Henri Irénée Marrou, La source occitane - Lou libre de jouventu (1920-1931) - Philippe Gardy

Henri Irénée Marrou, La source occitane - Lou libre de jouventu (1920-1931) - Philippe Gardy

The historian Henri Irénée Marrou (Marseille, 1904-Bourg-la-Reine, 1977) was also a musicologist and poet. He left at his death a collection of poems in the langue d'oc written while he was still a young man, searching for his way and beginning to find it. These poems, like so many others, could have disappeared. By simple negligence, forgetfulness, or embarrassment, or by the will of their author, who would have judged good to erase the trace of their existence for reasons which were clean to him and which he wished to keep with him, like a secret garden...
But things, as far as we can judge on parts a century later, did not happen exactly like that...
It is to this discovery that we invite the reader, more or less one hundred years after the writing of these "youthful" poems, followed a few years later by their publication in a collection. The lover of literature, especially of poetry, will be here, of course, the first concerned. But also the reader of the historical work of Marrou, who will find in these pages an unexpected base to this never denied vocation, and will remember then that the historian was also, throughout his route, a passionate lover of poetry, and particularly of that of the Occitan troubadours whose art rests on the close alliance of the letter and the melody, (... ) by discovering that it is part of both an existential experience (an impossible love) and a personal commitment to the langue d'oc, the nuances of which have not erased the original values - geographical, familial and sentimental - overhung for a lifetime by the almost magical presence of the poetry and musical genius of the troubadours.

Collection Cahiers de Carrefour Ventadour 2023.
Editions Carrefour Ventadour.

The author:

Philippe Gardy, academic, honorary director of research at the CNRS, specializes in the study of Occitan literature from the Baroque age to the contemporary period and has taught at the faculties.