2304. EBB to Anna Brownell Jameson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 234–235.
50 Wimpole Street.
Saturday. [11 April 1846] [1]
My dear Mrs Jameson, will these, either of them, do at all? If you scruple about making objections I shall be afraid to try experiments another time; but I hope you will not. With which hope, I send you two versions of the passage in the Odyssey. [2] In the first (written first) I tried to represent .. not perfectly but imperfectly .. understand! .. something of the Greek cadence, without trenching on the uncongenial English hexameters. This version, for the rest, is rendered line for line with the original:—yet, when I had done it, I shrank a little from sending it to you without an alternative in the commoner measure—& so, & so … (for my explanation grows as long as an Odyssey!) I send, besides, a blankverse translation, & entreat you to use a full liberty in selecting either version or rejecting both .... you, who know the good & evil of everything like Zeus, though you are so much too kind to have joy in your thunderbolts!
Let me remain
affectionately & gratefully yours
Elizabeth Barrett B–
Perhaps you object to the Greek names being used—which I would alter, if you preferred it so. I should say that the number of the daughters of Pandarus, given by Pope, is not mentioned in the original. [3]
Publication: Gerardine Macpherson, Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson (1878), pp. 218–219 (in part).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to this letter in her letter to RB of the 13th (no. 2310).
2. Both versions of EBB’s translation from Homer, headed “Odyssey book XX,” were published in Mrs. Jameson’s Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals (1846), in the chapter “The Xanthian Marbles,” pp. 137–138; as well as in EBB’s Last Poems (1862).
3. In The Odyssey of Homer (1725–26), XX, 78, Pope numbers the daughters of Pandarus at three; Homer does not say how many daughters there were.
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