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The taste of honey

Chapter 2: FOREWORD
By Edna Worthley Underwood
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About This Book

A personal, undated notebook by a linguist and reader, assembled over years from fragments, brief essays, translation notes, and literary impressions. The entries record responses to poetry and prose, reflections on language and style, travel recollections, and concise remarks on aesthetics and human values. Pieces range from youthful jottings to mature commentary, offering informal assessments of writers and prose technique alongside occasional translated passages and linguistic observations. The collection reads as a candid, unsystematic mosaic of intellectual curiosity rather than a formal, ordered study.

TO THREE PROSATEURS

LOTI, BLANCO-FOMBONA, D’ANNUNZIO

FOREWORD

The Taste of Honey is a genuine diary, of somewhat the same kind as De Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète, or Diary of a Kentish Gentleman, in that it was not written for public approval, but for personal pleasure. It is not dated nor arranged in order, partly because it was jotted down upon loose leaves which were threaded upon a string; partly because of the period of years covered and the vicissitudes that befall perishable substances such as paper.

Part was written at the age of sixteen, eighteen; part recently. Many pages have been lost; indeed as recently as the spring of 1928 a manuscript of over three hundred pages disappeared from the office of a New York magazine. Some notes from this are included however.

Selections from the Note Book have been published, in both French and English, Le Disque Vert of Belgium carried pages, when Hellens was director. American papers have carried other pages.

It has not been edited nor changed for publication. It is the unreserved expression of what was in the reader’s mind, set down with malice toward none and always with sincerity.