 Hello, I'm Sagar Asnani and I am a PhD candidate in musicology and medieval studies here at Berkeley. And my interest is in the kind of the intersection between language and music in medieval, basically what's now France. So the poem I've chosen to read today is called Tan Mabelis Lamourous Pessamen. The amorous thought delights me so. It's a medieval Occitan poem by a troubadour named Fouquet de Marseille. So they spoke Occitan, which is a language which actually is considered like an indigenous and endangered language because there's so few people who use it in their daily interactions today. But in the 12th century, in the southwest part of France and centered around like Toulouse, Poitiers, this language was actually really, really a prestige language. And it was spoken by some of the most powerful princes and dukes and counts and kings of France. Tan Mabelis Lamourous Pessamen says that it's a good thing to have a good heart. Because we can't have another piece of paper, no one likes it, no one likes it, so you know what I'm going to cook. If you love me, you'll never kill me. I promise to play with you for a long time, and I'll train you for a long time. The rhyme scheme here is essentially Occitan, right? And for the first line, Tan Mabelis Lamourous Pessamen. And Pessamen with that end S sound is very Occitan. If you go down to the fourth line, Ni mais, ne gousse, nomes douce, ni placence. And so there you have the same word placence, which rhymes with Pessamen, right? Ence is the rhyme scheme here. If this was French, plaisance. And so you would actually have that S sound at the end of plaisance in French, but then it would rhyme with Pensement. Features of this that are distinctly Occitan are woven right into the very lyrics themselves. So what's really interesting is that the same text, even though it might be very musical in one language, the moment you translate it, it loses a bit of that musicality because when we're translating, we're translating for meaning, not for sound. If you know the BTS butter, right? Smooth like butter, like a criminal undercover. That's not a play on English of really the words of what they mean. It's a play on English for how they sound. But I don't think they really cared if it was smooth like butter or smooth like margarine, right? You know, that's not the central aspect of that song. So while translation is always like interested in bringing the most out of the meaning, out of the semantics of the music, of the poetry, I think that, you know, music has to deal with the sound of language.