The Americas are the fateful Continents. Slowly they have destroyed the great living that existed before. And now they are forming the background for the New World, the dangerous scientific world, when values will be made over, and nothing will be as it was before, not even gods. The discovery of America marked the beginning of the death of beauty.
Some of the new and extreme schools of writing, of art in general, are merely expressions of weakness. The mind is registering wonder, uncertainty, and fear, at tremendous change. A close-up that is too sudden has caused temporary loss of mental poise. And with it has come the slower comprehension, that the old arts are dying, that they can not live on, because they will not be needed nor able to interest anyone, nor even amuse, in a scientific world.
I have read novels in German all my life and now I am asking myself why I do not have the impulse to write about them. There must be a reason. But I can not find it. I do not think that the English tongue carries German printed art any too well, when it is translated.
It is silly to say that people love different things. But sometimes it is necessary. Our friends love us only when we are foolish and they can look down upon us. A dangerous gesture always.
Some women when they are young love kittens, dogs, dolls or men, and always themselves, because they can not see themselves. As for me, I have loved words. Only words could give me the supreme emotion, because they were suffering strange and inexplainable change, which enchanted then puzzled me; transformations of sound, sense, down long alley-ways of time and living; and calling with voices changefully beautiful and broken, keeping always beyond the magic of perfect realization, and in addition, like a false love, prodigal of promises, infinite and unkept. The emotion of words, with their different rhythmic passions, in many races, in many lands, lured me. Following etymological laws, I have watched them, like gay actors on a stage in a play that never ends, put swiftly on varying vowel and consonant raiment. I have held my breath at the capricious orders of change. I have felt delight at their fresh grotesqueness.
Words are our oldest playmates. There is nothing else save the air we breathe with which so long we have been in contact.
At this moment, as a civilization changes, a period of time comes to an end, (and all else is useless and time-stained), women who play Bridge, patronize Beauty Parlors, fly in aeroplanes, use the root-words their Ayrian ancestors used, upon Indian highlands, at time of the dispersal of races, when they say sew—Indian siv. Since then the physical body has been made over in some degree, gods and religions have come and gone, the human voice has circled the globe and man learned to fly like the birds, but the little, helpless, drifting word with which we cry remains the same.
In El Modernismo, Poetas Modernistas, R. Blanco-Fombona has written an interesting, comprehensive, and necessary book about South American poets, and poets of old Spain.
He has related some facts which explain the discussed mystery of the meaning of the Great Nocturn of Silvá. He says that where the poet speaks of their shadows (Silvá and his sister, Elvira) meeting, he is relating, in his grief, a memory of their childhood. Once they went, in summer, to a dwelling, high in the Andes, for cooler air. At night upon a balcony, with the house lights behind them, Silvá and Elvira were standing, while the flickering lamp’s flame painted their gigantic, grotesque shadows across the night-black mountains.
My translation was made long ago, the first translation of Silvá into any language.