Page:Folk-ballads of southern Europe.djvu/11



HIS illustrative selection, with translation, of the ballads of Southern Europe grew quite simply from the effort to put into the hands of successive classes of Wellesley College students, studying English and Scottish popular ballads, analogous Continental folk-songs. Miss Jewett could easily bring to her classroom German ballads, as well as Scandinavian ballads in German and English translation, but for originals of many of the Southern analogues summarized in Professor Child's encyclopædic collection, which she deemed "as nearly perfect as is possible to any human achievement," she had to seek out, in the rich libraries of Boston and of Harvard, rare editions and old numbers of foreign reviews. The ballads so found were often in provincial dialects that might have baffled a less eager scholar, but it became one of her happiest pursuits to hunt down their inmost meaning and re-phrase it, poet that she was, in her own sympathetic translation. For the Roumanian ballads, although she pored over the originals, she had to depend, in the main, upon French translation, which was usually available, too, for the Gascon and Breton. Italian, which she