Mirèio

Published in 1859 to great fanfare from French literary society, Mirèio was the first of four long narrative poems written by the French author Frédéric Mistral. Composed in Occitan, a regional language spoken in southern France, Mirèio arose out of the milieu of the Félibrige, a cultural movement centered around Mistral and his compatriots who championed the use of the Occitan language. Rich with references to local Provençal culture and geography, Mirèio recounts the joys and sorrows of two young lovers: the titular Mirèio, daughter of a rich farmer, and Vincen, a poor basket weaver. Though the two fall madly in love, they find themselves separated by social class and the disapproving attitude of Mirèio's parents. In part thanks to Mirèio, Mistral went on to win the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature, celebrated by the Nobel Committee for his poetry and his work as a Provençal philologist. Mirèio was widely translated, and was also adapted into the French-language opera Mireille by Charles Gounod. Mirèio remains a celebrated depiction of Provençal culture to this day. This Standard Ebooks edition of Mirèio augments Harriet Waters Preston's unannotated 1890 translation with the annotations from her first translation published in 1872. A sweeping tale of forbidden love set against the sun-drenched hills of Provence, Mirèio is the Nobel Prize-winning epic that captured the soul of a vanishing culture. Frédéric Mistral's lyrical masterpiece blends folklore, romance, and regional pride into a poem still cherished as the crowning achievement of Occitan literature. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)