Unpacking a Provencal Library

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.

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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)

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"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."

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"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."

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

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"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."