Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
not know whether you are boasting or complaining. What are your withers? Have you any, to begin with? Do you 'wring' them or 'ring' them? And why can't you leave them alone?"
Not content with mastering five foreign languages, Teixeira created a new literary English for every new kind of book that he translated. His versions of Maeterlinck's Blue Bird, Couperus' Old People and The Things That Pass, Fabre's Hunting Wasps and Ewald's My Little Boy have nothing in common but their exquisite sympathy and scholarship; four different men might have produced them if four men could be found with the same taste, knowledge and diligence. Fabre's ingenuous air of perpetual discovery demanded the style of a grave, grown-up child; Maeterlinck's mystical essays invited a hint of preciosity and aloofness, to suggest that omniscience was expounding infinity through symbols older than time; and the atmospheric sixth-sense of Couperus had to be communicated by a sensitiveness of language that could create pictures and conjure up intangible clouds of discontent, guilty
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