El trovo verde. Poesía improvisada satírico-obscena en la fiesta de la cosecha

Abstract

Harvest time has been since Upper Antiquity an exceptional occasion in peasant societies, giving rise to festive customs such as duels of improvised poetry in obscene tone and motif. In these duels, precepts of decency were momentarily removed. The historical and comparative research since the fescennini verses of Antiquity, through the pullas of the trovadores de repente of the Golden Age and other satirical genres, allows to link the priapic improvised poetry of the Alpujarra in both reaping and grape harvest contexts to a long popular tradition in which debates of burlesque verses were an entertainment associated with the nexus between fertility of earth and sexuality and with a sense of regeneration that has cathartic laugh. The survival of this burlesque and erotic register among the Alpujarra troubadours in certain festivals, coincidental in dates, spaces and actors with the traditional context of licenses during harvest time, suggests the reusing of these duels of inventiveness, in which participants play recalling a time when they celebrated and accompanied the cosmic revitalization with satirically obscene remarks.