Mirèio, a Provençal Poem. Frédéric Mistral

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Brussels,

       April, 1890.

CANTO I.

       Lotus Farm.

       Table of Contents

      I SING the love of a Provençal maid;

       How through the wheat-fields of La Crau 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 Rhone,

       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’s 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 СКАЧАТЬ