Picture this: You eat a plate of macaroni and cheese, followed by a macaron cookie, all the while listening to music with a macaronic text and wearing the costume of a macaroni. Have I finally gone completely over the edge, and what on earth does all this have to do with the Christmas carol “In Dulci Jubilo”?
Well, I’ll tell you. No, I haven’t lost it, because all of these macaronical words are related and come, at least indirectly, from the Sicilian word maccarruni, which refers to foods made from some type of paste, either flour based or almond based. (The word “pasta” in and of itself simply means “paste.”) There’s a long, long trail a-windin’ here, with Arabic influences in Sicily resulting in the melding of many North African foods with Italian ones. Here’s a summary from an excellent article in Slate:
The pasta and the almond-pastry traditions merged in Sicily, resulting in foods with characteristics of both. Early pastas were often sweet, and could be fried or baked as well as boiled. Many recipes from this period exist in both a savory cheese version and a sweet almond-paste version that was suitable for Lent, when neither meat nor cheese could be eaten. . . . Out of this culinary morass arises, circa 1279, the word maccarruni, the Sicilian ancestor of our modern words macaroni, macaroon, and macaroni.1
Ho-kay. We’ve gotten the food items explained, but what about the music and the fashion? Let me deal with the fashion first: We all know that line from “Yankee Doodle”—“stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”—but don’t necessarily get the joke, which is a reference to a nickname given to British dandies who’d gone to Italy and taken up some of the extreme fashions of the time there. They were therefore called “macaronis” since they’d brought back a liking for pasta, and the reference to “Yankee Doodle” was originally meant as an insult to the colonist, or “Yankee,” troops that fought with the British in the French and Indian War—they were considered to be fools, or “doodles,” and so unsophisticated that they thought sticking a feather in their rustic hats was the height of fashion. I’m sorry, but I just can’t resist including an engraving here of a true macaroni, courtesy of Wikipedia (and note the tiny little hat perched on top of the guy’s enormous wig)–
Whew. Everybody still with me? Now we’re finally going to get to the whole point of this post, which is the carol mentioned w-a-y back at the beginning, “In Dulci Jubilo.” This piece was originally written in Latin and German, and any such texts that combine two or more languages, whether serious or satiric, are labeled “macaronic,” from a late-1400’s comic poem Macaronea that mixed Latin and Italian. It’s hard to know at this late date exactly why the author picked that title; most historians think he used it because he thought of macaroni pasta as food for peasants. My own theory is that he was referring to the mixture of sweet and savory that could exist in dough-based foods such as maccarruni. Who’s to say?
The text of our carol is said to have been written by a German mystic, Heinrich Seuse, sometime in the mid-1300s. He said that angels appeared to him in a vision, drew him into a heavenly dance, and taught him the words to the song. (Seuse reminds me a lot of William Blake.) His wording alternated German and Latin; there have been many adaptations and translations of his original over the years, with “In Dulci Jubilo” alternating Latin and English. The most commonly-sung all-English version is “Good Christian Men, Rejoice,” with its interpolations of “News, News” and “Joy, Joy” into the text, which is seen as a transcription mistake that has never been corrected. I don’t know—I kind of like it. The tune pre-existed the text and has been used in Lutheran hymnals since the 1500s; some think that it originated as a medieval dance.
The following textual analysis uses the Latin-English version of the piece from Karl Jenkins’ arrangement in his carol suite Joy to the World. His wording doesn’t exactly match any other English translations from Seuse’s German, and the credit says simply “trad. German, 14th century,” so he doesn’t seem to accept Seuse as the author of the original text. I’m guessing that he used his own translation of the German and then adjusted it to fit the tune. Here we go:
In dulci jubilo,
(In sweet rejoicing or gladness; more literally, “jubilation.”)
Let songs and gladness flow,
All our joys reclineth,
in praesepio,
(in the manger or stall—you have to put the previous English line together with the Latin to make a complete sentence.)
and like the sun he shineth,
matris in gremio.
(mother in lap—or, in the mother’s lap.)
Alpha es et O!
Alpha es et O!
(Beginning is and the end—a biblical title for Christ is “Alpha and Omega,” signifying his eternal existence.)
O Jesu parvule,
(O Jesus small child)
I yearn for thee alway,
comfort me and stay me,
O puer optime,
(O child/son/servant best of all)
with all thy lovingkindness,
O princeps gloriae
(O prince [of] glory)
trahe me post te.
trahe me post te.
(draw me after you—a request from the speaker that he would be allowed/drawn to follow Jesus.)
O Patris caritas,
(O Father loving or benevolent)
O nati lenitas,
(O birth gentle and meek)
deeply we were stained,
per nostra crimina,
(through our crimes or sins—a reference to the Christian idea of man’s innate sinfulness and need for salvation)
but he for us has gained,
coelorum gaudia,
(heavenly joys)
O that we were there,
O that we were there.
(The speaker longs to be in heaven.)
Ubi sunt gaudia,
(Where are there joys)
In any place but there?
There are angels singing,
nova cantica,
(a new song—of redemption)
and there the bells are ringing,
in regis curia,
(in the king’s court—a reference to the redeemed in heaven singing before God’s throne.)
Oh that we were there,
O that we were there.
(Interesting that Jenkins closes the last two verses with the same lines.)
Here’s one of only a few live YouTube performances of the Jenkins version:
I find performances of the more standard versions to be awfully draggy, but at least in this one you can be entertained by the lovely setting in Cambridge (and it’s an interesting arrangement, using Robert Pearsall’s version as a framework and then modified by the King’s College Choir director, Daniel Hyde):
But I kept running across references to an instrumental rock performance by someone named Mike Oldfield, so here it is in all its glory from 1976:
© Debi Simons
