| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: heavy way, with a fine colour and good-natured, sleepy eyes. She
was redolent of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white
hands, but she danced divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide
coming in. "There, that's something like," Nils said as he released
her. "You'll give me the next waltz, won't you? Now I must go and
dance with my little cousin."
Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and
held out his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that
she could not leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened
along at this moment, said she would attend to that, and Hilda came
out, as pink as her pink dress. The dance was a schottische, and
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: more short ones. Neither is the same precision required in Greek as in
Latin or English, nor in earlier Greek as in later; there was nothing
shocking to the contemporary of Thucydides and Plato in anacolutha and
repetitions. In such cases the genius of the English language requires
that the translation should be more intelligible than the Greek. The want
of more distinctions between the demonstrative pronouns is also greatly
felt. Two genitives dependent on one another, unless familiarised by
idiom, have an awkward effect in English. Frequently the noun has to take
the place of the pronoun. 'This' and 'that' are found repeating themselves
to weariness in the rough draft of a translation. As in the previous case,
while the feeling of the modern language is more opposed to tautology,
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