La Pléiade

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La Pléiade (French, German "Siebengestirn" ) was a group of French poets who formed around Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay in Paris in 1549 and initially referred to themselves as La Brigade (German "Trupp / Schar").

Group of poets in the 16th century

The name Pléiade , under which it went down in literary history, is first mentioned in 1556 in a poem by Ronsard, the leader of the group. It was he who limited the initially open membership to seven, based on a group of seven poets in the Hellenistic Alexandria of the 3rd century BC. BC, whose number corresponded to that of the Pleiades in Greek mythology. In addition to Ronsard and Du Bellay, the actual Pléiade includes the authors Jean Dorat , Rémy Belleau , Jean-Antoine de Baïf , Pontus de Tyard and Étienne Jodelle, who are hardly known today . The humanist scholar Jacques Peletier du Mans and the composer Claude Le Jeune had close relationships with the group .

The members of the Pléiade, who all had a profound knowledge of the Latin and mostly also the (old) Greek language and literature, on the one hand propagated the imitation of ancient authors and genres, but at the same time emphasized the value of French , which they renewed and through as a literary language Neologisms , e.g. B. Tried to enrich Latinisms , archaisms and expressions from technical languages ​​and dialects. Her work, especially her love poetry, is also strongly oriented towards the Italian literature that was authoritative in Europe at the time. B. in the poetry of Francesco Petrarch and his successors, the Petrarkisten .

The revolutionization of French metrics aimed at by some members, especially Baïf, in the sense of a system that also measures the quantities of the syllables and not just their number, could not prevail. The verse forms that today appear to be typical of the group, mainly thanks to Ronsard and Du Bellay, are rather the ten-syllable and the twelve-syllable alexandrine . Typical types of poetry are the sonnet and the ode .

The group's doctrine was formulated primarily by Du Bellay in his well-known work La Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549, German: "Defense and making the French language famous"). French should be “defended” against inveterate humanists who believed that no newer language could ever hold a candle to Latin and Greek. It was to be “illustrated” by literary works that could compete with those of the Greek and Roman classics, but above all with those of the modern Italians. In this respect, the Pléiade authors thought quite nationalistically.

Name transfer in the 20th century

In the 20th century, the name La Pléiade was transferred to some series of editions published by Gallimard :

  • the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade , the most renowned French classics series, which has been publishing great French and (in translations) foreign-language authors in leather-bound, thin-print editions since the 1920s and now comprises well over 600 volumes (as of 2019);
  • the Albums de la Pléiade , published since 1960: 45 volumes (as of April 2005);
  • the Cahiers de la Pléiade , a literary magazine published from April 1946 to autumn 1951 (13 issues);
  • the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade , published since 1955: 49 volumes (as of April 2005);
  • the Galérie de la Pléiade , published 1950 to 1957 (6 volumes).

literature

  • Heinz Willi Wittschier: The poetry of the Pléiade (= focus on Romance studies. Volume 11). Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1971.
  • Yvonne Bellenger: La Pléiade. La poésie en France near Ronsard. Extended new edition (first 1978). Nizet, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-7078-1110-2 .
  • Marie-Dominique Legrand (ed.): Vocabulaire et création poétique dans les jeunes années de la Pléiade (1547–1555). Champion, Paris 2013, ISBN 978-2-7453-2536-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerd Johann König: The neo-Latin poetry in France at the time of the Pléiade. Review. In: Romance Studies. No. 4, 2016, pp. 499-508.