MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY BRETON
THE POOR CLERK (IN BRETON, “AR C’HLOAREK PAOUR”)
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is rather a mediæval than a modern folk-poem. The translation is that of the late Tom Taylor (Ballads and Lyrics, Macmillan), who has the following note upon it:—“The Klöarek is a seminarist of Tréguier, a peasant who has a turn for books, or shows some vocation for the priesthood. Their miserable life, hard study, and abnegation of family life are provocative of regretful emotion, passionate and mystic asceticism. The Klöarek is the poet and hero of most of the Breton Sônes; Tréguier, therefore, is the nursery of the elegaic and religious popular poetry of Brittany.”
THE CROSS BY THE WAY (KROAZ ANN HENT).
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Vide preceding Note. This translation is from the same source as last.
THE SECRETS OF THE CLERK, AND LOVE SONG.
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See Note to “The Poor Clerk.” The first of these poems was probably composed in the transition period—late mediæval or early modern. Both are given in the rendering of Mr Alfred M. Williams (vide “Folk-Songs of Lower Brittany” in Studies in Folk-Song and Popular Poetry (1895)). “The Love Song” is modern—probably circa 1800, or even 1750.
HERVÉ NOËL LE BRETON.
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For all particulars concerning this poet I must refer interested readers to Mr W. J. Robertson’s brief memoir in that most delightful of all books of translation, A Century of French Verse (A. D. Innes & Co., 1895). This is without exception the ablest work of its kind we have. It is the production of one who is unmistakably himself a poet, who has the rare double power to translate literally, and at the same time with subtle art and charm, so that the least possible loss in translation is involved. In addition to these often exquisitely felicitous, and always notably able and suggestive renderings, Mr Robertson has prefixed to each representative selection a brief critical and biographical study of the poet represented—short études of remarkable insight and critical merit. Of Hervé Noël le Breton he gives some interesting particulars. The poet is of the ancient Armorican race, and was born in Nantes in 1851. He has not yet published any volume; and it is from an unpublished collection, Rêves et Symboles, that Mr Robertson has drawn. Strangely enough, neither in Tiercelin’s Breton Anthology nor anywhere else can I find any allusion to Hervé Noël le Breton: and his name is unknown to M. Louis Tiercelin, M. Anatole le Braz, and M. Charles Le Goffic, respectively the most eminent living Breton anthologist, Breton folk-lorist, and Breton poet-romancist and critic. For several reasons I take it that Le Breton is an assumed name; and it is even possible that the Armorican blood is only in the brain, and not in the body of the author of Rêves et Symboles. “The Burden of Lost Souls” is in three parts, of which that given here is the first. Here is the second: