MISTRAL, FRDRIC

born Sept. 8, 1830, Maillane, France died March 25, 1914, Maillane Frdric Mistral, etching, 1864 poet who led the 19th-century revival of Occitan (Provenal) language and literature. He shared the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904 (with Jos Echegaray y Eizaguirre) for his contributions in literature and philology. Mistral's father was a well-to-do farmer in the former French province of Provence. He attended the Royal College of Avignon (later renamed the Frdric Mistral School). One of his teachers was Joseph Roumanille, who had begun writing poems in the vernacular of Provence and who became his lifelong friend. Mistral took a degree in law at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1851. Wealthy enough to live without following a profession, he early decided to devote himself to the rehabilitation of Provenal life and language. In 1854, with several friends, he founded the Flibrige, an association for the maintenance of the Provenal language and customs, extended later to include the whole of southern France (le pays de la langue d'oc, the country of the language of oc, so called because the Provenal language uses oc for yes, in contrast to the French oui). As the language of the troubadours, Provenal had been the cultured speech of southern France and was used also by poets in Italy and Spain. Mistral threw himself into the literary revival of Provenal and was the guiding spirit and chief organizer of the Flibrige until his death in 1914. Mistral devoted 20 years' work to a scholarly dictionary of Provenal, entitled Lou Tresor du Flibrige, 2 vol. (1878). He also founded a Provenal ethnographic museum in Arles, using his Nobel Prize money to assist it. His attempts to restore the Provenal language to its ancient position did not succeed, but his poetic genius gave it some enduring masterpieces, and he is considered one of the greatest poets of France. His literary output consists of four long narrative poems: Mirio (1859; Mireio: A Provencal Poem), Calendau (1867), Nerto (1884), and Lou Poumo du Rose (1897; Eng. trans. The Song of the Rhne); a historical tragedy, La Reino Jano (1890; Queen Jane); two volumes of lyrics, Lis Isclo d'or (1876; definitive edition 1889) and Lis Oulivado (1912); and many short stories, collected in Prose d'Armana, 3 vol. (192629). Mistral's volume of memoirs, Moun espelido (Mes origines, 1906; Eng. trans. Memoirs of Mistral), is his best-known work, but his claim to greatness rests on his first and last long poems, Mirio and Lou Poumo du Rose, both full-scale epics in 12 cantos. Mirio, which is set in the poet's own time and district, is the story of a rich farmer's daughter whose love for a poor basketmaker's son is thwarted by her parents and ends with her death in the Church of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Into this poem Mistral poured his love for the countryside where he was born. Mirio skillfully combines narration, dialogue, description, and lyricism and is notable for the springy, musical quality of its highly individual stanzaic form. Under its French title, Mireille, it inspired an opera by Charles Gounod (1863). Lou Poumo du Rose tells of a voyage on the Rhne River from Lyon to Beaucaire by the barge Lou Caburle, which is boarded first by a romantic young prince of Holland and later by the daughter of a poor ferryman. The romance between them is cut short by disaster when the first steamboat to sail on the Rhne accidentally sinks Lou Caburle. Though the crew swims ashore, the lovers are drowned. Although less musical and more dense in style than Mirio, this epic is as full of life and colour. It suggests that Mistral, late in life, realized that his aim had not been reached and that much of what he loved was, like his heroes, doomed to perish.