Benjamin Péret – Jordi de Sant Jordi : une rencontre marginale

Abstract

In “Le Noyau de la comète”, the prologue to the Anthologie de l’Amour sublime, courtly love is extensively studied by the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret as he forges his own theory of love. Within the anthology, however, the only representation of courtly love is a figure situated in the margins of this tradition: Jordi de Sant Jordi, central in Catalan literature, but dislocated with regard to troubadours in time, place and language.This article studies the relationship between the eroticism of Jordi de Sant Jordi and his poem “Estramps” and the poetics and ideology of “amour sublime” through the history of the text, its language and the subsequent translation into French, quoted by Péret, by the occitanist René Nelli, a writer also found on the margins of XX century French literature.