or the Demons of the Night
Preface of the First Edition (1821)
The singular work which I offer to the public in translation is modern, and even recent. In Illyria it is generally attributed to a noble from Ragusa who hid his name under that of Count Maxime Odin, at the head of several poems of the same genre. I owe my knowledge of the latter to the friendship of M. Chevalier Fedorovich Albinoni, for they had never been printed up to the time when I stayed in those provinces. They probably have been printed since.
Smarra is the primitive name of the evil spirit which the ancients associated with the gloomy phenomenon of the nightmare. The same word expresses the same idea still in most of the Slavic dialects, in the lands of those peoples most subject to this frightful ailment. There are few Morlakian families that don’t have a member tormented by it. Thus, Providence has placed at the two ends of the vast chain of the Swiss and Italian Alps the two human infirmities which are most in contrast: In Dalmatia, the deliriums of an exalted imagination which transports the use of the faculties above a purely intellectual order of thinking; in the Savoy and the Valais, the almost total absence of the perceptivity that distinguishes humankind from the brute. These are, on the one side, the frenzies of Ariel, and, on the other, the savage stupor of Caliban.
In order to enter with interest into the secret of the composition of Smarra, perhaps you’d need to have experienced the nightmare illusions of which this poetic story is the faithful history—and that would be paying rather too much for the dull pleasure of reading my bad translation. All the same, almost everyone has been pursued in sleep by some distressing dream, or dazzled by the wonders of some spell-binding dream that ended all too soon. So I thought that this work would at least have for most people the merit of recalling familiar sensations which, as the author says, have never yet been experienced in any language and which even the people just waking from them can only rarely describe themselves. The poet’s most difficult artistic task is to round off and sustain well enough the narrative of an anecdote when its beginning, crisis, downfall, and outcome are based on a succession of bizarre dreams, where the transitions are often determined by only a single word. Even on this point, though, he only has to fit his teasing whim to nature—which amuses itself by interrupting us in the course of a single dream by episodes having nothing to do with its subject, while putting us through all the stages of a regular, complete, and more or less plausible action.
People who have read Apuleius will easily see that the plot of the first book of that ingenious story-teller’s Golden Ass has a great deal to do with this one. They resemble each other at bottom almost as much as they differ in form. The author even seems to have wanted to invite this comparison by keeping Lucius for his main character’s name. In fact, the philosopher of Madaure and the Dalmatian priest cited by Fortis, in his Travel in Dalmatia, volume I, page 65, have a common origin in the traditional songs of a country that Apuleius visited himself, curiously enough—although he disdained to give an account of the locale. That doesn’t, however, keep Apuleius from being one of the most romantic writers of ancient times. He flourished in the very period which separated the ages of judgment from the ages of imagination.
I must admit in closing that, if I had realized the difficulties of this translation before undertaking it, I would never have given myself the task. Seduced by the poem’s general effect without figuring up the combinations that produced it, I had attributed its merit to the composition. But the composition is really next to nothing. Its weak interest would not hold the attention for long, if the author had not enhanced it by using the wonders of his astonishing imagination, and, especially, of his style, which is incredibly bold, and yet elevated, picturesque, and harmonious throughout. And the style is precisely what I couldn’t reproduce. I couldn’t even have tried to put it across in French without ridiculous presumption. I’m sure that the readers who know the original work will see in this weak copy nothing but a futile attempt, but I hoped in my heart that at least they wouldn’t consider it the wasted effort of luckless vanity. I have judges in literature so inflexibly strict and friends so devotedly impartial that I am sure in advance that neither group will find this explanation useless.
C.N.