By davidh. On 14th September In French lacemakers , lace events , Lacemakers' songs. Jean Dumas with Virginie Granouillet. Photo Dumas family collection. Unable to read or write, she worked as a lacemaker from her childhood into her eighties. Jean Dumas, a professor of Italian at Clermont-Ferrand University, recorded songs from Virginie between and , the year before her death.
Jean came from Vorey, another lacemaking village on the Loire. Virginie probably knew many more β as Jean put to one side her religious songs and songs in the local dialect of Occitan. On 2nd April Guido Gezelle Bruges β Bruges was the most important poet of the nineteenth century to use the Flemish language. In the case of Gezelle, he really was forging a new language. Flemish was in danger of becoming a rural dialect, the kind of thing that the poetry-consuming class only used to speak to their servants.
Gezelle too was a fierce advocate for Flemish, but he was also determined to reshape the language for literary purposes. Modern Dutch would not do for him because it was the language of Calvinism, so he drew on the West Flemish dialect of his native Bruges. Yet one cannot label him a dialect poet: he rather used the spoken vernacular to construct a new, and idiosyncratic, poetic language. Guido Gezelle in Courtrai, From the Stichting de Bethune. Below we give the Flemish text and an, admittedly very rough, English translation.
The poem was first published in in the Bruges review Biekorf which Gezelle had helped to found. However, he avoided one stereotype, for his lacemaker is not old but clearly a young woman or girl. We found this image on Pinterest and do not know its current location. Gezelle, an anglophile, wanted to become a missionary to England he had good connections to the British Catholic community in Bruges, and he was serving as chaplain to the English Convent in the city when he died.
This ambition was quashed, apparently because his prominence on language and social questions had annoyed the ecclesiastical authorities. In consequence, Gezelle passed his entire life in the lace-making regions of West Flanders β Bruges, Roeselare, and Courtrai.
