Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/644
In another letter he gives us a glimpse of his life at Montana:
"There is perpetual sunshine here and perpetual leisure. Otherwise there's no particular reason for my continued existence. I get neither better nor worse and wait all day for news of Hassan."
From this time onwards, perhaps inspired by the magnificent success of The Golden Journey to Samarkand, he sent me a stream of projects for books, none of which he was destined ever to carry out. The only one which he seems seriously to have started, is a translation of Virgil's Aeneid VI, of which he writes as follows:
"My next book is half written. It is, I'm afraid, rather horrifying. This is the title:
AN INTERPRETATION
in blank verse
of
VIRGIL AENEID VI,
based on the poetic Value of the Sounds
together with the Latin text
and ten prefaces
by
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
120 pp. Wide margins. Paper, 3/6? Ready in February.
Seriously this is exactly the title I intend to give the book with which I am well advanced already. The book is simply an attempt to do a translation of Virgil as satisfactory as Fitzgerald's Omar—a-translation which will utterly eclipse the very numerous and very feeble attempts hitherto existing.
The ten Prefaces will be as combative as Bernard Shaw's and occupy some forty pages. They will be on the translation of sound, on Blank Verse, on Hell literature, on preceding translations of Virgil, on modern Scholarship, on the Modern Spirit, etc., etc., and should irritate every one as effectually as my preface to Samarkand."
Here is yet another project, contained in an undated letter: