Translators From England

"Swinburne gave the coup de grace to English rhyme."

"Over thirty years, large numbers of copies of Richard Aldington's works have been printed. In 1935, Death of a Hero and in 1937 All Men are Enemies ran to 10,000 copies. In the second half of the fifties and at the beginning of the sixties, the situation changed dramatically. The number of copies printed of the 1961 edition of Death of a Hero was ten times as large (100,000 copies). All Men are Enemies ran to 225,000 copies (Goslitizdat) and was also published in Smerdlovsk, by a local publishing house which printed around 100,000 copies. These books did not lie round in the bookshops—they were sold literally in a few days, and now it is impossible to find them in the shops—not one reader has offered to sell to a second-hand bookseller, evidently because people do not want to part with them. When Richard Aldington's friend, Mr. Alister Kershaw, asked me to send him old Russian editions of the writer and I tried to get them from the second-hand booksellers, I was told, "There are neither old ones nor new ones to be had.""

"I well remember that first meeting. We had lunch together and then strolled up Charing Cross Road, looking at the bookshops and talking about our literary enthusiasms. Aldington looked very handsome in his uniform and I was immediately captivated by the brightness and candour of his features—a boyishness, one might call it, which he retained perhaps all his life, certainly until he left Europe. He was one of the most stimulating friends I have ever had—easy in conversation and very frank, full of strange oaths (mostly in French), his mind darting about rapidly from one aspect of a subject to another."

"Richard Aldington has always been accepted in Russia, and still is, as a many-sided figure, a rounded personality. Articles have been written about him as a poet and a novelist, a translator and a critic, a man and a writer; the content of his works has been discussed and also their form, his works as a whole and individual books, and articles, studies, reviews and notices about him have appeared in works published in Moscow and Leningrad, in journals and in newspapers published in other cities. Papers have been read about him, lectures given, and students have written essays on him. His books have reached every part of our large country. And—what is even more important—his books are read. Our older and younger generations know Richard Aldington. He lives in our memory."

"It is true that the war occupies only the third part of the novel [Death of a Hero]. But it was perhaps the first of the "angry young men's" novels; it is fine one: and it is interesting to compare Aldington's picture of the pre-war generation with Sassoon's."

"I have little to say in favour of Pinorman, and nothing in defence of the book about Lawrence. But Aldington wrote a book about the other Lawrence which is first-class. Death of a Hero was not the first of the books proclaiming the disillusion of the generation which fought the First World War but it was in the vanguard. And a man who has written such other novels as All Men are Enemies and Women Must Work; whose poems include A Fool i' the Forest and A Dream in the Luxembourg; who has one of the best single volumes on Voltaire to his credit; and whose other work ranges from French Studies and Reviews to translations of Alcestis and Fifty Romance Lyric Poems cannot be dismissed so easily."

"Richard Aldington is exactly the same inside, murder, suicide, rape—with a desire to be raped very strong—same thing really—just like you—only he doesn't face it, and gilds his perverseness."

"I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre."

"Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill."

"Death of a Hero is a very angry novel; virulent is perhaps a better adjective... There is nothing Aldington does not view in hellish images. One has the impression of reading the testimony of a madman."

"Why do we call ourselves 'Imagists'. Well why not? Well I think it is a very good and descriptive title and it serves to enunciate some of the principles we mos firmly believe in... Direct treatment of the subject... as few adjectives as possible... a hardness, as of cut stone... individuality of rhythm..."

"I dream of silent verses where the rhyme Glides noiseless as an oar."

"By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a prescence, a genius loci, a potency."

"Acts and Monuments made Foxe England's first literary celebrity."

"Nor is it any longer profitable to debate whether certain episodes in the Book of Martyrs were Foxe's own invention, or accepted by him as factual in such a casual fashion as to bring his credibility into general question. It was natural that readers should have doubted the facts of the bizarre episode in Guernsey, when a woman reportedly gave birth in the fire and the newly born infant was tossed back into the flames to share the mother's grisly fate. The circumstances stretch credulity. But it appears from other documents that this obscenity indeed happened very much as Foxe reported it. If there were any remaining doubts about Foxe's fundamental honesty in such respects, they were removed by J. F. Mozley's scholarly albeit overly defensive study published in 1940, John Foxe and his Book. Acts and Monuments is stuffed with as many detailed and minor errors as we should expect of a history written on this scale and in great haste, in Foxe's words "so hastily raked up...in such shortness of time". There are mistakes of both person and place, mistakes of dates in plenty, faults of transcription and in proof-reading. But the only elements of pure invention (and not primarily Foxe's own invention) occur in the recounting of sundry extraordinary "providences" and other acts of divine judgment visited upon those responsible for the deaths of the martyrs: fragments in the manner of the De mortibus persecutorum of Lactantius."

"To say that Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church (to give the Book of Martyrs its official title) was hugely influential on English thought during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would be a gross understatement of the case. Only the Bible was read more frequently and more avidly."

"Afterward she opened the matter more plainly to M. Rise and Mistres Clarentius (if it be true that they tolde me, whiche hearde it of M. Rise himselfe) who then being most familiar with her, & most bold about her, tolde her that they feared she took thought for king Philips departing from her. Not that onely (sayde she) but when I am dead & opened, you shall find Calice lying in my hart."

"Then brought they a fagot kindled with fire, and layd the same downe at D. Ridleys feete. To whome Maister Latymer spake in this maner: Be of good comfort maister Ridley, and play the man: wee shall this day light such a candle by Gods grace in England, as (I trust) shall neuer be put out."

"No one would now argue, as a certain Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries once did, that the vanished register of Bishop Longland of Lincoln on which Foxe drew for his account of the Lollards of the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire and their trials (the fullest and most valuable of all records of early Tudor Lollardy) never existed but was forged by Foxe to give his narrative a spurious "appearance of veracity". A. G. Dickens has observed that Foxe lacked the intent, the incentive and the diabolical erudition to forget his voluminous and highly specific mass of evidence. The missing Lincoln act book is not now likely to be rediscovered. Foxe seems to have used a transcript of it together with other Lollard trial records at Lambeth Palace, where it no longer exists. But other "registers" in similar form have been found by modern research (notably the record of the Coventry trials of 1511) and comparison of these sources with the passages in Foxe which are based on them suggest that the martyrologist worked only a little more carelessly and a few shades more partially than would be tolerable in a modern doctoral thesis, but with essentially the same methods."

"Second only to the Bible in its influence, Foxe's work frequently stood beside the Bible on pulpits and in libraries."

"There is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes, as appeared right well in this man. For though they digged vp his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet þe word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne."

"M. Tyndall hearing thys, ful of godly zeale, and not bearing that blasphemous saying, replied againe & sayde: I defie the Pope and all his lawes: and further added, that if God spared hym life, ere many yeares he would cause a boy that driueth the plough to know more of the Scripture, then he did."

"At last, after muche reasoning, when no reason woulde serue, although he deserued no death, he was…brought forth to the place of execution, was there tied to þe stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterward with fire consumed in the morning at the towne of Filford, an. 1536. crieng thus at the stake with a feruente zeale, and a loud voyce: Lord open the King of Englands eyes."

"I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny." And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man's or a woman's destiny."

"At fifteen years of age, when first my parents settled down in London (temporarily as they thought) I had never been in England, never had an English friend or English governess, or English tuition of any sort or kind. I did not speak one word of English. Then how did it all come about? Neo-Victorians and Neo-Georgians will put it down to destiny; others to predestination. I, in my humble way, put it down to the Will of God. And looking back on my long life and its many changes I can trace the links of my chain of life that began on the great plains of Hungary, continued through the heart of London, and find me now at this hour of writing this book in Monte Carlo jotting down all that I can remember of those links which led me one by one to the conception of my first literary work. If any one of those links had not been, if any turn of event in my life had been different, I would probably have ended my days in the country of my birth and known nothing of the happiness which comes from love, from the affection of friends (such as one meets in England) and from success in the work to which I devoted so many years of my life."

"Se l'uns des amans est loiax, E li autre est jalox è faus, Si est amors entr'ex fausée, Ne puet avoir lunge durée. Amors n'a soing de compagnun, Boin amors n'est se de Dex nun, De cors en cors, de cuer en cuer, Autrement n'est prex à nul fuer. Tulles qui parla d'amistié, Dist assés bien en son ditié, Que vent amis, ce veut l'amie Dunt est boine la compaignie, S'ele le veut è il l'otreit. Dunt la druerie est à dreit, Puisque li uns l'autre desdit, N'i a d'amors fors c'un despit; Assés puet-um amors trover, Mais sens estuet al' bien garder, Douçour è francise è mesure."

"Tel cinc cent parolent d'amur, N'en sevent pas le pior tur, Ne que est loiax druerie."

"Amur n'est pruz se n'est egals."

"Mes ki ne mustre s'enferté A peine en peot aver santé: Amur est plaie dedenz cors, E si ne piert nïent defors. Ceo est un mal que lunges tient, Pur ceo que de nature vient."

"Ki divers cunte veut traitier, Diversement deit comencier E parler si rainablement K'il seit pleisibles a la gent."

"Tutes les dames de une tere Vendreit il meuz d'amer requere Quë un fol de sun pan tolir; Kar cil volt an eire ferir."

"Si est del riche orguillus: Ja del povre n'avra merci Pur sa pleinte ne pur sun cri; Mes se cil s'en peüst vengier, Dunc le verreit l'um suzpleier."

"D'euls deus fu il tut autresi Cume del chevrefoil esteit Ki a la codre se perneit: Quant il s'i est laciez e pris Ensemble poënt bien durer; Mes ki puis les volt deservrer, Li codres muert hastivement E li chevrefoil ensement. "Bele amie, si est de nus: Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!""

"Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, about the scandalous banishment of the Faerie folk by law-abiding conventional inhabitants of the town Lud-in-the-Mist, is sometimes characterized as "" in the manner of J.R.R. Tolkien's later, but more celebrated, work, The Hobbit (1937), for its "hobbit-ish" sounding names and settings. .... Perhaps, too, it is often assumed to lean that way because Mirrlees also coincidentally penned another obscure-but-brilliant text, Paris: A Poem (1919), published by Virginia Woolf's , written in what scholars consider a "" style. ... But, "high" can sometimes be too easy a critical reach, and, in the case of Lud-in-the-Mist, it's decidedly misleading."

"The year after ’s death Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, and for the next twenty or so years lived with her mother in , London and later . (TS Eliot staying with them during the war?) For many years Mirrlees worked on a Harrison biography that was never published. She also planned a many volume biography of the 17th century antiquarian , and published the first volume as A Fly in Amber (, 1962). After her mother’s death in 1948, Mirrlees moved to South Africa, a country she had visited as a child due to her father’s business interests, and lived there for fifteen years. She returned to England in 1963, settling in the Oxford suburb of , and published three slim poetry volumes in the sixties and early seventies, revised and expanded in Moods and Tensions (Amate Press, 1976). Mirrlees died in 1978 at the age of ninety-one."

"Pride and resentment are not indigenous in the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive."

"Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he never can tell."

"I have to confess that I felt rather proud of the simple device of my suffocating cloud. The Prospero of poisons, the Faustus of the front, bringing mental magic to modern armament."

"The ones we choose to love become our anchor when the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays."

"Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting."

"Said Marx, "Don't be snobbish, we seek to abolish The 3rd class, not the 1st.""

"This pen's all I have of ."

"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year Many thousands of Englishmen, Fists clenched, their bellies empty, Walked day and night on the capital city."

"Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew."

"He seems to me a very foolish man, and very wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear."

"Me com swiðe oft on gemynd, hwelce wiotan iu wæron giond Angelcynn, ægðer ge godcundra hada ge woruldcundra; ond hu gesæliglica tida ða wæron giond Angelcynn; ond hu ða kyningas ðe ðone onwald hæfdon ðæs folces Gode ond his ærendwrecum hiersumedon; ond hie ægðer ge hiora sibbe ge hiora siodu ge hiora onweald innanbordes gehioldon, ond eac ut hiora eðel rymdon; ond hu him ða speow ægðer ge mid wige ge mid wisdome; ond eac ða godcundan hadas, hu giorne hie wæron ægðer ge ymb lare ge ymb liornunga, ge ymb ealle ða ðiowotdomas ðe hie Gode don scoldon; ond hu man utanbordes wisdom ond lare hieder on lond sohte; ond hu we hie nu sceoldon ute begietan, gif we hie habban sceoldon."

"Doom very evenly! Do not doom one doom to the rich; another to the poor! Nor doom one doom to your friend; another to your foe!"

"Geðenc hwelc witu us ða becomon for ðisse worulde, ða ða we hit nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufodon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lefdon!"

"Þæt is nū hraðost to seċġenne þæt iċ wilnode weorðfullīċe to libbenne þā hwīle þe iċ lifde, and æfter mīnum līfe þām mannum tō lǣfanne þe æfter mē wǣren mīn ġemynd on gōdum weorcum."

"Ða ic ða gemunde hu sio Lar Lædengeðiodes ær ðissum afeallen wæs giond Angelcynn, ond ðeah monige cuðon Englisc gewrit arædan, ða ongan ic on gemang oðrum mislicum ond manigfealdum bisgum ðisses kynerices ða boc on Englisc ðe is genemned on Læden Pastoralis, ond on Englisc "Hierdeboc", hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgite."