Provençal or Provençal language?
Provençal (in Occitan Provençal: provençau/prouvençau) is a Romance language of the Langue d'oc family. It evolved from popular Latin and is spoken in Provence, but beyond its borders. This dialect should not be confused with the notion of Provençal language, which refers to the entire langue d'oc until it was renamed Occitan around 1930.
Creation of the Félibrige movement
In the second half of the 19thcentury , the Provençal language underwent a tremendous revival thanks to one of its most fervent defenders, Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914), who, with a number of friends, founded a movement - the Félibrige - to combat the isolation and discredit that had befallen this culture. He defined the foundations of the dialect, specifying that it was made up of sub-dialects from the Alps, the sea (Marseille, Var), Nice and the Rhône. Spelling was restored and codified in a two-volume bilingual dictionary, Lou Tresor dou Felibrige, covering all Occitan dialects. Frédéric Mistral enjoyed great success from 1859 with his epic poem "Mirèio"(Mireille), praised by Lamartine and adapted for lyric theater by Gounod. From then on, Mistral's success continued, and in 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
From Henri Bosco to Peter Mayle
Henri Bosco, René Char and Jean Breton may be the most deeply rooted of Provençal poets, but they're not the only ones. Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) was a jack-of-all-trades: ethnology, philosophical analysis, art history. Orange's open-air theater fascinated him. It was in his notes on Provence that he expressed his emotion with praise; an emotion also found years later in Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (1883-1963).
Born in Avignon, Pierre Boulle (1912-1994) is the author of The Bridge on the River Kwai and the world-famous science-fiction novel Planet of the Apes.
Among these artists are Jean Echenoz, a novelist born in Orange in 1947, who won the Prix Médicis in 1983 for Cherokee and the Prix Goncourt in 1999 for Je m'en vais, and Peter Mayle (1939- 2018), the most Provençal of Englishmen, who became famous with the publication of his first novel, Une année en Provence, a worldwide success followed by other titles, two of which have been adapted for the cinema.
Last but not least, shortly before his death, Camus bought his house in Lourmarin, and now rests in the small cemetery of this village in the southern Luberon.
To make people smile..
Here are a few extracts from Marie Mauron's book Dictons d'Oc et Proverbes de Provence (1965)
It is better to slip with the foot than with the tongue.
The head carries the feet.
If white beards were wise, goats should be wise.
