[Membroj] Unpacking a provencal library

[Ralph Dumain]

Note: The title takes off from a well-known essay by German-Jewish 
philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin.  Following the abstract are 
excerpts from the full text of the article. The archive in question 
is now to be found at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. It would 
be nice to locate, if possible, Aubanel's "Venus d'Arles" in 
Esperanto translation.

* * *

Lloyd, Rosemary. "Unpacking a provencal library. " Nineteenth-Century 
French Studies.  32.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2004): 332(14).

Abstract:

The recent acquisition of the library of the Aubanel family, whose 
best-known member was the poet, Theodore Aubanel, allows a study of 
the Felibrige movement, its friends, and its critics, through an 
analysis of the manuscript inscriptions. Of the library's 1,300 books 
and ten boxes of pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, and academic 
bulletins, there are some six hundred inscriptions and manuscript 
insertions written in French, Provencal, Catalan, Italian, English, 
and Esperanto. Ranging form brief definitions to sonnets, from praise 
to provocation, they shed an unaccustomed light on the writers, 
presses, and preoccupations of nineteenth-century Provence. (RL)

* * *

"The Provencal library in question is that of the Aubanel family, and 
especially of Theodore Aubanel, whom Paul Valery once termed the only 
true Provencal poet, and who had been such a supportive companion of 
Stephane Mallarme during the grim time he spent as a teacher in the 
provinces, the dear friend to whom Mallarme would write sending 
kisses from his daughter Genevieve, then a toddler, to Aubanel's 
infant son Jean-de-la-Croix. (2) Aubanel was a member of the 
Felibrige, (3) the band of Provencal writers who in the second half 
of the nineteenth century, at a time when Paris was rapidly extending 
its linguistic and cultural hegemony, were struggling to preserve at 
least some aspects of their culture, in a bid whose most concrete 
trace can be round in the Museon Arletan in Arles, to which Frederic 
Mistral devoted the money he earned from his Nobel Prize. (4) But the 
members of the Felibrige were also attempting not just to preserve 
the Provencal language, but also to transform into a written language 
what until then had been largely a spoken language (at least since 
the middle ages). In 1855 they founded an almanac, L'Armana 
prouvencau, which is still published today and which reflects this 
intellectual, artistic, and political conviction of the importance of 
those non-French languages and cultures practiced within the hexagon."

* * *

"Approximately six hundred of the books and pamphlets, moreover, 
include manuscript additions, either in the form of inscriptions 
written directly on the volume, or in that of inserted letters or 
poems. (7) There are also, lamentably, several traces of authors or 
presses who simply resorted to a stamp--Hommage de l'auteur--truly 
the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. These envois 
and dedications suggest something of the writer's aspirations for his 
work (rarely, in this particularly masculine culture, her work--Marie 
Jenna and Adele Souchier are among the few exceptions). (8) Insofar 
as they indicate the level of attachment to the movement and its 
purposes, the inscriptions furnish a sense of an effervescent if 
somewhat heterogeneous fellowship, with links to many other groups 
who were trying to give prominence to what we now term less-studied 
languages, languages like Catalan and Welsh, Esperanto and Gaelic. 
The network of relationships such dedications sketch allows us, not 
just, as Robert Darnton has argued, to "inspect the furnishings" of a 
library-owner's mind (134), but more importantly to see the Felibrige 
movement, and indeed the clusters of such movements, from a 
perspective quite different from that provided by more conventional 
historical approaches."

* * *

"Written in French and Provencal, Catalan, Italian, English, and 
Esperanto, these manuscript insertions run the gamut of the genre of 
the inscription"

* * *

"And although there are no books inscribed by Mistral, there is a 
card from him, in his beautiful handwriting, and his 1909 Mirejo has 
an insert, a translation of Aubanel's "Venus d'Arles" into Esperanto. 
(27) Aubanel's poem, which is part of his collection Li Fiho 
d'Avignoun (The Girls of Avignon), is there in his handwriting with 
his translation into French."

* * *



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