I was very pleased to hear from you again. I am busy with preparations for Italy, for the doctors say I should be away from our damp Scottish climate from October-end till Spring comes again. How far off it seems.... Spring! Do you long for it, do you love its advent, as I do? Wherever I am, St. Bride’s Day is always for me the joy-festival of the year—the day when the real new year is born, and the three dark months are gone, and Spring leans across the often gray and wet, but often rainbow-lit, green-tremulous horizons of February. This year it seems a longer way off than hitherto, and yet it should not be so—for I go to Italy, and to friends, and to beautiful places in the sun, there and in Sicily, and perhaps in Algeria. But, somehow, I care less for these than I did a few years ago, than two or three years ago, than a year ago. I think outward change matters less and less as the imagination deepens and as the spirit more and more “turns westward.” I love the South: and in much, and for much, am happy there: but as the fatally swift months slip into the dark I realise more and more that it is better to live a briefer while at a high reach of the spirit and the uplifted if overwrought physical part of one than to save the body and soothe the mind by the illusions of physical indolence and mental leisure afforded by long sojourns in the sunlands of the South....
How I wish I knew Loeffler and Debussy and others as you do: but then, though I love music, tho’ it is one of the vital things in life for me, I am not a musician, alas. So even if I had all their music beside me it would be like a foreign language that must be read in translation. Do you realise—I suppose you do—how fortunate you are in being your own interpreter. Some day, however, I hope to know intimately all those wonderful settings of Verlaine and Baudelaire and Mallarmé and others. The verbal music of these is a ceaseless pleasure to me. I have a great love of and joy in all later French poetry, and can never understand common attitude to it here—either one of ignorance, or patronage, or complete misapprehension. Because of the obvious fact that French is not so poetic a language as English or German, in scale, sonority, or richness of vocabulary—it is, indeed, in the last respect the poorest I believe of all European languages as English is by far the richest—people, and even those who should be better informed, jump to the conclusion that therefore all French poetry is artificial or monotonously alike, or, at best, far inferior to English. So far as I can judge, finer poetry has been produced in France of late years than in England, and very much finer than any I know in Germany. However, the habitual error of judgment is mainly due to ignorance: that, and the all but universal unfamiliarity with French save in its conventional usage, spoken or written....
“Fiona” received that summer, from Mr. Yoni Noguchi, a volume entitled From the Eastern Sea by that Japanese author, and sent acknowledgment:
On the Mediterranean.
Dear Mr. Noguchi,
Your note and delightful little book reached me, after considerable delay, in southern Europe. I write this at sea, and will send it with other letters, etc., to be stamped and posted in Edinburgh—and the two reasons of delay will show you that it is not from indolence!
I have read your book with singular pleasure. What it lacks in form (an inevitable lack, in the circumstances) it offers in essential poetry. I find atmosphere and charm and colour and naïveté, and the true touch of the poet; and congratulate you on your ‘success of suggestion’ in a language so different in all ways from that wherein (I am sure) you have already achieved the ‘success of finality.’
Believe me, yours very truly,
Fiona Macleod.
Later, Mr. Noguchi sent his subsequent book The Summer Cloud, a collection of short prose-poems, which, as he explained in his note of presentation: “In fact, I had been reading your prose-poems, The Silence of Amor, and wished I could write such pieces myself. And here is the result!”