Hearing the Voice of Form: Poetic Doubling in the Works of Raimbaut d’Aurenga

If the troubadour Raimbaut d’Aurenga produced a corpus that spans the hermetic (or clus ) and simple ( leu ) styles of his time, his work is also marked by a certain disdain for poetic convention, often expressed through biting irony and coarse humour. This article suggests, via an analysis of his lesser-known ‘Pois tals sabers mi sortz e·m creis’ [‘Since such knowledge is born and grows in me’], in comparison with his more famous songs, that Raimbaut’s relationship to poetic form is one that assigns it a similar role to troubadour melodies: these are devices which at once reinforce the semantic unity of a song, while also functioning as independent means of expression — an interaction I call a ‘double’, following the philosopher Lydia Goehr. Additionally borrowing from the thought of Theodor Adorno, Simon Gaunt, and Sarah Kay, I argue that Raimbaut consistently plays on this relationship to elaborate a first-person subject position, not only at the expense of poetic conventions, but also, at times, of meaning. Such is the poetry he boasts of as one of ‘digz escur’: obscure words.