Magdalena Kowalska, “Ouvroir de litanie potentielle? Litanie de Jean Meschinot / Jacques Roubaud entre la tradition des chants royaux et celle des litanies poétiques contemporaines,” Journal of Philology and Intercultural Communication — Revue de philologie et de communication interculturelle 3 (2019) no. 1.
The subject of this article is the analysis of Secondes litanies de la Vierge (1991) by Jacques Roubaud, which unveils three types of relations in which these poems may be perceived: between the form of liturgical litany and the forme fixée of chant royal, between the rules of litany’s creation and rules of potential literature, and between the liturgical litany and the poetic litanies written in the twentieth century. The main aim of the article is to represent the work of Jacques Roubaud as a sophisticated public response to the work of one of Grand Rhétoriquers, Jean Meschinot (1420–1491), author of Litanies de la Vierge. The contemporary poet reuses the content of old chants royaux as well the rules of the composition provided by Meschinot, and creates the work which fits into the range of contemporary poems, intended as the litany, but does not follow directly the path sketched by poets like Bonnefoy, Stéfan, and Claudel.