ABSTRACT
Prose and poetry, biography and imagination are inseparable in the life and legend of Jaufre Rudel but also for the songs and legacy of this early twelfth-century troubadour, a leading Occitan poet from the South of France. Some manuscripts introduce his poetry through a romanticized representation of his departure on the Second Crusade, which called him to the Holy Land on a journey from which he did not return. His several archetypal songs praising an unidentified distant love (amor de lonh) have led his contemporaries and ours to posit many different identities for the unnamed beloved. Was she a historical woman or a dream vision? Is she the embodiment of an ideal, localized in Jerusalem and personified as a female beauty? Legend has him die in her arms on arrival, his quest fulfilled. But the core of his exemplary love poetry is desire, not fulfillment. Satisfaction comes later if at all, beyond poetry, in life or in death. Jaufre Rudel’s love songs are the quintessential expression of a yearning for someone and/or something to be achieved only beyond poetry, in the context of the universal pursuit of the perfect love object to complete our desire.
