Mirèio, a Provençal Poem

Mirèio



Frontispiece by Joseph Pennell.
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.
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.


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.