The Memoirs of Frédéric 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081121009X
• ISBN13: 9780811210096
• Release Date: November 1986
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 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.