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Englisch-Deutsch-Übersetzungen, Anglo-German translations, Christiane Bergfeld

Since 1985
Translation - Copywriting - Editing

Gioia e Fernando Lanzi: Il pesepe e i suoi personaggi

Nativity Figures, an Italian work on the tradition of creches, translated from Italian to German

[Krippenfiguren aus aller Welt. Geschichte und Tradition]

Please click the image for a sample of my German translation.

I'm not authorised to translate the original Italian to English and publish it on this site. HoAs the German sample I have chosen for the corresponding German page dwells on the tradition of the creche and its characters in Provence, I'd like to quote from an English text in the public domain.

Excerpt from
The Christmas Kalends of Provence and Some Other Provencal Festivals
by Thomas A. Janvier (1894)
The making of the creche is especially the children's part of the festival - though the elders always take a most lively interest in it - and a couple of days before Christmas, as we were returning from one of our walks, we fell in with all the farm children coming homeward from the mountains laden with creche-making material: mosses, lichens, laurel, and holly; this last of smaller growth than our holly, but bearing fine red berries, which in Provencal are called li poumeto de Sant-Jan - "the little apples of Saint John."

[...]

In a way, the creche takes in Provence the place of the Christmas-tree, of which Northern institution nothing is known here; but it is closer to the heart of Christmas than the tree, being touched with a little of the tender beauty of the event which it represents in so quaint a guise. Its invention is ascribed to Saint Francis of Assisi. The chronicle of his Order tells that this seraphic man, having first obtained the permission of the Holy See, represented the principal scenes of the Nativity in a stable; and that in the stable so transformed he celebrated mass and preached to the people. All this is wholly in keeping with the character of Saint Francis; and, certainly, the creche had its origin in Italy in his period, and in the same conditions which formed his graciously fanciful soul. Its introduction into Provence is said to have been in the time of John XXII - the second of the Avignon Popes, who came to the Pontificate in the year 1316 - and by the Fathers of the Oratory of Marseille: from which centre it rapidly spread abroad through the land
until it became a necessary feature of the Christmas festival both in
churches and in homes.

Obviously, the creche is an offshoot from the miracle plays and mysteries which had their beginning a full two centuries earlier. These also survive vigorously in Provence in the "Pastouralo": an acted representation of the Nativity that is given each year during the Christmas season by amateurs or professionals in every city and town, and in almost every village. Indeed, the Pastouralo is so large a subject, and so curious and so interesting, that I venture here only to allude to it. Nor has it, properly - although so intensely a part of the Provencal Christmas - a place in this paper, which especially deals with the Christmas of the home.

In the farm-houses, and in the dwellings of the middle-class, the creche is placed always in the living-room, and so becomes an intimate part of the family life. On a table set in a corner is represented a rocky hill-side - dusted with flour to represent snow - rising in terraces tufted with moss and grass and little trees and broken by foot-paths and a winding road. This structure is very like a Provencal hill-side, but it is supposed to represent the rocky region around Bethlehem. At ist base, on the left, embowered in laurel or in holly, is a wooden or pasteboard representation of the inn; and beside the inn is the stable: an open shed in which are grouped little figures representing the several personages of the Nativity. In the centre is the Christ-Child, either in a cradle or lying on a truss of straw; seated beside him is the Virgin; Saint Joseph stands near, holding in his hand the mystic lily; with their heads bent down over the Child are the ox and the ass - for those good animals helped with their breath through that cold night to keep him warm. In the foreground are the two ravi - a man and a woman in awed ecstasy, with upraised arms - and the adoring shepherds. To these are added on Epiphany the figures of the Magi - the Kings, as they are called always in French and in Provencal - with their train of attendants, and the camels on which they have brought their gifts. Angels (pendent from the farm-house ceiling) float in the air above the stable. Higher is the Star, from which a ray (a golden thread) descends to the Christ-Child's hand. Over all, in a glory of clouds, hangs the figure of Jehovah attended by a white dove.

These are the essentials of the creche; and in the beginning, no doubt, these made the whole of it. But for nearly six centuries the delicate imagination of the Provencal poets and the cruder, but still poetic, fancy of the Provencal people have been enlarging upon the simple original: with the result that twoscore or more figures often are found in the creche of to-day.

Either drawing from the quaintly beautiful mediaeval legends of the birth and childhood of Jesus, or directly from their own quaintly simple souls, the poets from early times have been making Christmas songs - noels, or nouve as they are called in Provencal - in which new subordinate characters have been created in a spirit of frank realism, and these have materialized in new figures surrounding the creche. At the same time the fancy of the people, working with a still more naive directness along the lines of associated ideas, has been making the most curiously incongruous and anachronistic additions to the group.

To the first order belong such creations as the blind man, led by a child, coming to be healed of his blindness by the Infant's touch; or that of the young mother hurrying to offer her breast to the new-born (in accordance with the beautiful custom still in force in Provence) that its own mother may rest a little before she begins to suckle it; or that of the other mother bringing the cradle of which her own baby has been dispossessed, because of her compassion for the poor woman at the inn whose child is lying on a truss of straw.

But the popular additions, begotten of association of ideas, are far more numerous and also are far more curious. The hill-top, close under the floating figure of Jehovah, has been crowned with a wind-mill - because wind-mills abounded anciently on the hill-tops of Provence. To the mill, naturally, has been added a miller - who is riding down the road on an ass, with a sack of flour across his saddle-bow that he is carrying as a gift to the Holy Family. The adoring shepherds have been given flocks of sheep, and on the hill-side more shepherds and more sheep have been put for company. The sheep, in association with the ox and the ass, have brought in their train a whole troop of domestic animals - including geese and turkeys and chickens and a cock on the roof of the stable; and in the train of the camels has come the extraordinary addition of lions, bears, leopards, elephants, ostriches, and even crocodiles! The Provencaux being from of old mighty hunters (the tradition has found its classic embodiment in Tartarin), and hill-sides being appropriate to hunting, a figure of a fowler with a gun at his shoulder has been introduced; and as it is well, even in the case of a Provencal sportsman, to point a gun at a definite object, the fowler usually is so placed as to aim at the cock on the stable roof. He is a modern, yet not very recent addition, the fowler, as is shown by the fact that he carries a flint-lock fowling-piece. Drumming and fifing being absolute essentials to every sort of Provencal festivity, a conspicuous figure always is found playing on a tambourin and galoubet. Itinerant knife-grinders are an old institution here, and in some obscure way - possibly because of their thievish propensities – are associated intimately with the devil; and so there is either a knife-grinder simple, or a devil with a knife-grinder's wheel. Of old it was the custom for the women to carry distaffs and to spin out thread as they went to and from the fields or along the roads (just as the women nowadays knit as they walk), and therefore a spinning-woman always is of the company. Because child-stealing was not uncommon here formerly, and because gypsies still are plentiful, there are three gypsies lurking about the inn all ready to steal the Christ-Child away. As the inn-keeper naturally would come out to investigate the cause of the commotion in his stable-yard, he is found, with the others, lantern in hand. And, finally, there is a group of women bearing as gifts to the Christ-Child the essentials of the Christmas feast: codfish, chickens, carde, ropes of garlic, eggs, and the great Christmas cakes, poumpo and fougasso.

Many other figures may be, and often are, added to the group - of which one of the most delightful is the Turk who makes a solacing present of his pipe to Saint Joseph; but all of these which I have named have come to be now quite as necessary to a properly made creche as are the few which are taken direct from the Bible narrative: and the congregation surely is one of the quaintest that ever poetry and simplicity together devised!

In Provencal the diminutive of saint is santoun; and it is as santouns that all the personages of the creche - including the whole of the purely human and animal contingent, and even the knife-grinding devil – are known. They are of various sizes - the largest, used in churches, being from two to three feet high - and in quality of all degrees: ranging downward from real magnificence (such as may be seen in the seventeenth-century Neapolitan creche in Room V of the Musee de Cluny) to the rough little clay figures two or three inches high in common household use throughout Provence. These last, sold by thousands at Christmas time, are as crude as they well can be: pressed in rude moulds, dried (not baked), and painted with glaring colours, with a little gilding added in the case of Jehovah and the angels and the Kings.

Not until "the day of the Kings," the Feast of the Epiphany, is the creche completed. Then are added to the group the figures of the three Kings - the Magi, as we call them in English: along with their gallant train of servitors, and the hump-backed camels on which they have ridden westward to Bethlehem guided by the Star. The Provencal children believe that they come at sunset, in pomp and splendour, riding in from the outer country, and on through the street of the village, and in through the church door, to do homage before the manger in the transept where the Christ-Child lies. And the children believe that it may be seen, this noble procession, if only they may have the good fortune to hit upon the road along which the royal progress to their village is to be made. But Mistral has told about all this far better than I can tell about it, and I shall quote here, by his permission, a page or two from the "Memoirs" which he is writing, slowly and lovingly, in the between-whiles of the making of his songs:

"To-morrow's the festival of the Kings. This evening they arrive. If you want to see them, little ones, go quickly to meet them - and take presents for them, and for their pages, and for the poor camels who have come so far!"

That was what, in my time, the mothers used to say on the eve of Epiphany - and, zou! all the children of the village would be off together to meet "les Rois Mages," who were coming with their pages and their camels and the whole of their glittering royal suite to adore the Christ-Child in our church in Maillane! All of us together, little chaps with curly hair, pretty little girls, our sabots clacking, off we would go along the Arles road, our hearts thrilling with joy, our eyes full of visions. In our hands we would carry, as we had been bidden, our presents: fougasso for the Kings, figs for the pages, sweet hay for the tired camels who had come so far.

Since 1985 Translation - Copywriting - Editing

Gioia e Fernando Lanzi: Il pesepe e i suoi personaggi

[Krippenfiguren aus aller Welt. Geschichte und Tradition]

Since 1985
Translation - Copywriting - Editing