Barzaz Breiz

"The Oath of the Nominoë"

The Barzaz Breiz (in modern spelling Barzhaz Breizh, about "Breton collection of songs and poems", from Breton barzhaz Breizh "collection of Bretagne poetry") is a collection of Breton folk songs collected by Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué and published in 1839. It was compiled from oral sources and includes traditional folk tales, legends and music. Hersart de la Villemarqué grew up on the Plessix estate in Nizon , which is near Pont-Aven . He was half Breton himself.

meaning

The collection was published in Breton with a French translation. The book achieved widespread circulation, as it was at that time that the romantic generation in France, who also "discovered" the Basque language , became curious about the rural cultures of Europe and the supposedly pagan remains beneath the surface of popular Catholicism. The Barzaz Breiz brought Breton folk culture to European consciousness for the first time. One of the oldest of the songs collected is the Legend of Ys . La Villemarqué not only recorded the melodies of the ballads, but also the lyrics. This was one of the first attempts to collect and print traditional Breton music, aside from hymns.

Until this publication, the Breton legends were only known from references from French romances of the 13th and 14th centuries, in which many cultural aspects were adapted for the French listeners.

The first part of the book contains ballads about historical legends and heroic deeds of Breton leaders, including Nominoë , Erispoë and the Warriors of the Battle of the Thirty . The second part deals with local culture and focuses on religious festivals and seasonal events.

authenticity

The publication of traditional literature was controversial at the time because of the discussion about the most famous of these collections, James Macpherson's "The Poems of Ossian", ostensibly the translation of ancient Gaelic traditions, which, however, had been greatly modified and partly invented by Macpherson. After the publication of the Barzaz Breiz it was criticized by François-Marie Luzel (1826–1895) at a scientific conference in 1868. At the congress of the Breton Society in Saint-Brieuc in 1872 , he claimed that the songs had been written entirely in Macpherson's manner, for, as he said, he had never encountered ballads in such elegant Breton, devoid of French loanwords. Villemarqués refused to give other scientists access to his notebooks.

The controversy continued into the twentieth century. In 1960, Francis Gourvil claimed in his doctoral thesis that the Barzaz Breiz was a fake. These allegations were partially refuted in 1974 thanks to the Villemarqués notebooks found by Donatien Laurent in 1964 . Laurent's dissertation was published in 1989. Laurent summarized that Villemarqué rearranged the material he had collected in order to organize and animate the lyrics and music. At that time, however, this was common, comparable to the work of the Brothers Grimm . Laurent wrote:

Il fut d'abord un réfecteur, emporté trop souvent par les mirages d'une imagination fertile, plus prompt à réparer les prétendus oublis de la tradition poétique qu'à l'accepter pour elle même.

German:

Above all, he was a restorer who too often allowed himself to be carried away by the illusions of a fertile imagination, always more willing to correct alleged omissions in the poetic tradition than to accept them for their own sake.

expenditure

The first edition was published in Paris in 1839 by Éditions Delloye as “ Folio in 8 ” (8 folios per binding ). Reprinted in 1840, 1845 and published by Didier et Cie. In 1846, the book was published in Paris in 1867.

In 1852 Moritz Hartmann and Ludwig Pfau tackled a translation into German, which appeared in 1858 under the title “Breton Folk Songs”. The two translators had visited Villemarqué in Brittany in 1852, which Hartmann reported in his travel notes. Each of the two translators worked on about a third of the songs, and they jointly translated the remaining third into German.

In 1865, the standard English translation by Tom Taylor was published under the title "Ballads and Songs of Brittany". This edition contained some of the original melodies "harmonized by Mrs. Tom Taylor" but left out some ballads.

The 1867 edition has been reprinted by the Perrin academic library to this day, not including the numerous English (Taylor, Fleay, ...), German (Keller-Seckendorff), Italian (Pascoli) and Polish translations etc.

In 1981 a paperback was published.

In 1989 the Breton publisher Mouladurioù Hor Yezh published a Barzhaz Breizh that only contained the Breton text in modern spelling and the notes.

In 1996, Coop Breizh published a paperback edition with only the French text.

In 1999, Editions du Layeur published a reprint of the 1867 edition by Yann-Fañch Kemener , a singer and collector. In addition to the foreword to the 1845 edition, it contains Breton and French versions of the poems, with great emphasis on legibility. An enclosed CD contains the recordings of twelve of the songs by Yann-Fañch Kemener and “ Maîtrise de Bretagne ”, both solo and duo.

See also

• Folk
• Breton music

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tom Taylor (Ed.): Ballads and songs of Brittany . Translated from the “Barsaz-Breiz” of Viscount Hersart de la Villemarqué. With some of the original melodies harmonized by Mrs. Tom Taylor. With illustrations by J. Tissot, JE Millais, RA, J. Tenniel, C. Keene, E. Corbould, and HK Browne. MacMillan and Co., London and Cambridge 1865, The evil tribute of Noménoë (Drouk-Kinnig Neumenoiou.), P. 45 ( Full text in Google Book Search [accessed on August 31, 2009] English: Barzaz Breiz . Translated by Tom Taylor).
2. ↑ Francis Faverau : Geriadur ar brezhoneg a-Vreman . Dictionnaire du breton contemporain. Skol-Vreiz ( agencebretagnepresse.com [accessed August 23, 2010]). agencebretagnepresse.com ( Memento of the original from September 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (Ed.): Barzas-Breiz. Chants popular de la Bretagne . Recueillis et publiés avec une traduction française, des éclairissements, des notes et les mélodies originales, par Th. De La Villemarqué. tape 2 . Charpentier, Paris 1839 (French, full text in Google Book Search [accessed August 31, 2009]).
4. ^ Donatien Laurent: Aux sources du Barzaz-Breiz . La mémoire d'un peuple. La Chasse Marée / Ar Men, Douarnenez 1989.
5. ↑ Anne-Marie Thiesse: La création of national identités - Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle . In: Richard Figuier (Ed.): Points Histoire . 2nd Edition. H296. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-02-041406-6 , pp. 126 (Thiesse quotes Laurent on page 313).
6. ^ Moritz Hartmann, Ludwig Pfau (ed.): Breton folk songs . For the most part after the collection of Mr. La Villemarqué. Verlag der M. DuMont-Schauberg'schen Buchhandlung, Cologne 1859 ( full text in the Google book search [accessed on July 9, 2010], translated by Moritz Hartmann, Ludwig Pfau).
7. ↑ Adelbert von Keller , Eduard von Seckendorff (Ed.): Folk songs from Bretagne . With XVI original melodies. Ludw. Friedr. Fues., Tübingen 1841 ( full text in the Google book search [accessed on August 31, 2009] French: Barzaz Breiz . Translated by Adelbert von Keller, Eduard von Seckendorff).