Mirèio, a Provençal Poem. Frédéric Mistral

Provençal of the most pliant, are mixed up in these delightfully comic dialogues exactly as they are upon the lips of the common folk. It is the most amusing, perhaps the only distinctly amusing work which the school of the felibre has ever produced, and anybody who reads French may read and have a hearty laugh over it. And I may add, from my own experience, that a very short residence in the ancient Provincia is enough to show that the local idiom is much more intelligible phonetically than it looks at first sight upon paper.

      I may be mistaken, but I take the truth to be that modern Provençal is, after all, a dialect only, and not, as was so long and passionately claimed by the confederate poets, a language. As a matter of fact, it resembles the plastic idiom of the ancient Troubadours very little more than it resembles modern French, and certainly no more than it resembles Gascon, Catalan, or the Italian of the Western Riviera. All the Romance dialects, however fallen from literary honour, or untamed by literary law, are closely akin, and bear marks, even in their utmost degradation, of the same illustrious pedigree. They are like certain wild flowers, the pimpernel, the anemone, whose species can never be mistaken, but whose colours present, and that spontaneously, an almost infinite variety.

The poem of “Mirèio,” in parallel French and Provençal, first fell in my way in the summer of 1871; and I admire my own audacity in immediately attempting to turn it into English verse,[1] almost as much as I do that of the men who first preached the Provençal crusade against the language of Racine and Molière. Of course I knew no more of the idiom in which it was originally composed than could be gathered from a close comparison of the same with Mistral’s own French, aided by a smattering of old Provençal. I may plead in extenuation of my effrontery that there was virtually no more to be known at that time, for even the grammar already mentioned had not then been published. There is not very much more to be known even now.

[1] Boston, U.S.A., Roberts Bros., 1872.

      The scheme of the Provençal verse, though elaborate, and seemingly very artificial, was easily enough intelligible to an English ear; more so, I should fancy, than to a Parisian one, on account of its obvious jingle—or, to speak by the book, the exuberance of its rhymes, and the strength of its tonic accents. The same remark, as is well known, applies in a general way to the songs of the Troubadours. Mistral’s stanza consists of five eight-syllabled iambic lines with feminine rhymes, in groups of two and three, and two twelve-syllabled iambic lines, with masculine rhymes. The Quaker poet Whittier had fallen upon a somewhat similar verse, in one of the finest of his earlier poems—“Lines written at Hampton Beach”:—

      “So when Time’s veil shall fall asunder,

       The soul may know

       No sudden change, no curious wonder,

       Nor sink the weight of mystery under,

       But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.”

      But this is far simpler than Mistral’s.

      I did actually make an attempt to transfer this florid measure to our own sober English tongue, and that eminent American poet and very distinguished connoisseur in poetic metres, the late Mr. Longfellow, once told me that he greatly wished I had persevered, and that he thought it would have been quite possible to render the whole poem in the same way. Perhaps it would have been, to a master of versification, like himself; and for his sake, and out of respect for his opinion, I subjoin the opening stanzas of the poem in Provençal, and my own attempt to imitate their metre, premising, for the benefit of the unskilled, that in Provençal every letter sounds, the vowels as in French, while of the consonants g and j before e and i are pronounced like ds, and ch always like ts. A final vowel is elided, in scanning, before another vowel; and the tonic accent is strongly marked:—

      “Cante uno chato de Prouvènço,

       Dins lis amour de la jouvènço,

       A travès da la Crau, vers la mar, dins li bla,

       Umble escoulan d’ou grand Oumero,

       Iéu la vole segui. Coume èro

       Rèn qu’uno chato de Prouvènço,

       En foro de la Crau se n’es gaire parla.

       Emai soun front noun lusiguèsse

       Que de jouinesso; emai n’agùesse

       Ni diadèmo d’or ni mantèu de Damas,

       Vole qu’en glòri fugue aussado

       Coune uno rèino, e caressado

       Pèr nosto lengo mespresado

       Car cantan que pèr vautre, o pastre e gènt di mas!”

      Or thus:—

      “A maiden of Provence I sing:

       I tell the love-tale of her spring,

       Across La Crau’s wide wheat-fields follow her to the sea.

       Mine be the daring aspiration

       To sing of her in Homer’s fashion,

       My lady of the lowly station,

       Unknown beyond the prairies of lone La Crau was she.

      What though her brow was never crowned

       Save with the youth that rayed it round?

       What though she bore no golden crown and wore no damask cloak?

       Yet I would have her raised in glory

       As a queen is, and set before me

       In our poor speech to tell her story,

       Because I sing for you alone, shepherds and farmer-folk!”

      To me the thought of keeping this up for twelve cantos was simply appalling. Even in my trial stanzas, as will be seen, I had sacrificed many of the feminine rhymes; and I am now inclined to think, though I speak under correction, that Mistral himself and his followers availed themselves pretty liberally of the license which the classic Troubadours are well known to have employed, of manipulating their final syllables more or less in order to make them rhyme.

      The measure finally adopted—ten-syllabled iambic lines with consecutive rhymes, usually masculine but sometimes feminine—was essentially the same as that employed by William Morris in the “Earthly Paradise.” That beautiful work was then new, and very popular in America, and it seemed, and I own that to me it seems still, to present almost the ideal of English narrative poetry. But I broke my version into stanzas of six lines, by way, I suppose, of making it look more like the original.

      In those comparatively early days, I also held, and rather doated on, a theory of my own about what are called imperfect rhymes. I was persuaded that rhymes where the consonant sounds correspond while the vowel sounds merely approximate—like wreck and make, gone and son—are the counterpart on the one hand of assonances upon the other, in which the vowels correspond but not the consonants; that their relation to perfect rhymes is exactly that of minor to major harmonies, and that they relieve the ear in a long-rhymed poem, no less than the latter in a musical composition. Though very naturally censured for the freedom with which I exercised this caprice in my version of “Mirèio,” I still clung to it tenaciously as late as 1880, when I made a version of the Georgics of Vergil. I am by no means certain even now that there is not sound musical justification for the idea, but I have grown conservative with years, as we are all apt to do, and I cherish an ever-increasing respect for law—literary and other. In the present edition of my “Mirèio,” I have therefore reformed and, so to speak, ranged some scores of these licentious rhymes, aiming always, at the same time, at coming closer to the meaning of the original, as I now understand it, even if need be, at the sacrifice of some picturesqueness in the English line.

      I had always beside me when I first made my version, the English prose translation of “Mirèio,” by Mr. C. H. Grant, to which I feel myself to have been not a little indebted. In artlessness