Fredric Mistral

Extract

Whilst Italy celebrates the bi-millenary of the birth of Virgil, Provence keeps this year the centenary of her own Virgil, Frédéric Mistral, born at Maillane, near Arles, on the 8th September, 1830. His memory is still fresh amongst his people, for he died only as recently as 1914, and we may confidently expect a flood of personal reminiscences from many who were privileged to know him intimately, but to the average Englishman, Mistral can be spoken of only as one who has already passed into literary history, and the justification of these lines must be the comparative unfamiliarity of their subject matter to most English readers.

That Mistral is so little known here is perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that his writings are to us, in a sense, doubly foreign. His most important work, Mirèio (Mireille), may be known, as to its theme, through the medium of Gounod’s opera, but, of the latter, two versions exist, one of which falsifies the action of the poem for the sake of a ‘prettier’ curtain. The poem itself has been translated into English, but such is the irony of things, that the more readable a translation, the less it savours of the original, and in the case of poetry one feels dissatisfied with anything but a strictly literal version intended to enable the reader to follow the original, line by line. Mistral is doubly foreign to us, in the sense that even Paris is able to read him only with a French translation en regard.