“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 doated 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 Vergil. 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.