Dear List,

 

I came across a translation of Elizabeth Barret Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," in which the Brazilian translator remarked that the chosen title intended to suggest that Elizabeth Barret's lines were a translation from an original poem written in Portuguese, by a Portuguese lady. Among these Sonnets we find the famous "How Do I Love Thee?" ("...I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight/.../I love thee to the level of every day's/Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light...." Sonnet XLIII).

 

Wiki informs that "two of Barrett’s most famous pieces were produced after she met Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh." and that "Portuguese" was a pet name Browning used.... Sonnets from the Portuguese also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets." What I couldn't find in the Wiki resumé was a reference to a particular sonnet written by Barret, before she met Robert B, that may have lain behind Browning's choice of her pet name. Namely, the sonnet "Catarina to Camoens"*. Nor did I find information concerning the intimate connection between these sonnets and their courtship correspondence. Elizabeth wrote those sonnets in the intervals between the 574 letters she exchanged with Robert. For some reason she hid them from him even after their first years of marriage but he was charmed by them and encouraged her to get them published.. Elizabeth Browning's rendering of Catarina's love for the Portuguese poet was translated by Fernando Pessoa and Rainier M. Rilke translated all the "Sonnets from the Portuguese." into German. 

 

Elizabeth B Browning was already known in England and America after two volumes of her collected poems were published, in 1844. Almost a year later, when she was 39, she received a letter from an aspiring poet, aged 32, in which he declared: " I love your verses with all my heart (...)and I love you too."  Thanks to the protection of a distant cousin of Elizabeth, John Kenyon, Elizabeth and Robert Browning were able to meet after a few months of hesitations on her part. Twenty months later they were married, against Mr.Barret's wishes, and eloped to Italy. Her lyric poems witness the plights of a forbidden love between two poets who progressively grew closer by their writings and, through these, were able to build a real world that set their story apart from all the other romantic themes which were then in fashion and the balads that related similar misadventures. Elizabeth had read Luis de Camões's  lyrical poems that had been translated and published in 1803 by Lord Strangford. The added biographical note about Camoens caught Elizabeth's attention and this fascination later extended to Robert and the pair, in their most intimate moments, often played the roles of the two star-crossed Portuguese lovers, Camões and Catarina... 

 

Whenever I read John Shade's "Pale Fire," certain intonations remind me vaguely of Shakespeare's sonnet 30 (among others), but also Elizabeth Barret's Sonnet XLIII, although I don't know why it happens, for  it's not for their shared cadence, stress or lyricism. Today's trove in Portuguese and in English carried me back to this sensation once again, one that I always rejected knowing of VN's low opinion about women writers and poets. Anyway the important figure in Nabokov's novels has always been explicitly Robert Browning.

 

Checking into Brian Boyd's "Nabokov's Pale Fire,The Magic of Artistic Discovery,"  I found various entries that pointed to Robert Browning only. In connection to Queen Blenda's otherwordly dictation and to Hazel's esoteric experiences in the Haunted Barn, Brian Boyd (p.156) refers to Robert Browning's echoes (Dulwich Forest, "Here Papa pisses") and to a séance, directed by Daniel Home, attended by Robert and which inspired him to turn Home into the "speaker of his 'Mr.Sludge, the Medium'." What is not informed is that Elizabeth Barret Browning was fascinated by occultism and mediunism for some time - to her husband's patient chagrin.The education of their son, Pen (dressed in extravagant clothes and with uncut curls), was another critical point in their usually harmonious marriage. 

 

I couldn't help but to wonder if Elizabeth's and Robert's intensely romantic role-playing and poetic talents were not secretly admired by Vladimir Nabokov (his initial courtship of Vera, with their masks and poems, seems to have been flamboyant and romantic). Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Barret Browning shared a sporadic interest in the occult and in medieval tales (I learned from V.N himself that my favorite early childhood reading, "Amadis de Gaula,"was written by a Portuguese author***). and Nabokov's extensive studies of Pushkin must have brought to his attention the poet's words about Camoens ( "Igru ego liubil tvorets Makbeta,/Im skorbnu mysl' Kamoens obleka" ) and, this is why I'm curious about why he never bothered to mention Camoens name, nor his lyrical poems or the great epic "Os Lusíadas," that chants the feats of Vasco da Gama (after all, in ADA, Nabokov chose Mascodagama as Van Veen's thespionym and there's a reference to Robert Brown in connection to another pair of unhappy lovers).

 

What would VN have thought of the successful and independent literary activities by the Brownings, or about Elizabeth's poems?  Hoping to clarify certain points related to V.Nabokov's tolerance of "female poets," I returned to his "Verses and Versions," I tried to recover what he wrote about translations and translators, enjoying, in the meantime, a faint hint for Pale Fire's "Wordsmith" and "Goldsworth," when he warns the readers that: "I am not a teacher of any language myself - in fact there is a kind or iron curtain painted green, or let us say a green velvet curtain, between Goldwin Smith Hall, where I teach literature and the remote Morrill Hall, where the Russian language is taught " or a whiff of Pnin's French Department and Prof. Blorenge, when Nabokov refers to the head of a Slavic department "who for years conceals the treasure of his ignorance and lives in solecism as others live in sin." Nevertheless, what I was looking for relates to other kinds of "verbal transmigrations," summarized in "The Art of Translation III: A Kind of V Movement." It is when Nabokov imagines "two fair countries, From and Into" and states that "the perfect translator should  know the From language as well as he does the Into language. He should also be acquainted with the manners, traditions, fauna, flora and times of both countries....He should be of the same sex as his author..."

Perhaps the best direct information lies in his correspondence with E.Wilson, when we follow his reluctance to admit  Jane Austen's excellency, his surprise at Mary McCarthy's literary achievements, or the complacent way he received the praise of Lolita by E.Wilson's new wife (at that time she was a dissenting voice in his circle).

 

 

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* A disputed register describes how twenty-year old Camões met and fell in love with Catarina de Ataíde in Coimbra. Apparently she was the motive for his expulsion from Coimbra and various exiles in the African colonies and in India. Camões and Catarina's love was not subdued by their separation, or so legend tells. It was only in the XIXth Century, during the Romantic period,that he became the heroic and melancholic soldier in the pen of Garrett and Castilho. Camões dedicated several poems to Catarina (Natércia, an anagram) but there was also a distant cousin of his, Isabel Tavares, to whom many other sonnets were dedicated (addressed to Belisa or Sibila, ie., to Isabel).

The first lines of Elizabeth B Browning's poem "Catarina to Camoens (Dying in his absence abroad, and referring to the poem in which he recorded the sweetness of her eyes)" are:

On the door you will not enter,
I have gazed too long: adieu!
Hope withdraws her peradventure;
Death is near me,--and not _you_.
Come, O lover,
Close and cover
These poor eyes, you called, I ween,
"Sweetest eyes were ever seen!"

 

** Camões makes Vasco da Gama describe the history of Portugal through the stories he tells during his nautical exploits and which are inset like independent "novellas" in the body of his epic. In one of them Gama describes the 14th century romance between a pair of royal lovers, Pedro and Inês, whose fate was tragically decided by the Portuguese King, Afonso IV. Besides Camões, Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Ezra Pound, among countless other poets, were touched by the sad destiny of Inês, who "after her death became a queen". The legend that describes two secretly connected mansions tells how the lovers met for their trysts. According to one of them, King Pedro the First fashioned his love letters into boats that he let float down the waters of a little channel connecting his abode with the abbey in which Inês had found a refuge. During the Napoleonic wars, one of their descendants, Dom João VI, decided to leave Portugal, moving the capital city of his kingdom from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. At that time we also find the Duke of Wellington fighting against the Napoleonic armies in Europe. Wellington had made a stop in Portugal at the same site where the story of Pedro and Inês took place, in the bucolic fields in the Mondego. The Duke was so touched by the legends that he ordered a stone to be laid close to the two sequoias (“Wellingtonias”) that he planted in the site. He had this monument inscribed with lines selected from “The Lusiads”, Canto III, verse 135.Is it possible to consider that VN was also acquainted with the story of "Pedro and Inês" as told in The Lusiads? There are two references to Wellington (as the “Wellington mountain” (A312) and “as far back as the days ‘when Washingtonias were Wellingtonias’”(A,81), and the fires of the Napoleonic wars rise in the background of "Ada", with its romantic poets, Chateaubriand and Byron castles, while further back we find brooks and shepherds in Nabokov´s playful references to arcadian poets and their valorous knights. The 14thcentury Afonso IV´s son, Pedro (Peter), and his unfortunate love remind me of Lucette´s stay at the Alphonse IV hotel. There are hints in “Ada” about the story of other famous lovers, Princess Margaret and the photographer Peter Townsend, in the poem Lucette was deceitfully given to learn by heart. Note that the entire scenery that surrounds Peter and Margaret was created by Nabokov as a parody of the Romantic and Arcadian themes with their heroes and milkmaids and that this poem has been "composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called "Peter and Margaret." This poem "Van (...)was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston(...)’ wrote: ‘I kept for years — it must be in my Ardis nursery — the anthology you once gave me ; and the little poem (...) Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now read on: ‘Here, said the guide, was the field,/There, he said, was the wood./This is where Peter kneeled,/That’s where the Princess stood/ No, the visitor said,/You are the ghost, old guide./Oats and oaks may be dead,/But she is by my side.’ (A,146). The legend about the two separate domains joined by the watery channels that carry love-letters written by Pedro to Inês de Castro also pervades “Ada” when Aqua imagines that she can hear water talking, or by the invented hydraulic dorophones. Lucette flushed her blank suicide note down the toilet before drowning and later sent “maybe, a mermaid message” to Ada. (this is an excerpt from a long unpublished paper I wrote about Mascodagama's tricks and the epic by Camões).