splashed you”, “clearly it’s not what it sounds like”).
The Roman Shakira
Rome provides us with something unique in classical antiquity: the voice of a scorned woman who criticizes her former love. Her name was sulpicia and lived more than two thousand years ago, in the second half of the first century before our era, during the time of the emperor August. He belonged to a very important family of the Roman elite: his father, Servian Sulpice Rufuswas a great Roman jurist and senator who became consul in 51 AD. Sulpicia lost her father at an early age and was raised by her uncle, a notable military commander and patron of the arts.
The most important thing is that, after the death of his father, she inherited her share of the family fortune and could manage it herself. That is, Sulpicia did not need to invoice.
In her poems, Sulpicia recounts her love affair with a certain Cerinto, another of those “talking names” whose identity we do not know. At one point, she believes that he has been unfaithful and throws his darts at him in a way that is reminiscent of Shakira’s song: Are you going to compare someone, says Sulpicia, with me, who am the daughter of a consul?
It’s good that you trust me so much that you don’t conceive
that suddenly stumbles, inexperienced, badly.
Would you prefer a toga and a groped whore, with a basket,
to Sulpicia, who is the daughter of Servius?
(Greco-RomanSulpicia, poem 4. Translation: Aurora Luque)
Love and heartbreak have been the great themes of poetry and music throughout history. When we talk about love we are also Greco-Romans: the love motives that they developed are everywhere. Shakira has updated these motifs clearly giving them her personal touch. We are heirs to the classics, whoever itches.
Cristina Rosillo LopezProfessor of Ancient History, Pablo de Olavide University; Rule Fernandez GarridoProfessor of Greek Philology, University of Huelva Y Rosario Moreno SoldevilaProfessor of Latin Philology, Pablo de Olavide University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
