Via Figari 28

Ruta di Camogli

Ligure, Italy

28 September 1956

My dear Marguerite Caetani,

Of course I am very glad that the translations turned out so well, so much better than I had thought, and surely if they seem all right to you, who read French, and to René Char, who reads English, I should be satisfied and should require no further check upon them.

I had not meant, in any case, that I thought they should be edited to improve their quality as writing, but only that where I had made an elementary mistake in translating a certain word (all I have to help me in these exercises is a pocket Larousse and my imagination) you would naturally correct that.

In the previous translations from Menard, for example, I translated "moisson" as "mold" though it means "harvest" (page 11), "fourre" as "fishrun" though it means "thicket" and "arche" as "arch" though it means "ark" (page 20), "marches" as "marches" though it means "steps" (page 21). These mistakes are there in the pamphlet. I am not sure that there are no others of the same sort, and they should be, indeed they should have been, corrected. So should any that may be found in the more recent efforts.

Because you have been kind and because I like both you and the poet, it gives me pain to say again that you will have to omit my name from these translations. For Menard's essays I felt enough sympathy to justify putting my name to the renderings with whatever of approval that might imply. I do not feel that degree of sympathy for these three essayists. I do not so much care for what they say nor for their manner of saying it. I think they are rather "joining the dance" as you put it, but insofar as it is their dance I'll have to sit it out, thanks. The essays are *interesting*, they are *worth translating*,

and I should say that you were perfectly right to want to print them in English.
But they share in a point of view that is not mine and I don't want anyone to
suppose that it is.

You will understand, then, won't you, as I feel sure that
Char will? He feels, as I do, a hatred of all false positions. So let us keep
mutually clear of this one. It is a point of honor, of poetic honor if you like,
certainly of conviction.

And I think I may have something to send you for Botteghe
Oscure at last. In the winter, or if not in the winter in the spring, I hope I
may be in Rome and see you and talk about all these matters. Again and ever
with my best wishes,

Yrs faithfully,

I'll do the Menard essay after we move back to Sestri Levante next week.

BOTTEGHE OSCVRE

*An International Review of New Literature*

MARGUERITE CAETANI, EDITOR

Via delle Botteghe Oscure, 32 - Roma

22 April 1958

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,

Princess Caetani (who is just leaving for a week in the country) asks me to write to you to say how happy she was to see your translation of sections of the *Iliad*, which she thought very beautiful. Everyone seems to be deep in Homer just at this instant: she has received translations from William Arrowsmith and Christopher Logue as well! But as fine as it is, she says, she thinks that she cannot take it for BOTTEGHE OSCURE. She hopes very much you will send her other work for perusal, and sends you her best wishes, to which I add my own.