Memories of Federic Mistral

By Frédéric Mistral and Constance Elizabeth Maud

Book Overview

Fr d ric Mistral (1830-1914) was without a doubt the greatest modern Proven al poet and the foremost champion of his native Provence, the guiding spirit of a group of latter-day troubadours who revived and refined the language of Southern France as a literary medium. For this achievement and for his own poetry, Mistral was awarded the Nobel prize in 1904--characteristically, he gave the prize money to a folklore museum he had founded in Arles. Two years later, at the age of seventy-six, Mistral published his charming book of Memoirs, which is not so much an autobiography as a recollection of the life of ordinary country people in his early years, filled with delightful anecdotes, tales, folksongs, and poetry. Written in the relaxed conversational style of an elderly gentleman reminiscing about the old days, the Memoirs describe the circumstances of Mistral's childhood and early manhood - the Proven al landscapes, the seasonal life of the farm, the religious observances and seasonal festivities, many clearly of pagan origin. Although educated in the classics and law in Avignon and Aix, Mistral felt out of place among the French-speaking bourgeois and returned to his family farm to devote his life to writing for the simple farming people of his region. He soon began his long poem Mir io (eventually transformed into the opera Mireille by Gounod), whose heroine was modeled on the peasant girls he saw and worked with daily. At the same time, he and several other young men came together to form the Felibrige, a society dedicated to restoring the Proven al language and preserving local traditions. The Memoirs concludes with the death of young Mistral's father and the success of Mir io (1859), so quietly understated that one would hardly suspect that the author had been hailed as a major poet while still in his twenties. Mistral wrote his Memoirs in Proven al and himself translated them into French. A previous English translation (abridged and paraphrased from the French) was published in 1907 and has been out of print ever since. In his new translation, George Wickes of the University of Oregon has mined Mistral's monumental dictionary, Lou Tresor d u F librige. This illustrated edition includes the original texts of Proven al songs and verse, with Professor Wickes' English versions printed en face.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081121009X
• ISBN13: 9780811210096
• Release Date: November 1986
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

His Years in Provence

Mistral launched, and won the Nobel for, the Provencal renaissance, a quixotic shot at restoring the language of the troubadours to the respectability of print after centuries sheltered in the mouths of south French peasants. His Memoirs are Romantic and winning in their humble insistence that the "back to the land" poetic he and his fellow Felibriges pioneered sprang from a doggedly non-literary way of life, in this case the earthy cadence and harvest cycles of Provence, that Land of the Lost that becomes through Mistral's rosy lenses everything the 20th-century isn't: rustic, contentedly patriarchal, pre-industrial, frankly religious, and integrated into a satisfying cosmic whole. Mistral has to be one of the least alienated writers modernity ever threw up, though his Provence looks so much like Tolkien's Shire that you have to wonder if the modernity's in the escapism; the glow comes in part from Mistral's awareness of a world disappeared, like childhood. You choose your illusion and takes your chances; Mistral lived a long life--and helped keep a language from dying--inside his.

The poet of provence

The Nobel poet who brought back the Provencal language to his beloved Provence writes of his home and surroundings and his quartrains. If you love the childhood memories of Marcel Pagnol, you'll love this book too.