Mr. Macfarlane: "Do you have any views about sources and springs of poetic expression?"

Mr. Steiner: "My sadness is, that I haven't had certain printing errors, which commit you to immortality. Thomas Nash, contemporary of Shakespeare, rival of Shakespeare, very envious of Shakespeare, translates Villon. Not translates in our sense, but adapts the famous ballads of Villon. He translates beautifully a French line about Helen of Troy: "And as she goes grey, brightness falls from her hair."  Very beautiful line. 

His printer misreads the manuscript and gives us "the brightness falls from the air". One of the great lines in world poetry, for which Nash is remembered. The luck of that error - that too can be a great creation."