Apropos of a passing thought while reading David’s most recent note, I had a
bit of a crisis last evening. After determining that my plan to read more
poetry in order to write more poetry wasn’t working, and especially after
reading Auden’s comment (in The Dyer’s Hand) that a real poet couldn’t bear to
read another modern poet, I decided to move the modern poetry into the garage
and move my (modest) medieval-history library into the bookcase nearest my
desk.
Sometime ago I got rid of all the books I thought I’d never read or want again;
so my search wasn’t as difficult as it might earlier have been. At last, last
night I decided I had probably found them all. I sat staring at them on their
three shelves. Then to my horror, I noticed that my prized volume of the
History of Provencal Poetry by C. C. Fauriel and translated by G. J. Adler was
missing. Might I have inadvertently sent it off to the Salvation Army in fit
of forgetfulness? I spent another hour looking for this book I was convinced
had a red binding and finally finding it in a green binding.
I last read this book in 1994; so decided to see if perhaps in the meantime
some modern translator (Adler made his translation in 1860) had tackled
Fauriel, but (according to Amazon) no one had. I then checked Adler, because
he wasn’t just a translator. He felt free to correct Fauriel when necessary.
Adler lived from 1821 to 1868. In 1858, according to the Wikipedia article, he
completed “his last important work, A practical Grammar of the Latin Language.”
Since Adler at the end of his preface to Provencal Poetry, dated it “New York,
May 1860,” it must be someone’s opinion that Provencal Poetry isn’t important.
Further down, the Wikipedia author writes, “Adler was known to Herman Melville,
whom he met on a sea journey to Europe in October 1849. This was shortly
before Melville wrote Moby Dick. Melville of that encounter wrote: ‘He is
author of a formidable lexicon (German and English); in compiling which he
almost ruined his health. He was almost crazy, he tells me, for a time. He is
full of the German metaphysics, and discourses of Kant, Swedenborg, etc.’
“Melville spent many hours talking to Adler, talking of ‘Fixed Fate, Free will,
foreknowledge and the absolute’, said Melville, ‘his philosophy is Coleredgian
[sic], he accepts the scriptures as divine, and yet leaves himself free to
inquire into nature. He does not take it that the Bible is absolutely
infallible and that anything opposed to it in Science must be wrong. He
believes that there are things out of God and independent [sic] of him – things
that would have existed were there no God – such as that two and two make four;
for it is not that God so decrees mathematically, but that in the very nature
of things, the fact is thus.’
“Further, Leon Howard [a Melville biographer] points out that Adler may well
serve as the model for Bartleby in Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a story
of Wall Street.
And, from Hershel Parker’s biography of Herman Melville: “On 25 August
Melville was excused from work for the funeral of George Adler, whose body was
buried at the rapidly filling Trinity Cemetery, after a funeral at St.
Michael’s Church. Melville was one of only a handful of mourners at the
funeral. When he was earning no money, in late 1859 or early 1860, and before
Lizzie inherited money, Melville had subscribed for a copy of Adler’s
translation of a book on Provencal poetry – the test of friendship. Most of
the intervening years Adler had remained at Bloomingdale’s Asylum. . . It was
a sorry affair, a man of genius living in confinement and dying almost
unmourned. . .”
One further note: Amazon did have Fauriel’ Provencal Poetry, all three volumes,
in French. I was tempted to order them but discovered that I had sent my
French/English Dictionary off to the Salvation Army.
Lawrence
