Fiona Macleod.
IL CASTELLO DI MANIACE, BRONTE, SICILY
From a photograph taken by the Hon. Alex. Nelson Hood
The October number of The Fortnightly Review contained a series of poems by F. M. entitled “The Ivory Gate,” and at the same time an American edition of From the Hills of Dream—altered from the original issue—was published by Mr. T. Mosher, to whom the poet wrote concerning the last section of the English Edition:
12th Nov., 1901.
Dear Mr. Mosher,
What a lovely book Mimes is! It is a pleasure to look at it, to handle it. The simple beauty of the cover-design charms me. And the contents ... yes, these are beautiful, too.
I think the translation has been finely made, but there are a few slips in interpretative translation, and (as perhaps is inevitable) a lapse ever and again from the subtle harmony, the peculiar musical undulant rhythm of the original. In a creative translation, the faintest jar can destroy the illusion: and more than once I was rudely reminded that a foreigner mixt this far-carried honey and myrrh. Yet this is only “a counsel of perfection,” by one who perhaps dwells overmuch upon the ideal of a flawless raiment for beautiful thought or dream. Nor would I seem ungracious to a translator who has so finely achieved a task almost as difficult as that set to Liban by Oisin in the Land of the Ever-Living, when he bade her take a wave from the shore and a green blade from the grass and a leaf from a tree and the breath of the wind and a man’s sigh and a woman’s thought, and out of them all make an air that would be like the single song of a bird. Do you wish to tempt me? Tempt me then with a proposal as to “The Silence of Amor,” to be brought out as Mimes is!