- Project Runeberg -  Gösta Berling's saga / Part I /
vi

Author: Selma Lagerlöf Translator: Lillie Tudeer
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personality combines with art to create a rhapsodic
prose possessing the fervor of verse and a style new
in world literature. Some paragraphs one hesitates
whether to print as prose or vers libre. One could
rewrite in metrical form, for example, the description
of the beautiful Marienne Sinclaire, in “The Ball
at Ekeby:”

Her presence gave inspiration to the speeches
And life to the wine.
She gave speed to the violin bows,
And the dancing went gayer than ever
Over the boards that she touched
With her slender feet.
She shone in the tableaux
And in the acting.


It is a good test of the national character of a story
when public demand, as in the case of Mark
Twain’s Bull Frog, requires the author to write
a second narrative to tell how the first came into
existence. In A Story of a Story, one may read of the
long, quiet years that went into the making of Gösta;
how the frail Värmland girl, destined to renown,
in her pastoral home at Mårbacka listened to spinsters
and travelling fiddlers reciting the mad old
days after the Napoleonic wars, when gay soldiers
of fortune, by their pranks and romantic behavior,
made the bright-eyed maidens and pleasure-loving

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