“But Shakspeare’s words are so strongly chosen that they are a great element in his great plays. And a translation at best is something of a parody, especially a translation from a northern tongue, with its force and backbone, so to speak, into a southern, serpentine, gliding language. You have heard the absurd rendering of that passage from Macbeth where the witches salute him with ‘Hail to thee, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!’ into such French as ‘Comment vous portez vous, Monsieur Macbeth; comment vous portez vous, Monsieur Thane de Cawdor!’ A translation must pass through the medium of another mind, and other minds like Shakspeare’s are hard to find.” Norman spoke with so much reverence for Mae’s greatest idol that her heart warmed and she smiled approval, though for argument’s sake she remained on the other side. “Isn’t a translation more like an engraver’s art, and aren’t fine engravings to be sought and admired even when we know the great original in its glory of color? Then all writing is only translation, not copying. Shakspeare had to translate the tongues he found in stones, the books he found in brooks, with twenty-six little characters and his great mind, into what we all study, and love, and strive after. But he had to use these twenty-six characters in certain hard, Anglo-Saxon forms and confine himself to them. When he wanted to talk about ‘fen-sucked fogs,’ and such damp, shivery places, he is all right, but when he sings of ‘love’s light wings,’ and all that nonsense, he is impeded; now open to him ‘Italian, the language of angels’--you know the old rhyme--and see what a chance he has among the “liquid l’s and bell-voiced m’s and crushed tz’s.” To-night you will hear Desdemona call Othello ‘Il mio marito,’ in a way that will start the tears. What are the stiff English words to that? ‘My husband!’ Husband is a very uneuphonious name, I think.” Norman Mann smiled. “Another cup of coffee, if you please--not quite as sweet as the last,” and he passed his cup. “I believe there is always a charm in a novel word that has not been commonized by the crowd. ‘Dear’ means very little to us nowadays, because every school girl is every other school girl’s ‘dear,’ and elderly ladies ‘my dear’ the world at large, in a pretty and benevolent way. So with the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’; we hear them every day in commonest speech--‘the coachman and his wife,’ or ‘Sally Jones’s husband,’--but I take it this is when we stand outside. That wonderful little possessive pronoun MY has a great, thrilling power. ‘My husband’ will be as fine to your ears as ‘il mio marito,’ which has, after all, a slippery, uncertain sound; and as for ‘my wife’--”