United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If Roumanille and Aubanel contented themselves with the publication of poems of no very ambitious length, the author of "Mirèio" aimed directly at enriching his language at the outset with an epic. He has given us in twelve cantos the song of Provence.
It is a wine of poets, this bee-kissed Châteauneuf, and its noblest association is not with the Popes who gave their name to it but with the seven poets Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Matthieu, Brunet, Giéra, Tavan whose chosen drink it was in those glorious days when they all were young together and were founding the Félibrige: the society that was to restore the golden age of the Troubadours and, incidentally, to decentralize France.
"Aubanel and you will say as I do, when you have read his book is a wild pomegranate-tree. The Provençal public, whom his first poems had pleased so much, was beginning to say, 'But what is our Aubanel doing, that we no longer hear him sing?" Then follows an exposition of the hopeless passion of the poet, how he took for motto, "Quau canto, Soun mau encanto."
As may easily be seen, Aubanel writes not, like Roumanille, for his own people alone. His Muse is more ambitious, and seeks to interest by appealing to the sentiments in a language polished with all the art of its sister, the French.
"You have seen Sunshine and rain at one: her smiles and tears Were like a better day: Those happy smiles That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence, As pearls from diamonds dropp'd." Lis Oubreto de ROUMANILLE. Avignon. 1860. 12mo. T. AUBANEL. La Miougrano Entreduberto. Avec Traduction littérale en regard. Avignon: J. Roumanille. 1860. 12mo.
Anciently it filled the cups over which chirped the sprightly Popes of Avignon; and in later times, only forty years back, it was the drink of the young Félibrien poets Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Mathieu and the rest while they tuned and set a-going their lyres. But it is passing into a tradition now.
The Academie des jeux floraux altered the character of the competition by admitting French poems after 1694. At the end of the sixteenth century, Provençal poetry underwent a revival; in our own time, poets such as Jasmin, Aubanel, Roumanille and above all, Mistral, have raised their language from a patois to a literary power.
Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles or in Avignon Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giéra, Brunet, and Tavan after the manner of Ronsard's "Pléiade," and Rossetti's "P.R.B." formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great work of regeneration.
The road-side smiled with flowers, as he passed, and mothers trembled for joy; for infant-asylums arose wherever the child-angel trod." One of the first to respond to the call of Roumanille for the composition of the selection "Li Prouvençalo" was Th. Aubanel, also of Avignon. And now, eight years later, the promise of M. René Taillandier, in his introduction to the selection, has become reality.
Word Of The Day