From the Wayback Machine (mercilessly plagiarized!). Sources, sadly, were not cited …
Décima’s Iberian Genesis
The espinela form is a logical development of a thousand years of Spanish literary trends. Octosyllabic lines are common in proverbs and the refrains of songs and are documented in poems recorded as early as the sixth century (Navarro 1986: 71). Mozarabe (HispanoMuslim) poets used them in the 11th and 12th centuries, and Iberian Jews and Muslims prized the art of intricate improvised verse (Gerber 1992: 6267). By the 1400s, songs of eight syllable lines were widespread among the troubadours of Castille. These medieval poems were often arranged in fourline romance style (with a rhyme pattern of abcb) or redondillas (abba). The décima can be understood as two redondillas joined by a two-line “bridge” that repeats the last rhyme of the first redondilla and the first rhyme of the second (abbaa/aabba).
By the end of the 16th century the décima and the quintilla were popular forms in song, lyric poetry, and the theater. The quintilla is a five-line, two-rhyme verse which can be understood as a half-décima; or to look at it another way, the décima can be understood as a pair of quintillas in two variations; abbaa and aabba. When a décima is portrayed this way, it becomes a palindrome; that is, the pattern is identical read left to right or right to left. This phenomenon is known as “the décima mirror” (Paredes 1993: 247). Furthermore, a vertical line of symmetry can be draw between the two patterns.
Part of the special appeal of the décima is precisely this curious and ambiguous set of patterns, mathematically stimulating and easily enjoyed. Its inherently rhythmic pattern of stressed syllables and pairs of rhymes repeated unequally yet regularly is a linguistic emulation of the continuo parts of the rumba. In this way an arcane poetic or literary device becomes another rhythmic element in the rumba gestalt.
Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Tirso de Molina (1571-1648), and Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) (notably in his famous play La vida es sueño, to which of course our introductory décima refers) used espinelas extensively. Décimas also quickly became popular among Spain’s unlettered working classes, particularly in rural areas. The décima form, easy to put to music and blessed with a particularly appealing and satisfying rhyme structure and cadencia (cadence), was quickly appropriated by popular poets in Andalusia and the Canary Islands. As the décima’s literary fortunes rose and fell, these campesinos maintained a vibrant tradition of décimas improvised to music, still celebrated today in Spain (particularly in Murcia, the Alpajarra region, and Almería), the Canaries, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Décima’s popularity in Spain enabled it to bridge languages; working people in the northeastern province of Catalonia wrote décimas in Catalán and in the 19th and 20th centuries recited them to solicit gratuities at Christmas time (see Batlle 1933). The Catalán coastal town of Sitges preserves décima to this day.
Décima‘s status as a literary form declined after its heyday in the Siglo de Oro, Spain’s “Golden Age” of literature, the 17th century. The romantic poets (1830s/40s) such as Núñez de Arce (18341903) and José de Zorilla (18171893), and later the “generation of 1927” (Jorge Guillén [1893-1984], García Lorca [1898-1936]), revived the literary décima in Spain. Today, however, the literary décima languishes, again ignored by Spain’s academic poets (Mendoza 1957: 9).
Décima spread rapidly throughout the Americas; Latin American poets as disparate as the Mexican polymath Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz (1651-1695), who won a national décima improvisation contest in 1683, the Nicaraguan modernista innovator Rubén Darío (18671916), and the Chilean Violeta Parra (1917-1967) were preeminent decimistas of their times. Anthologies reflect an unending stream of literary poetic inspiration expressed in this classic genre (Orta 1990, Franco Lao 1970, BravoVillasante 1982, Cela 1982, Feijóo 1982). Décima also entered the musical folk culture of the continent; see for example Mendoza (1957) on the Mexican balona tradition, Hernández (1993) on the Puerto Rican seis style of décima improvisation, and Aretz (1980: 213 231) for a continental ethnomusicological overview. Décima is sung today in Louisiana among Canary Islanders who immigrated to that state in the late 18th century (see Armistead 1992) and there is a long history of décima on the TexasMexican border (see Paredes 1993).
the zone in between the bridge and the crossing
I think all good Lacanians can, in this chiastic musical/poetic rhythmic pattern, see an obvious connection. This is in the “hinge piece” connecting the bridge to the turning point in the palindrome where the balance tips from one side to the other, from “odds to evens,” as in Lacan’s slide-rule analogy.
Nothing earth-shaking here, except to realize that, in constructing the palindromic décimas, a sliding effect is formed that, in Flamenco, becomes the ornament of the guitar that is allowed to slide back and forth across the 12-beat measure. This is the point at which the line “breathes in,” a systolic inflation of energy and spirit, to be exhaled, diastolically, in a symmetrical phrase. The cut is not just a tipping point, it is a Lacanian cut,