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.

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 doted 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 Virgil. 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 of narrative, in vigour 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.

A second English translation, by H. Crichton, with which I became acquainted subsequently, had been published by Macmillan and Co., London, in 1868. This version was a metrical one, and fairly close, but it failed, I think, in catching, not the music merely, but the rural freshness and fragrance, the genuinely bucolic spirit of the Provençal. It is because, I venture to hope, that my version, with all its faults, does reflect something of all this, that a new edition of it is offered to the public after so long a time.

Harriet Waters Preston.

Brussels,
April, 1890.

Mirèio

A Provençal Poem

Canto I

Lotus2 Farm

I sing the love of a Provençal maid;
How through the wheat-fields of La Crau3 she strayed,
Following the fate that drew her to the sea.
Unknown beyond remote La Crau was she;
And I, who tell the rustic tale of her,
Would fain be Homer’s humble follower.

What though youth’s aureóle was her only crown?
And never gold she wore nor damask gown?
I’ll build her up a throne out of my song,
And hail her queen in our despisèd tongue.
Mine be the simple speech that ye all know,
Shepherds and farmer-folk of lone La Crau.

God of my country, who didst have Thy birth
Among poor shepherds when Thou wast on earth,
Breathe fire into my song! Thou knowest, my God,
How, when the lusty summer is abroad,
And figs turn ripe in sun and dew, comes he—
Brute, greedy man—and quite despoils the tree.

Yet on that ravaged tree thou savest oft
Some little branch inviolate aloft,
Tender and airy up against the blue,
Which the rude spoiler cannot win unto:
Only the birds shall come and banquet there,
When, at St. Magdalene’s, the fruit is fair.

Methinks I see yon airy little bough:
It mocks me with its freshness even now;
The light breeze lifts it, and it waves on high
Fruitage and foliage that cannot die.
Help me, dear God, on our Provençal speech,
To soar until the birds’ own home I reach!

Once, then, beside the poplar-bordered Rhône,
There lived a basket-weaver and his son,
In a poor hut set round with willow-trees
(For all their humble wares were made from these);
And sometimes they from farm to farm would wend,
And horses’ cribs and broken baskets mend.

And so one evening, as they trudged their round
With osier bundles on their shoulders bound,
“Father,” young Vincen said, “the clouds look wild
About old Magalouno’s4 tower up-piled.
If that gray rampart fell, ’twould do us harm:
We should be drenched ere we had gained the farm.”

“Nay, nay!” the old man said, “no rain to-night!
’Tis the sea-breeze that shakes the trees. All right!
A western gale were different.” Vincen mused:
“Are many ploughs at Lotus farmstead used?”
“Six ploughs!” the basket-weaver answered slow:
“It is the finest freehold in La Crau.

“Look! There’s their olive-orchard, intermixt
With rows of vines and almond-trees betwixt.
The beauty of it is, that vineyard hath
For every day in all the year a path!
There’s ne’er another such the beauty is;
And in each path are just so many trees.”

“O heavens! How many hands at harvest-tide
So many trees must need!” young Vincen cried.
“Nay: for ’tis almost Hallowmas, you know,
When all the girls come flocking in from Baux,5
And, singing, heap with olives green and dun
The sheets6 and sacks, and call it only fun.”

The sun was sinking, as old Ambroi said;
On high were little clouds a-flush with red;
Sideways upon their yokèd cattle rode
The labourers slowly home, each with his goad
Erect. Night darkened on the distant moor;
’Twas supper-time, the day of toil was o’er.

“And here we are!” the boy cried. “I can see
The straw-heaped threshing-floor, so hasten we!”
“But stay!” the other. “Now, as I’m alive,
The Lotus Farm’s the place for sheep to thrive—
The pine-woods all the summer, and the sweep
Of the great plain in winter. Lucky sheep!

“And look at the great trees that shade the dwelling,
And look at that delicious stream forth welling
Inside the vivary! And mark the bees!
Autumn makes havoc in their colonies;
But every year, when comes the bright May weather,
Yon lotus-grove a hundred swarms will gather.”

“And one thing more!” cried Vincen, eagerly,
“The very best of all, it seems to me—
I mean the maiden, father, who dwells here.
Thou canst not have forgotten how, last year,
She bade us bring her olive-baskets two,
And fit her little one with handles new.”

So saying, they drew the farm-house door anigh,
And, in the dewy twilight, saw thereby
The maid herself. Distaff in hand she stood,
Watching her silkworms at their leafy food.
Then master Ambroi let his osiers fall,
And sang out cheerily, “Good-even, all!”

“Father, the same to you!” the damsel said.
“I had come out my distaff-point to thread,
It grows so dark. Whence come you now, I pray?
From Valabrègo?”7 Ambroi answered, “Yea.
I said, when the fast-coming dark I saw,
‘We’ll sleep at Lotus Farm upon the straw.’ ”

Whereat, with no more words, father and son
Hard by upon a roller sat them down,
And fell to their own work right busily.
A half-made cradle chanced the same to be.
Fast through the nimble fingers of the two
The supple osier bent and crossed and flew.

Certes, our Vincen was a comely lad.
A bright face and a manly form he had,
Albeit that summer he was bare sixteen.
Swart were his cheeks; but the dark soil, I ween,
Bears the fine wheat, and black grapes make the wine
That sets our feet a-dance, our eyes a-shine.

Full well he knew the osier to prepare,
And deftly wrought: but ofttimes to his share
Fell coarser work; for he the panniers made
Wherewith the farmers use their beasts to lade,
And divers kinds of baskets, huge and rough,
Handy and light. Ay, he had skill enough!