A special interest, as it seems to me, belongs to every attempt to restore to a place in literature the genuine peasant speech of the Roumanians, with all its Slavisms undiluted, and showing by those Slavisms that it is not a sham peasant literature with the thoughts of educated men put into the language of a lower class. The task of contributing to this restoration has been undertaken by M. Ricard Torceanu. He has spent much time and labor in going from village to village to collect the songs, the customs, and lore of the peasants. Everything which he amassed was orally communicated to him. What he gained was often fragmentary and uncouth, but it had the advantage of being a genuine product. It would almost seem as if the villagers were beginning to forget their village songs. In a few years’ time, perhaps, these songs will be no longer to be heard, having been driven away by the new education code and by the new language which has been to a great extent substituted for the old tongue. Then these poems will remain like the last echoes of bygone days.
M. Torceanu has invented nothing, he has extenuated nothing. He has set down what he heard, and no more; he needs, therefore, to make no apology, although the poetry is often meagre and is always absolutely simple. In actual form these songs have some points of likeness to Mr. Barnes’s Dorset lays. In both the beat of four is much the most usual measure of the line; only that, owing to the difference in the accent, while in English the four-beat is often reached in only seven syllables, in the Roumanian eight are nearly always employed. A great variety of accentuation prevents the monotony which would naturally arise from the frequency of this form. And as this variety of accent can not be rendered in the English translation, more freedom has been used in the number of syllables contained in a line than is used in the original. At the same time the four-beat, when found in the original, has been generally preserved.
Alternate rhyme is the exception, the most usual thing being the couplet. Very frequently, however, four of five lines rhyme or sound together. These poets are not very particular about accurate rhyme. Untrained ears are never very exacting on this head. Our ballad literature could show countless instances of such assonance as wind, begin, him, them, am, man, etc. The Roumanians are much more liberal still—at least as appears to our ears. Some of their rhymes recall the loose assonance of old French poetry, such as the Chansons de Geste. Little distinction seems to be made between the liquids l and r, so that are and ale would pass for a proper rhyme. In singing each line is repeated twice, with a variety of accent.
The songs have one peculiarity: almost all begin with the words frunză verde, that is, green leaf. To this follows sometimes “of the so and so.” This reminds us of the beginnings of the snatches of rhyme in Mr. Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”:
Flower o’ the clove,
All the Latin I construe is amo, I love.
Occasionally the frunză verde is followed on by the name of a flower unconnected with it by any conjunction. Thus the following song begins with a line which, literally translated, is simply “green leaf, three violets;” but to make it intelligible we will borrow the form from Mr. Browning’s songs.
The same phrase frunză verde is frequently introduced into the middle of the poem. One might be tempted to suppose that when it is found there, it has been the result of the welding together of two different songs. But there are some instances where this certainly has not been the case.
Now take for a specimen the following song, characteristic enough of the greater number of these village lays:
Green leaf, green leaf of the violet,