The finest piece of translating in modern English is Curtin’s translation of the Polish Trilogy of Sienkiewicz. It can not be adequately praised nor the publisher who has issued it worthily again and again.
There are few better judges of weight of words, stretch of margins. Sienkiewicz has merry characters as waggish as Falstaff, as boisterously humorous as Rabelais, and quite as hilarious as Abu-l-Hasan, who delighted in disguising grotesques and the threading of long mysterious alley-ways, in gay Arabian Nights, in which famous story collection there are no greater characterizations than Sienkiewicz’ Zagloba, Prince of Liars. Almost all literatures that have been great have produced, in art, one immortal liar. We are not great. But we have George Washington and a cherry tree, which I have always considered one of the divinely stupid stories of the world. This has, in America, one parallel in stupidity, Henry Ford’s collection of pumps.
To revert to Sienkiewicz and the Nights of Araby, the Orient is filled with marvels and magic and mystery; with strategy; and beauty that is strange and deadly. The Occident is used to mental food that is colder, and not so highly seasoned. Sienkiewicz has grandeur of conception akin to the East. Only the East with a past that is measureless can be at one and the same moment, bitter and tender, cruel and impassioned. Thousands and thousands of years are necessary to ripen to perfection that rare fruit of Time, the human mind. To twist a Russian proverb to the moment’s need. A young race is not strong; a young apple not sweet.
What an amazing piece of mental architecture Somadeva built long ago, in India in his Ocean of Story. To measure exactly just how petty the art-creative mind of today is, read it! The entire Human Comedy of Balzac would be one little drop to the ocean. It is not properly speaking an Ocean at all; it is greater: It is a world.
Probably the best Voyages are the purely imaginary. Gulliver wrote one, Cyrano de Bergerac another, and Xavier de Maistre a third. One went to the rim of the mind’s nimble making, the second to the moon, and the third merely journeyed around his chamber. But the distances were all equal, and enchanting.
I am heartbroken that I could not have seen the palaces of Nineveh. It is eye-delight that keeps me alive.
Fancy lofty walled interiors completely covered, (or built rather), of a substance resembling precious porcelain, with the blazing surface of a gem. But pictured, colored! Esarhaddon declared that his palace interiors surpassed the rainbow. These glazed fragments are found today in Assyria. Why could I not have seen it? Thêbes, too! And Babylon! I have always hated economy, petty things, and cold hearts. Shabbiness. Not my kingdom for a horse—but all boasted Fifth Avenue for Babylon. And the gardens of Asia!
Petofi was a lonely, but a good deal madder, a more impetuous, Heine, who lived in Hungary, but he was of Slav descent and his original family name was Petrovich. Like Heine, he felt out of harmony with Goethe. In one of his letters to Friedrich Kerenyi he declares: “... I say it right out. I do not like Goethe. I can not stand him! His head is a diamond, his heart a pebble.”
Petofi’s days suffered from lack of that which Goethe had in abundance, wise guidance. There may be envy mixed with hatred. He goes on to exclaim in this letter: “Bury me in the north. Plant an orange tree upon my grave and you will see how my heart will warm it into bloom.”