MALAGASAY SONGS

In the eighteenth century Everiste Parnay published a short collection of some loosely translated traditional Hainteny prose songs of the Merina people of Madagascar, from material he had collected while on service in Reunion. This cultural import may have been the birth of the French tradition of the poem in prose. In 1920, an artist book illustrated by Jean Emile Laboureur was commissioned by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to celebrate the work, only five years before Ravel set three of the songs, and his exotic stylings may well have been influenced by the book's production.