LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18551, 28 November 1925, Page 15

LITERARY GOSSIP

A revised and enlarged edition of "New Zealand Verse," published in 1906 in the "Canterbury Poets" scries, is now in the press, and is expected to make its appearance before Christmas. Messrs Whiteombe and Tombs, Ltd., are the publishers. Tho original book, which was the first, and is still tho only, anthology of New Zealand verse having a national range, has been long ont of print. It was highly praised by reviewers, both British and New Zealand, when it first appeared, and tho new edition, prepared by the samo selectors, Messrs W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie, should be a considerable improvement on it. In size and form it will resemble the best-known Australian anthologies. Twentv-four poems in the original book have been excised and forty-three added. The additions include new work of various original contributors, done in the last nineteen years, and of eighteen new writerfc. It will probably be called "A Treasury of New Zealand Verse."

Of all the pleasures in a foreign language—so Charles V'nce argues in the "New Statesman"—there is none so good as finding an untranslatable phrase. For the rest, a foreign language is merely another and more difficult way of saying what one can already sny in one's own; and, to the Englishman, -there is in this something not only wasteful, but faintly absurd. We should all be heartv Esperantists, had the Esperantists adopted English instead of making the unaccountable mistake of inventing yet another language. And then we come on an untranslatable phrase, and at once the Esperantists and the one-languaged Englishmen are confounded. The Tower of Babel is justified. For we have found something new, something as positive and beautiful as a flower or a tree which cannot grow in England, belonging like them, to the soil, and making with them part of the changing loveliness of the world.

There are things—but they become more rare—which are untranslatable for no reason of language. I remember at school to have translated into French that passage in Charles Kingsley on the passion for boat-racing: "I felt my soul stirred up to a sort of sweet madness, not merely by the shouts and cheers of the mob around me, but by the loud, fierce pulse of the rowlocks, "the swift, whispering rush of the long, snake-like eight oars, the swirl and gurgle of the water in their wake, the grim, breathless silence of the straining rowers." . The Frenchman who had set up that task congratulated us collectively (and with great courtesy) on the excellence of our translations. "But," said he, "they are not French at all," and here he quietly dropped them into the wastepaper basket, "for this passage describes what we Frenchmen do not understand." But that was in the davs before ever a Frenchman came to "Wimbledon.

Here is a pen-portrait of G. B. Shaw, accompanying an actual drawing supplied to the New York-"Bookman" by Karel Capek, the Czech, dramatist: This is an almost supernatural personality, 'Mr Bernard dhaw; I could not make a better drawing of him, because he keeps moving about and talking. He is immensely, tall, thini and straight; he looks half like God and half like, a very malicious satyr, who, however, by a process of sublimation extending , over • thousands of years, has lost all that is too closely akin to Nature. He has white hair, a white beard, and a very rosy skin; inhumanly clear eyes, a prominent and pugnacious nose, something about him of Don Quixote, something apostolic, and something that makes v fun of everything in the ' world, in-, eluding hirjself. Never in my life have I seen bo unusual a.being; to

tell the truth I was afraid of him. I thought it was some spirit who was only - pretending tov be the famous Bernard Shaw. He is a vegetarian, I do not know whether on principle or from gourmandise; one never knows whether people have principles on principle -or for their personal gratification. He has a pensive wife, a soft-toned! harpsichord,, end windows looking on to the Thame's; he sparkles with life and has heaps of interesting things to say about himself, about Strindberg, about' Rodin, alnd other -famous .things;"to listen to him is a delight coupled with' awe.