Mirèio

Mirèio

By Frédéric Mistral.

Translated by Harriet Waters Preston.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. To Lamartine
4. Preface to the English Edition
5. Mirèio
   1. Canto I: Lotus Farm
   2. Canto II: The Leaf-Picking
   3. Canto III: The Cocooning
   4. Canto IV: The Suitors
   5. Canto V: The Battle
   6. Canto VI: The Witch
   7. Canto VII: The Old Men
   8. Canto VIII: La Crau
   9. Canto IX: The Muster
   10. Canto X: Camargue
   11. Canto XI: The Saints
   12. Canto XII: Death
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To Lamartine

Te consecre Mirèio: es moun cor e moun amo,
Es la flour de mis an.
Es un raisin de crau qu’emé touto sa ramo,
Te porge un païsan.

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I offer thee Mirèio: it is my heart and spirit,
The blossom of my years.
A cluster of Crau grapes, with all the green leaves near it,
To thee a peasant bears.

Preface to the English Edition

Thirty odd years have come and gone since the curious litterateurs of Paris were excited and charmed by the apparition of Frédéric Mistral’s Mirèio. A pastoral poem in twelve cantos, composed in the dialect of the Bouches-du-Rhône, and first issued by an obscure bookseller at Avignon, it was produced before the great literary world with a parallel French version of the author’s own, very singular and rather sauvage as French, but exceedingly bold, picturesque, and poetic, and the poem had the further advantage of a most eloquent and sympathetic introduction in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of September 15, 1859, by Saint-René Taillandier.

The employment of a rustic southern dialect for the purposes of poetic narrative was by no means so unheard-of a thing, even to the men of that generation, as was indirectly assumed by the first reviewer of Mirèio. Had not Jacques Jasmin, the immortal barber of Agen, written, in his own local patois, “Françonette,” and “The Blind Girl of Castel Cuillé,” and the inimitable Papillotes? But the work of Mistral, along with that of the school which he claimed to represent, and of which he was easily chief, was heralded by a certain fanfare⁠—it came with a specific and impressive claim of ancient Provençal traditions to be revived, and a vast future inaugurated: pretensions which would have seemed almost droll to the Gascon Jasmin, with his exquisite humour and his adorable simplicity.

I can do no more than glance in this place at the history of the self-styled Provençal Revival, the most ambitious and by far the most romantic literary adventure of our day. It is an inviting subject, and will one day form an interesting chapter in the long annals of poesy; but the time is not yet fully come for estimating its results, and still less, with its greatest champion yet living, for writing its obituary.

Joseph Roumanille, a schoolmaster of St. Rémy, near Tarascon, was the father of the movement. He first wrote poems in modern Provençal, so the pleasant legend says, because his old mother could not understand him when he essayed to read her those which he had written in French. Delighted, and, as it would seem, a little amazed at his own success, he came forward as the rightful heir to the long-lapsed inheritance of the Troubadours, assumed that the language, whose literary capacities he had rediscovered, was essentially the same as theirs, and contrived thoroughly to imbue with his own faith in its future a band of clever and ardent pupils, among whom, by the will of Heaven, there was one rare genius⁠—Frédéric Mistral, and one wild enthusiast, who was, at the same time, an affluent and pathetic versifier⁠—Théodore Aubanel. Animated by a mystical assurance, hardly less profound than that of Loyola and his companions upon Montmartre, these knights of song bound themselves by a sort of vow, to write in the effete language of the French Academy no more. They constituted themselves a poetic order, and proceeded to adopt an elaborate and somewhat fantastic organization. The almost religious earnestness which animated them may be judged by the fact that when one of the original band, Eugène Garcin⁠—formally saluted by name, along with some half-dozen others, in the sixth canto of Mirèio⁠—cooled in his ardour a little, and attempted to point out the factitious and impracticable side of the movement, he was solemnly denounced by Mistral as “the Judas of our little church.” It was a defection of no serious moment, and the revival went its fervid way without Garcin.

The Provençal poets agreed to call themselves felibre, nobody knows to this day exactly why. There are those who say that the word means homme de foi libre, that is, emancipated from