Wildly the winging
War birds, flying
wake the winter-dead
wish for the sea-road.
Sweetheart, they summon me,
singing of flowers
fair for the faring.
Farewell, I love you.
It didn’t work. It wasn’t only that the metallic rhythm and hard barking syllables were lost, the intricate rhyme and alliteration, though that was part of it — but it just didn’t make sense in Terrestrial. The concepts were lacking. How could you render, well, such a word as vorkansraavin as “faring” and hope to get more than a mutilated fragment of meaning? Psychologies were simply too different.
And there, perhaps, lay his answer to the high chiefs. But they wouldn’t know. They couldn’t. And he was alone, and winter was coming again.