Now here at once we are on dangerous ground. When a poet makes use of a symbol it is because that symbol enables him to say something that he cannot say so well, or so beautifully, or perhaps at all, in plain language. He is a rash man, therefore, who will attempt to elucidate another's symbolism. However, I have already been rash, in venturing to translate, not a few selected lyrics, but an entire volume of verse from cover to cover, than which there is no more appalling task in literature. But I am not, therefore, disposed to court disaster by attempting any detailed or positive explanation. I could indeed have asked M. Maeterlinck for such; but at the moment of writing his country is being crucified by the powers of darkness, and he has other and sterner matters to think of.
This machinery of hot-houses, bell-glasses, hospitals, and what not—what are we to make of it? I do not think we shall go far wrong in supposing the hot-house, the bell-glass, the diving-bell, the hospital, to typify the isolation and insulation caused by a false civilization and an unreal religion, so productive of hypocrisy, fear, and confusion that each man is a prisoner within himself, unable to reach his fellow. And the inmates of the hot-house—the strange growths, the fantastic visions, the violent antitheses and incongruities—these, we may take it, are the morbidities fostered by a life which protects us and them from the agencies by which Nature makes her own children perfect in strength and beauty and service. That is my reading of it; the reader is perfectly free to differ from me, and will lose little by so doing if I have succeeded in preserving a tithe of the original beauty of the verse.
If here and there—more particularly in the unrhymed pieces—the violent and intentional incongruities and antitheses seem startling and incomprehensible, and a little apt to tickle the risibility of the frivolous Anglo-Saxon, let us remember that to read a symbolic poem literally is as foolish as to seek for a cipher in Shakespeare, or to set about interpreting a melody in terms of its notation, in the hope of spelling out a message.
One peculiarity of Maeterlinck's which may at first confuse the English reader is only a simple convention. All poetry is full of similes; the simile confuses no one. If a poet tells us that his heart is like a singing-bird we do not seriously suppose him to mean that his heart has feathers and two legs; but merely that it possesses some other essential quality of a singing-bird. Now Maeterlinck constantly, in his verse, uses what is merely a modification of the simile, which has precisely the same significance, but which takes the form of a positive assertion of identity. He would say: My heart is a singing-bird or a plant in a green-house, or anything else that seemed to be illuminating; and this apparent literalness of statement, which is carried very far, is, and must always be understood as, a mere variant of the familiar simile.
IV
A word as to the work of translation. Most of the lyrics in Serres Chaudes are written in the metre familiar to English readers as that of "In Memoriam." It is, in English, rather a dull metre, the stanza being in reality no stanza at all, but merely a line of thirty-two syllables with interior rhymes. It is greatly improved and enlivened by the omission of four syllables, or rather by their replacement by pauses of one syllable's value. This change I have sometimes made; and in one case I have, in order to avoid a verbal obscurity, extended the line to ten syllables. Apart from these exceptions all the poems in this volume are translated into their original metres, and it has always been my first object to produce a literal, almost a word for word, translation. Whatever the faults of my version, it is strictly faithful. If I am deemed to have also preserved something of the beauty of the original I shall feel more than rewarded for a task that has presented many difficulties.
BERNARD MIALL
Ilfracombe,
September 1914.