Dr. Eleanor Arroway, the protagonist of Carl Sagan's novel Contact , "vaguely remembered a quartet—was it by William Butler Yeats?—that she used to console her unfortunate lovers because, as always, it was she who decided to end the relationship."

You say there is no love, my love,
unless it lasts forever.
Nonsense; there are episodes
much better than the entire work.» [1]

Dr. Arroway's doubt is justified: in reality, we owe the poem not to Yeats, but to an American poet named Grace Fallow Norton (1876-1962). It is likely that these verses were imprinted in Sagan's memory (as we will see, somewhat imperfectly) and that time eventually blurred the news of their author. The confusion, however, is not inexcusable: "Norton's life has never been told outside her family circle and her work is not very well known" [2]. These lines aim to alleviate this situation somewhat.

Norton's first anthology, Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph’s (1912), placed her among the most promising poets in the United States. The work, which collects poems written from the perspective of a hospitalized girl, is dedicated to her husband, who abandoned her a few months later. Norton, orphaned since the age of ten, had learned from a very young age to overcome personal misfortunes and soon rebuilt her life with her second husband, the painter George Herbert Macrum. The verses of her second anthology (The Sister of the Wind, 1914) reflect the emotional ups and downs of this period.

Without waiting for the work to be finished printing, the newlyweds embarked for Hamburg with the intention of visiting Paris and Brittany. In this corner of France, they were caught by the First World War. With trains and ships mobilized for troop transport and bank transfers interrupted, Norton and her husband took two months to flee the continent and seek refuge in England, although their hopes of getting a ticket back to the United States remained slim. When they finally managed to cross the Atlantic, half a year after starting the journey, they brought with them the paintings created by Macrum during that time, but the fate of these seemed predetermined, and many of them would end up being consumed in a fire years later along with many of Norton’s childhood memories.

PerPerhaps the events of these months and the restrictions imposed on telegrams spared Norton from receiving the first reviews of The Sister of the Wind, 1914. He would soon discover that these were less favorable than those of his first work. A review in Poetry magazine considered his style outdated and immature, although it also recognized the merit of some of his verses [3]. Nothing prevents imagining among these the verses of a poem titled Von ewiger Liebe:

You say there is no love, my love,
Unless it lasts for aye!
Oh, folly, there are interludes
Better than the play.

You say lest it endure, sweet love,
It is not love for aye?
Oh, blind! Eternity can be
All in one little day. [4]

I believe I am not mistaken in stating that this poem is unpublished in Spanish, at least in its complete version of two quartets. There will be those who think that the poor translation I propose below is outdated and immature. My only consolation is not having to cross a war and an ocean to find out.

You say there is no love, my love,
unless it lasts forever.
What nonsense; there are intermissions.
better than the main work.

You say that it will not last, sweet love,
love is not forever?
What blindness! In a short day
all eternity fits in.

The most evident novelty compared to the version that appears in Contact is the existence of a second quatrain. Attentive readers will have also noticed other discrepancies: Norton's poem does not mention episodes, but interludes (interludes instead of episodes episodes in the original English), and these are not "much better" than the work they are compared to; only "better." These differences aim to confirm that Sagan translated the poem from memory, without a written reference to the original. If true, they also establish that Sagan's memory shares traits with the rest of humanity, which is encouraging.

Norton's subsequent poetry collections have a more warlike and political character. What is your legion? , she openly advocated for the United States' intervention in the war, while the contrasts in the militarization of the previously peaceful Brittany inspired the verses of RoadsDespite the publication of both works in the same year (1916), her career as a poet had not yet taken off, and Norton increasingly relied on her work as a translator. One of these translations, The Odyssey of a Torpedoed Transport, was a great bestseller in 1917. It is a collection of anonymous letters, supposedly the work of a French merchant sailor whose ship was caught up in the war conflict. Norton, like his readers, firmly believed in the authenticity of these documents, although they were later revealed to be literary creations by the writer Maurice Larrouy.

Before this revelation, Norton lamented in the preface that the anonymity prevented the author from receiving the recognition he deserved [5]. That Grace Fallow Norton laments the anonymous influence of a fictional character in a very real war makes it less pathetic to lament that Norton's influence on the life of Eleanor Arroway, decipherer of the most intimate mysteries of the Universe in Sagan's novel, is not recognized. Or so I want to think.

Due to a tremor in his hands, Macrum abandoned painting. Norton, in solidarity with her husband, also stopped writing.

NOTES
1. Sagan, Carl. Contact. Translation by Raquel Albornoz. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1985.
2. Hutchison, Hazel. The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World WarNew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. The biographical notes are taken from this work.
3. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Chicago: Poetry Foundation, November 1914.
4. Norton, Grace Fallow. The Sister of the Wind. London: Constable, 1914.
5. «"Some small recognition of the part he was playing would have been so sweet to him! He received none. But to believe in one’s work is the sweetest reward one can have and he had this reward at last, for he came to believe in the Merchant Marine". (Larrouy, Maurice. The Odyssey of a Torpedoed Transport. Translation and preface by Grace Fallow Norton. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917).