# European Elegies/Preface

PREFACE
THE POEMS in this volume are my own unaided renderings from the original languages. The work of translation was begun in October 1925 as a “sad mechanic exercise” to deaden the pain of a great bereavement. At that time I had no other conscious purpose; but as the collection took form, almost beyond my will, I gradually realized that the source of my own consolation might, even in the faultiness of translation, make some appeal to others, especially since scarcely any of the poems had ever known English before. To that belated decision to publish, the little volume owes whatever elements of structural coherence it may possess.
The anthology does not pretend to be adequately representative of European elegy. All anthologies are necessarily personal in their principle of selection, and circumstances have made this one intensely so. As a matter of fact I have not attempted to gather together what I feel to be the greatest elegiac poems of Europe, but merely to translate those poems towards which I have felt the strongest emotional reaction during the past few months; and the limitations of this method have been intensified by the narrow range of my humble bookshelves. In an essentially unilingual Canadian city, no library, civic or academic, offered me literature in more than half a dozen of the major languages of Europe, and I was therefore confined to the volumes that my own interest in all languages had gathered about me. As the leanness of a young scholar’s purse had kept those books few though select, the poems from which I gleaned my elegiac favourites in, say, Catalan or Finnish, numbered only a few hundred altogether; and similarly for a score of the other languages.
My method of translation is comparatively simple. First choosing some poem that had moved me in the original, I keep ​that original before me, mumbling it aloud and brooding over it until I have saturated my mind with its emotion. Then I endeavour to reproduce its form and spirit in English as accurately as possible, reserving only the conviction that a literal translation is inherently criminal and that any verse rendering which sacrifices beauty to philology is a blasphemous offence in its very existence.
The original metres have been adhered to in most cases. In those instances, however, where the metrical basis, such as quantity, internal vowel rhymes, or alliteration, is alien to modern English, I have tried to employ some metre which would give an equivalent effect. Again, the exigencies of metre have sometimes called for a little Procrustean stretching and trimming of the original locutions. In this connection it is worth remembering that English, as Jespersen and others have shown, is more laconic, i.e. syllabically more economical, than any other European language. I have therefore occasionally reduced the original metre by a foot, cutting down foreign Alexandrines, for example, to English pentameter lines.
Any one who attempts to render poetry from one language into another realizes, with something akin to despair, an elusive essence that defies translation, a fragile magic whose spell is inseparable from the original incantation. In some cases I have found that when I had reincarnated poems in English verse, life beat so feebly in their veins that their only hope of survival lay in a transfusion of my own blood; and I have felt no scruples in granting them this if it could make them live. Such a transfusion of my own experience has involved changing the bearing of words, phrases, and even entire lines, taking liberties with tense and number, and omitting stanzas that did not harmonize with my emotional reinterpretation of the poem. Such changes affect very few of the ​elegies, yet they occur often enough to make it advisable for me to put my aims on record, lest alterations due to a deliberate artistic purpose be criticized as unconscious lapses in scholarship. This principle applies also to the titles, which have been freely altered or invented to suit my purposes, and to the arbitrary isolation of brief snatches from the Middle English Pearl, Jorge Manrique’s Coplas, and Hallgrímur Pétursson’s Utfararsálmur.
The order in which the poems appear is neither chronological nor alphabetical, but involves a vague general history of emotional experience, beginning with violent distress, passing through a stage of philosophic nihilism, emerging into a grey dawn of tearful reminiscence, rallying steadily, and ending in quiescent fortitude, with “calm of mind, all passion spent.” This development is reflected in a background of the seasons, beginning with the autumn of bereavement, and closing with the autumn of the following year. The underlying movement of feeling may not be as evident to the reader as to the translator; and in any case the former is warned against trying to detect and formulate any didactic purpose or philosophic message. The chief collective significance of the anthology lies indirectly in its indication of the type and sequence of poems which appealed to one individual in the outworking of a tragic experience. If the separate poems combine to form an emotional mosaic, it is one in which the pattern is neither mathematically exact nor artistically complete. The experience which lies behind has been definite, coherent, and profound, but its disclosure is not desired or intended.
Only this would I confess: that the task which was in the beginning an anodyne became at last an instrument of deliverance and revelation, not in any religious sense normally so conceived, but in the broadest realm of the human spirit. ​In the years before, I had believed in an academic way in the common humanity of mankind. My studies in history, economics, and anthropology had helped towards a fuller intellectual realization of that truth. But I remained emotionally blind to the reality until my heart, made sensitive by grief, had felt through the lyric and elegiac poetry of fifty literatures man’s common perception of the sacredness of grief and the beauty of life even in its tragedy. And so I knew at last that inspiration is no respecter of persons, and that the soul of man, whatever its local incarnation, suffers and aspires, and strives brokenly to express moments of love and sacrifice and creation that are in essence immortal.
Modern nations are unhappily isolated and estranged by their very loyalties to speech, kin, and faith . But in the presence of the ultimate they may all join hands in community of spirit. Beyond race and creed and language are the fundamental sanctities of human life—love, tenderness, sorrow, fortitude. This little volume is, for the translator at least, a Siloam of these healing waters, flowing in from fifty linguistic hillsides of human experience; and I gain strength from the hope that it may contribute its stream to the ocean of understanding that shall one day consummate its cleansing, reconciling “task of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”
W.K.
Wesley College, Winnipeg, January, 1927.