“He ought to know.”
“I don’t know. He said in a large easy way you’d get seven or eight guineas apiece for these things, and then do ’em in a book.”
“Well?”
“Everybody would be doing it if it were so easy.”
“You are really remarkable. A good translation is most rare; and particularly a good English translation. You have seen these Tolstoys. I have not met in German or French anything so vile. It is a whole base trade.”
“The public does not know. And if these things sell why should publishers pay for good translations? It’s like machine and hand-made embroidery. It does not pay to do good work. I’ve often heard translations are badly paid and I can quite understand it. It could be done in a factory at an immense pace.”
“You are right. I have known a group of poor Russian students translate a whole book in a single night. But you will not find cynical vulgarisation of literature anywhere but in England and America. It is indeed remarkable to the foreigner the way in this country the profession of letters has become a speculation. Never before I came here did I meet this idea of writing for a living, in this naïve widespread form. There is something very bad in it.” Miriam surveyed the green vista, thinking guiltily of her envy and admiration of the many young men she had met at the Wilsons’ who were mysteriously “writing” or “going to write,” of her surprise and disappointment in meeting here and there things they had written ...... don’t, Miss Henderson .... don’t take up .... a journalistic career on the strength of being able to write; as badly as Jenkins. Editors—poor dears—are beleaguered, by aspiring relatives. She thought out now, untrammelled by the distraction of listening to the way he formed his sentences, the meaning of these last words ..... it spread a chill over the wide stretch of sunlit grass; in the very moments that were passing, the writing world was going actively on, the clever people who had ideas and style and those others, determined, besieging, gradually making themselves into writers, indistinguishable by most readers, from the others, sharing, even during their dreadful beginnings, in the social distinctions and privileges of “writers,” and all of them, the clever ones and the others, quite untroubled by any sense of guilt, and making, when they were all together, a social atmosphere that was, in spite of its scepticism, and its scorn of everyday life, easier to breathe than any other. But being burdened with a hesitating sense of guilt, unable to be really interested in the things clever people wrote about, being beguiled by gross sentimentality because of its foreign dress and the fascination of transforming it, meant belonging outside the world of clever writers, tried in their balance and found wanting; and cut off from the world of innocent unconscious determined aspirants by a mysterious fear.
It was mean to sit waiting for life to throw up things that would distract one for a while from the sense of emptiness. Sitting moving about from place to place, in the dress of the period. Being nowhere, one had no right even to the dress of the period. In the bottom of the lake .... hidden, and forgotten. Round the far-off lake were feathery green trees, not minding. She sat imagining their trunks, filmed over with the murk of London winters, but all the more beautiful now, standing out black amongst the clouds of green. There were trees in the distance ahead, trees, forgotten. She was here to look at them. It was urgent, important. All this long time and she had never once looked. She lifted her eyes cautiously, without moving, to take in the wide belt beyond the stretch of grass. It was perfect. Full spring complete, prepared and set there, ungrudgingly, demanding nothing but love; embanked between the sky and the grass, a dense perfect shape of various pure colour, an effect, that would pass; but she had seen it. The sharp angle of its edge stood out against a farther, far-off belt of misty green, with here and there a dark maroon blot of copper beech.
“Whatever happens, as long as one lives, there is the spring.”
“Do not be too sure of this.”