kharja

   The term kharja derives from the Arabic word meaning “exit.” A kharja was the end of a longer poem (the muwashshah) that was made up of several sections, or strophes, and was fashionable in Mozarabic Spain.While the muwashshah itself was written in classical Arabic and later imitated in Hebrew, the kharja (a final strophe, usually of three or four lines) was written in a spoken, vernacular dialect— either colloquial Arabic, Hebrew, or a Romance language, or even a mixture of these languages. Many of the kharjas seem to have been composed before the poems of which they are part, and were perhaps in oral circulation. The kharja was generally a love song from the point of view of a lower-class woman longing for her absent lover. The kharjas that survive are thus the earliest extant love poems in any Romance vernacular, dating at least as far back as the early 10th century. Often they express the kind of idealization of romantic love that becomes common in the tradition of fin amors or COURTLY LOVE that arose in neighboring Provençe at the end of the 11th century and spread throughout Europe.

   Some of the imagery of the kharjas is also reminiscent of the Provençal TROUBADOURS. The motif of love causing the lover physical pain, for example, is present, along with the assertion that only the beloved can cure the speaker’s suffering: “my eyes languish, ah God,/ah they hurt me so!” (Dronke 1968, I, 29) says one kharja, and another laments “My beloved languishes with love of me./Who is there to cure him?/By my lover’s soul, what thirst for my coming!” (Dronke 1968, I, 31).

   Bibliography

   ■ Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.