We Old World folk take life, to a certain degree, more at our leisure, but nevertheless every real artist follows the great direction that has seized all our contemporary being.
Directness of truth, vividness and intensity of presentation, exact rendering of impression, are the means by which we seek to produce life; life itself is the object, but I am afraid that to the end the life-giving spark will defy analysis.
Let me hope that the figures whose woes and weal my reader will follow through these pages may be half as alive to him as they have been to me; and let me hope, likewise, that when he closes the volume we may have become fast friends.
I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking Mrs. Wister most heartily for her faithful and picturesque rendering of my story.
What a rare delight it is to an author to find himself so admirably rendered and so perfectly understood only those can feel that have undergone the acute misery of seeing their every thought mangled, their every sentence massacred, as common translations will mangle and massacre word and thought.
Therefore let every writer thank Providence, if he find an artist like Mrs. Wister willing to put herself to the trouble of following his intentions, and of clothing his ideas in so brilliant a garb.
It is only natural, therefore, that, having been lucky enough to find so rare a translator, I should authorize the translation to the absolute exclusion of any other.
So, hoping it may find favour in the eyes of my transatlantic readers, I should like to shake hands with them at parting and say good-bye with the Old World saw, "Auf Wiedersehen."
Ossip Schubin.