“Pray as a poet: the case of Philippe Desportes”

Prayer for Desportes is an orientation of the speech. Between his secular Premières œuvres and his Christian poetry, the poet establishes thematic, lexical and linguistic links ensuring both the unity of his work and its division into two coherent groups.

The petrarchist language in the devotional catholic poetry

The use of the petrarchism in the Catholic religious poetry is not a concession to the mundane taste, but a spiritual exercise. The tension created ostensibly by the intersection of languages is part of a theological project: it supports the dynamism of an spiritual initiation and a progressive transformation of human love into the divine love. This project understood like this, it must refer to the structures of the time and the structure of the soul, as well to the transforming union and therapeutic function of literary inculturation.

Maciej Rybiński in quest for sermo humilis. The Book of Psalms by Marot-Bèze in Polish (1605)

The Book of Psalms – translated in Polish by Maciej Rybiński, preacher of the Bohemian Brothers (Hussites linked with Polish Calvinists) – was the fourth Psalter of the Reformed Church in Poland. These psalms were sung with the melody of the French psalms by Marot and Bèze, and were used in liturgy until the end of 18th century.
The article tracks a method which the translator adopted while adapting the French texts for the Polish language as well as Rybiński’s reliance on an earlier Catholic paraphrase of the Psalter completed by Jan Kochanowski (1579). The intention of the Polish translator was to work out his own poetics in accordance with the Calvinist principles sermo humilis.

David, Horace and the mystical hussar. Republic, faith and heritage of the Polish Poetry of the 17th century

The republican idea of the so-called “golden freedom”was established in Poland in the 16th century as a result of collective actions of the catholic and protestant nobility. In the 17thcentury this idea still joined with the catholic faith and was best incarnated in the poems by Wespazjan Kochowski. Both Wespazjan and his work are now forgotten, but the ideas preached by him are still alive. The Polish religious poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries is directly present in contemporary Polish religiousness.