Louisa Paulin et Max Rouquette : reconnaissance littéraire, dissensions graphiques et rendez-vous manqués

Abstract

At the end of the 1930s, Louisa Paulin (1880-1944), a French and Occitan writer, met the work of one of her younger siblings in Occitan literature, Max Rouquette (1908-2005), whose talents as a prose writer and then as a poet she immediately admired. The latter, in his turn, expresses in the journal OC his admiration for the first published collection of his elder, Sorgas (1940). But very quickly this mutual recognition turns short: engaged the one and the other in fights for the Occitan language which did not borrow exactly the same intellectual weapons and, initially, linguistic, it followed a chain of misunderstandings of which several correspondences help to measure the origin and the developments. Intellectual confrontations, organizational rivalries and quests for legitimacy thus took precedence over literary issues proper, in the moment, but also over a longer period of time, until today.

Keywords

• Paulin (Louisa)
• Rouquette (Max)
• Occitan poetry