Mirèio/Preface
PREFACE.
THE words, "Translated from the Provençal," suggest to the ordinary reader only a confused and dazzling image of mediæval life amid southern scenery,—troubadours and courts of love, knights, ladies, and tournaments. Few of us have even been aware that the long-buried root of Romance poetry has of late sent up a green and graceful shoot, and that one of the most charming episodes of recent literary history concerns what is known in France as the Provençal revival. The story is thus told by Saint-René Taillandier, in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," for October, 1859:—
"This new Provençal poetry, which has created a certain sensation of late, had a very simple and touching origin. The son of a gardener of Saint-Rémy, educated in our French schools, wrote verses at the age of twenty, as one fresh from college is apt to do,—simple, unpretending verses, by no means poésie du diable, as a witty critic calls the over-hold attempts of youth, but rather poésie de famille, which was destined never to trangress the limits of the fireside. These verses the gardener's son designed for his mother, and he sat up late one night to read them to her. But the youth was under a strange illusion. The poor woman had long since forgotten the little French which she had learned at school, and the verses which she had inspired were written in a tongue she could not understand. The humble minstrel was a thoughtful soul, and this discovery overwhelmed him with sadness. 'And so,' he mused, 'my mother is debarred from those intellectual joys which delight me. When she has finished her day's toil, she may not listen to noble thoughts expressed in a melodious form. In the middle and north of France some few of the accents of our poets may gladden the shop of the mechanic and the cottage of the laborer. A song, a strophe, a canticle, a grand or joyous strain, may possibly linger in their memory; but, with us, where is the poetry of the poor? Our Provençal tongue has been for centuries dishonored by low singers, tavern catches, vulgar squibs, uncouth and licentious rhymes. Such is the groundwork of our popular literature! Well, then, since our mothers do not comprehend enough of French to understand the songs which filial tenderness has inspired, let us sing in the language of our mothers! Since we have no popular literature save that of the ale-house, let us create one for the hearths of our sires and grand-sires.' The boy of Saint-Rémy had written French verses without the slightest literary pretension. Henceforth he will write Provençal verses, with the very definite aim of substituting a frank, healthful, honest, yet gay and genuinely popular style of poetry for that riot of coarse speech which had slain modesty in the ears of the young. Such was the birth of that new Provençal poetry which is to-day illustrated by the success of 'Mirèio.'"
The name of this gardener of Saint-Rémy was Joseph Roumanille. He was a country school-master, as well as a rustic poet and a loving son; and he contrived to inspire with his own enthusiasm for their dishonored dialect, and to enlist in an ardent crusade for its restoration to literary honor, a class of apt and brilliant pupils, the youngest and most remarkable of whom was Frédéric Mistral, the author of "Mirèio." His master and his comrades, the chief of whom are apostrophized by name in the beginning of the Sixth Canto, had attempted only lyrics in their regenerate native tongue. Mistral conceived the bolder idea of employing it for the unfashionable uses of pastoral story, and of making it the medium of a study from nature, of the yet primitive and picturesque rural life of southern France. Discarding all classical models, and seeking to draw his inspiration straight from the soil, he produced a work at once beautiful and unique, and which created a marvellous excitement in the orderly circles of literary France. Critics of the sensational and conjectural order shouted in ecstasy that this was "primeval poesy," a "draught from the fountain-head," and, with the true French instinct for dramatic effect, proclaimed the author to be an unlettered peasant, a daily farm-laborer. In truth M. Mistral was a youth of fortune, the son of what we should call a "gentleman farmer" of Maiano, or Maillane, and had received a liberal education at the college of Montpellier, after graduating from the tuition of Roumanille.
"Mirèio" first appeared at Paris in September, 1859,[1] having beside the Provençal a parallel French version of the author's own, or rather a prose translation divided into verses to correspond with the stanzas of the original. This translation is absolutely literal, following the very order of the Provençal words, even when least consonant with French usage; and strange French it is, as French, to one who knows only the acknowledged models,—artless, abrupt, homely, not to say sauvage, but always poetical and always fascinating. Indeed the critic quoted above does not hesitate to affirm his belief that M. Mistral wrote from the first with an eye to his Parisian audience, and even manipulated his Provençal verse in order to make the French rendering of it more effective. "Remarkable," he says, "as this translation seems, it is most artfully adapted to impress a cultivated audience. Its very strangeness recommends it; just as in reading a literal translation of a German or English poem, we are always tempted to believe that the brusquerie of form, the abrupt and grotesque turns of expression, attest the vigor of the original text. But, strange or not, the translation has captivated the critics. The Provençal is not always understood, and that not by the common people merely, but even by those most accomplished in the language. And this is why the success of 'Mirèio,' instead of being announced to Paris by Provence, was not imposed upon but certainly recommended to Provence by the suffrages of Paris."
No doubt there is a degree of truth in this. A young poet,—and Mistral was but twenty-seven when "Mirèio" first appeared,—however earnestly devoted to the restoration of a decayed literature, must needs be principally influenced in his work by the hope of winning personal fame; and fame in Mistral's case depended on a Parisian success. But it matters little comparatively with what view he wrote, seeing that he produced the most original poem of modern times,—a poem rustic in theme, unconventional in treatment, full of the sunshine and the untaught grace of out-door life, yet stamped with the inalienable dignity of high literary descent. M. Mistral seldom reminds us of any other author. When he does, it is of the greatest. Vincen and Mirèio occasionally recall Romeo and Juliet; but only, it may be, through their youth, their abandon, their southern precocity, and their similar misfortunes, while their passion has far more of childlike innocence than that of the immortal lovers of Verona. And if it seem, at first sight, audacious in our author to declare himself even a humble pupil of Homer, it should be remembered that, in one respect at least,—Matthew Arnold would call it a capital one,—he signally justifies the pretension. Lively and simple,—whether by instinct or by art,—he is invariably noble. How far I have been able to preserve these traits in the ensuing version the reader shall decide.
I must, however, hasten to disclaim any thing approaching to a critical knowledge of the rich and charming Provençal dialect,—or rather language, for it is more than a dialect. I know it only through a close comparison of the original "Mirèio" with the parallel French version before mentioned, assisted by occasional references to Raynouard's "Résumé de la Grammaire Romaine." I had first learned to admire "Mirèio" through the English prose-version of Mr. C H. Grant, to which I feel myself not a little indebted. In artlessness of narrative, in vigor and felicity of expression, I have never hoped to surpass this unrhymed and unmeasured version, which needed, as it seemed to me, only a rhythmic form to render it worthy of the essentially musical original.
What that form should be, I found, when I came myself to think of translating "Mirèio" into verse, a question of no little difficulty. The Provençal measure is very un-English and alluring,—highly ornate in melody, abounding in double and triple rhymes, echoes and assonances; in general effect most like the elaborate Latin metres invented by the monks of the Middle Age, as Bernard of Cluny's in "De Contemptu Mundi." I can think of no English verse at all resembling it unless it be Whittier's in one of the best 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 inward rise, and with the vastness grow."
But this is far simpler than Mistral's. Hopeless as the notion seemed, I did make an attempt to transfer this florid measure to our sober English tongue, but soon became convinced that a few pages at most would exhaust its possibilities and render it wofully tedious. Only the plainest and most transparent of English metres could, I thought, endure and adapt itself with sustained facility to the abrupt action and widely varying emotion of the original. The one finally selected, which is essentially the same as that employed by Mr. William Morris in the "Earthly Paradise," seemed to me on the whole best adapted to the purposes of English narrative-verse.[2]
And in general with regard to this matter of adhering to the metre of the original in poetical translations, I suspect it to be imperative chiefly in lyric poetry or where the two languages are near akin. I have never yet seen a German metre which could not, by means of a little patience and ingenuity, be transferred to English; but with the liquid, lingering rhythm of the Latin tongues it is quite otherwise. There the genius of our language is defied, and it is useless rebelling against philological fate. I cannot better illustrate than by a reference to Mr. Duffield's laborious, and, in some sort, highly successful rendering into similar English verse, of Bernard of Cluny's hymn mentioned above, where the sad and stately melody of,—
"Hic breve vivitur, hic breve plangitur,
Hic breve fletur,
Non breve vivere, non breve plangere,
Retribuetur,"
so sweetly echoed in Dr. Neale's familiar,—
"Brief life it here our portion," &c.,
becomes in the hands of the exact (?) translator,—
"Briefly we tarry here, briefly are harried here,
Here is brief sorrow;
But not to brevity comes our longevity
Due on that morrow,"
the movement whereof I have heard compared by a sensitive critic to the clanking of chains.
A second English translation of "Mirèio," by H. Crichton, was published by Macmillan & Co., London, in 1868. This version, which I examined with interest after my own was completed, is a metrical one, but seems to have failed to win English readers to an adequate appreciation of "Mirèio."
One word about my imperfect rhymes, the rather as there is a species of critic whose peculiar aliment such rhymes seem to be. I hope I have not strained too far that by-law of prosody which authorizes their occasional employment. In a long poem composed like this of consecutive rhyming lines, and where the poverty of our language in perfect rhymes soon becomes painfully apparent, they are, I venture to think, not only allowable, but agreeable. Rhymes in which the consonant sounds correspond, while the vowel sounds only approximate,—and this is the only kind of imperfect rhyme I have ever employed,—are the counterpart of assonances in which the vowels correspond, but not the consonants. They have, it seems to me, their precise equivalent in minor harmonies, and relieve the ear in a long composition no less than they.
And so I take leave of "Mirèo," my constant and always lovable companion of last summer and autumn, and resign her to the public.
Danvers, Feb. 27, 1872.
- ↑ A single edition of the Provençal alone had previously been printed at Avignon.
- ↑ 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 lusignèsse
Que de jouinesso; emai n'agùesse
Ni diadèmo d'or ui 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!But the thought of keeping this up for twelve cantos was appalling, and suggestive of nothing so much as the nursery romance of "The Little Man and Little Maid."