In his famous essay on Arnaut Daniel, Ezra Pound neatly glosses over one unflattering biographical detail. Though the essay stirred a minor renaissance of interest in the twelfth-century troubadour, it failed to mention that Arnaut was a cheater and a plagiarist.

Pound's essay, "Arnaut Daniel" (1920), is part dual-language edition, part critical appraisal of the work of the poet whom Dante called il miglior fabbro--"the better craftsman"--an epithet which T.S. Eliot later transferred to Pound in the dedication to The Waste Land. Three of Arnaut's lyrics, however, did not make Pound's scrupulous cut. The sestina for instance, the sole exemplar of Arnaut's longest-lived formal invention, is ignored simply because, according to Pound (and in defiance of every opinion of it before or since), the world's first sestina "is a poor one." 

The song that starts "Anc ieu non l'aic" was also expunged. "[Arnaut] learned this song from a jongleur," Pound explains, "and the matter went as a joke." But Arnaut didn't just "learn" this song. He stole it. Moreover, he stole it to win a bet. Moreover still, stealing the jongleur's song was the one tactic that could have lost him the bet. But somehow everything turned out much better for him than expected.

Here's how it happened. We learn from the song's razo (a quasi-biographical commentary that provided the "reason" behind an individual lyric) that Arnaut Daniel was spending time in the court of King Richard I, the Lionheart of England, when suddenly, "another jongleur made a bet with Arnaut that he could write more difficult rhymes than he." What ensued from this challenge was something not dissimilar from a hip-hop battle, except that the combatants had ten days to compose their verses. In this case, each contender anted up his horse and was locked in a separate room to get to work.

I should pause here to mention the third song Pound chose to purge from the canonical Arnaut: "Trucs Malecs." Pound omits it "for reasons clear to all who have read it." Gloss: the song is about a man named Bernart who was asked to kiss his lady's ass, literally. This sirventes (or satire) was Arnaut's response to a heated poetic controversy (regarding the said Bernart) that had developed between several other troubadours. In the course of their thinly metaphorically-veiled verbal shit-slinging, Arnaut had suffered some collateral smudging of his ego. One of the versified volleys let slip that he was a compulsive gambler, and consequently an impoverished scholar. In response, Arnaut thoroughly out-filthed the filthy dialogue that had tangentially bruised his pride, and so drew the discussion to a close.

Betting, then, was apparently nothing new for Arnaut, nor was winning contests of versification. Perhaps this is why it so troubled him when, locked away in that cold English chamber for ten days, he felt the sudden onset of writer's-block. Perhaps this also explains why he so quickly adopted an alternate course of action. Rather than defend the honor of his scorned rhymes honestly, Arnaut decided instead to listen carefully through the walls of his chamber and to steal the rhymes of his opponent. As the jongleur composed and practiced his song in the adjoining room, Arnaut eavesdropped and memorized it word for word, with the intention of submitting it as his own.

But how was this ever going to work? Arnaut was renowned on both sides of the channel for his "difficult rhymes," of which some were so uniquely challenging that they functioned as a sort of signature. The rhyme in -aura, for instance, from his "En cest sonet," (which ends with his well-known autobiography of paradoxes: "I am Arnaut who hoards the wind, who swims against the current, and chases the hare with the ox") was so closely tied to Arnaut that no other troubadour ever used it. Almost half of his rhyme-schemes were similarly untouched, one of which followed the almost absurd pattern abcdefgbhhicjklcm for six strophes. Arnaut could hardly have gotten away with using anyone's rhymes but his own because his own were so famously unique.

Another pertinent fact is that stealing rhymes was not only permitted in the Troubadour poetic, but institutionalized. "Trucs Malecs" will again be of service to explain this. When a troubadour wanted to make it known that he was writing an answer to some other song, he would write what's called a contrafactum (hence our word "counterfeit"), which meant he would either use the exact rhyme-scheme of the target song, or, more emphatically, the exact same rhymes. It is in the less stringent way that "Trucs Malecs" fits itself into the melee of which it was the last delivered blow.

So why not eavesdrop, catch wind of the jongleur's rhyme scheme, and write a clever contrafactum to demolish it fairly, instead of stealing the whole song and risk offending the Crusader King? Perhaps what Arnaut did was, after all, as Pound suggests, a fabulous and deliberate jest. By copying the whole song without a single alteration, Arnaut exposes a hidden paradox (he was, after all, famous too for his paradoxes) behind the unspoken rules of the game. Mingling the two approaches of the established licit and the absolutely illicit manner of conduct in such a scenario shows how the difference between these opposing routes is only a matter of degree. That is to say, Arnaut brought to the surface of contrafactum the modern meaning of "counterfeit."

And in effect, Arnaut's counterfeit was the ultimate contrafactum, one whose insistence on adhering to the rules of its genre was so clearly marked that no one could fail to recognize its source, because it would be indistinguishable from it. Precisely this insistence, however, is what distinguishes Arnaut's "Anc ieu non l'aic" from his opponent's "Anc ieu non l'aic." It is its undiminished echo, its perfect rhyme, every vowel and consonant poised to answer to its match in the original--the first ever poem-rhyme.  In short, Arnaut's song was the perfect answer not just to the individual challenge, but to the institution of the poetic contest.

But Arnaut could not have anticipated that he would be chosen to sing his song first in front of the royal referee and judge. If he had gone second, his song would have been precisely what I said it was, a contrafactum pushed to the limits of its definition. Going first, however, turned Arnaut's jest into a trope of a different order. Suddenly, the jongleur's song--the original--became the contrafactum, and the jongleur was forced into the unenviable position of Echo, having nothing but his adversary's words to repeat. The counterfeited copy had replaced the original.

The ruse, however, was too obvious, too blatant, and Arnaut made no effort to disguise his actions from the court. This is how the bet ended:

Despite Pound's rejection, this song still remains firmly lodged within the Arnaut canon.  Its first line almost seems to proclaim its dubious authorship: "Anc ieu non l'aic, mas ella m'a" ("I didn't ever have her [or, it: the song?] but she [it] has me").  Otherwise the content of the song offers nothing new. Its only claim to our attention is that it is the only one of Arnaut's songs to come equipped with a razo. It is true though that razos like this one are universally suspected of being totally made up, based only on imaginative readings of "clues" found in the songs themselves. It is also true that this song's last line mentions the name of its (new) author, just as all of Arnaut Daniel's songs do: "c'Arnautz non oblida" ("For Arnaut does not forget"). You could say that this was added after the fact to cement the transfer of authorship, or even that "non oblida" implicates Arnaut's culprit memory. But there is every reason to believe that the razo's story is simply a clever fiction, perhaps dreamed up to garnish an otherwise uninspired piece. It's sad to have to admit it, but it is highly unlikely that Arnaut's wager and ploy at the court of Richard ever happened.

Unless, of course, "Arnautz" was also the name of his opponent at the English court. Just why was it necessary, in the last line of the razo, to specify that the song was awarded to "Arnaut Daniel"?

There were in fact at least two Arnauts, if not more. Pound mentions the other one, the beta-Arnaut, Arnaut de Maroill, in his 1909 collection of Personae. He even forces his way into Maroill's mouth, as Pound was fond of doing, and makes him call himself, "Arnaut the less" (Marvoil).History too has been relatively unkind to this quite decent poet who had the extreme misfortune of sharing the name of the most famous troubadour.

But that's not all they shared. If you compare the short texts of their vidas (biographies), which often showed up together in the same manuscripts, you will find that the Arnaut boys were not only exact contemporaries but that they grew up down the street from each other. Their similar circumstances were so confusing to their biographers that the author of Arnaut Daniel's vida felt the need to note the similarity in order to keep them separate, adding, "Arnaut Daniel was from the same region as Arnaut de Maroill." 

Point by point, the facts of the two Arnauts' lives seem to run parallel, if inverse, courses. Arnaut the less was too poor to pursue literature. So he wandered until he attracted some powerful patrons with only his poetic skills to support him. Arnaut Daniel, on the other hand, was born a gentleman and became a great scholar, but abandoned letters in order to give himself wholly to the composition of his difficult rhymes. We have only "Trucs Malecs" to tell us that, thanks to the dice, he wound up as poor as Maroill began.

The poetry of the two Arnauts also seems to echo or rhyme with one other in suggestive, almost suspicious ways. Daniel invented the sestina. Maroill invented something very similar, a poem whose rhymes revolve around the stable axis of the word domna ("lady"). Daniel incorporated his name into every lyric. Maroill never once did. Both were fond of abecedarian techniques in their verse-making.