TEX
Alexander Teixeira de MattosI
“A great translator,” one friend wrote of Teixeira, “is far more rare than a great author.”
Judged by the quality and volume of his work, by the range of foreign languages from which he translated and by the perfection of the English in which he rendered them, Teixeira was incontestably the greatest translator of his time. Throughout Great Britain and the United States his name has long been held in honour by all who have watched, cheering, as the literature of France and Belgium, of Germany and the Netherlands, of Denmark and Norway strode along the broad viaduct which his labours had, in great part, established.
Of the man, apart from his name, little has been made public. His love of laughing at himself might prompt him to say: “Whenyou write myLife and Letters...”; but his modesty and his humour would have been perturbed in equal measure by the vision of a solemn biography and a low-voiced press. “I was a little bit underpraised before,” he once confessed; “I’m being a little bit overpraised now.” Since the best of himself went impartially into all that he wrote, his conscience could never be haunted by the recollection of shoddy workmanship, even in the days before he had a reputation to jeopardize; nor, when he had won recognition, could his head be turned by the announcement that he had created a masterpiece. If he enjoyed the consciousness of having filled the English treasury with the literary spoils of six countries, he dissembled his enjoyment. In so far as he wished to be remembered at all, it was not as a man of letters, but as a friend, a connoisseur of life, a man of sympathy unaging and zest unstaled, a lover of simple jests, a laughing philosopher. Of their charity, he wished those who loved him to have masses said for the repose of his soul; he would have been tortured by the thought that, in life or death, he had brought unhappinessto any one or that, dead or living, he had prompted any one to discuss him with pomposity. “Are you not being a little solemn?” was a question that alternated with the advice: “Cultivate a pococurantist attitude to life.”
“If there had been noAlice in Wonderland,” said another friend, “it would have been necessary for Tex to create her.”
Those who knew the translator of Fabre and Ewald, of Maeterlinck and Couperus only by his awe-inspiring name must detect in this a hint that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos had a lighter side to his nature; the suspicion can best be established or laid by the evidence of his own letters.
The present volume is an attempt to sketch the man in outline for those readers who have recognized his talent in scholarship without guessing his genius for friendship. “The apostles are not all dead,” he wrote, in criticism of the legends that were growing up around the men of the nineties; “many of them are your living contemporaries; you could, if you like, receive at first hand their memories of their dead fellows.” ... It is the purpose of this sketch to present one‘apostle’ as he revealed himself to one of his disciples. A biography and bibliography will be found in the appropriate works of reference. Only a single chapter has been attempted here; of those who knew him during the nineties, which he loved so well and of which he preserved the tradition so faithfully, perhaps one will write that earlier chapter and describe Teixeira in the position which he took up on their outskirts. And one better qualified than the present writer should paint this sphinx of the bridge-table, with his perversity of declaration and his brilliance of play. “You have made your contract,” admitted a friend who was partnering him for the first time; “but ... but ... butwhythat declaration?” “I wanted to see your expression,” answered Teixeira with the complacency of a man who did not greatly mind whether he won or lost, but abominated a dull game. Those who knew him all his life may feel, with the writer, that the last half-dozen years constitute, naturally and dramatically, a chapter by themselves. They are the period of his literary recognition and, unhappily, of his physical decline; of his emergence fromseclusion; of his first public services and his last private friendships.
By 1914 Teixeira stood in the forefront of English translators; and, through his labours, translation had won a place in the forefront of English literature. Almost simultaneously with the outbreak of war, he was attacked by the heart-affection that ultimately killed him; and the record of this period is the record of an invalid. Ill-health notwithstanding, he offered his energy and ability to the country of his adoption; and, in an emergency war-department largely staffed by men of letters, the most retiring of them all became enmeshed in the machinery of government. From his marriage until the war, Teixeira had lived an almost monastic life, only relaxing his rule of solitary work in favour of the bridge-table. Once set in the midst of appreciative friends, this sham recluse found himself entertaining and being entertained, joining new clubs, indulging his old inscrutable sociability and almost overcoming his former shyness.
For three-and-a-half out of these last seven years, one of Teixeira’s colleagues workedwith him almost daily at the same table in the same room of the same department. The rare separations due to leave or illness were countered by an almost daily correspondence, conducted in the spirit of an intimate and elaborate game; and, when the work of the department ended, the letters—sometimes interrupted by a diary or suspended for a meeting—kept the intimacy unbroken.
So written, they are as personal, as discursive and—to a stranger—as full of allusion as the long-sustained conversation of two friends. It is to be hoped that, in their present form, they are at least not obscure; of these, and of all, letters it must not be forgotten that the writer was not counting his words for a telegram nor selecting his subjects for later publication.
From his half of the correspondence—in a life untouched by drama—Teixeira’s personality may be left to reconstruct itself. Not every side of his character is revealed, for an interchange conducted primarily as a game afforded him few opportunities of exhibiting his serene philosophy and meditative bent. The absence of all calculation fromhis mind—a part of his refusal to grow up—may, for want of counter-availing ballast, be interpreted as flippancy. And, as the man was greater than the word he wrote and the word he translated, his letters have to be supplied by imagination with some of the radiance which he shed over preposterous story and trivial jest. Charm, which is so hard to analyse in the living, is yet harder to recapture from the dead; but, if the record of a single friendship can suggest loyalty, courage, generosity and tenderness, if a whimsical turn of phrase can indicate humour, patience and an infinite capacity for providing and receiving enjoyment, Teixeira’s letters will preserve, for those who did not know him, the fragrance of spirit recognized and remembered by all who did.