4549. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 87–88.
Florence
Dec. 15. [1859] [1]
My dear Sir, It has been suggested to me, several times, that the part of my Imaginary Conversations in which the interlocutors are Italian would be advantageously translated into that language. I have long suppresst the idea, and never entertained the wish. But if you know any good Tuscan scholar who will undertake the work, which I think will occupy about 300 pages in large duodecimo, I will engage to pay him three hundred lire for 100 copies in sheets, to be sent to my friends and correspondents in England, and not interfering with the sale on the Continent.
I take no great interest in this matter. With kindest regards to Mrs Browning, believe me, my dear Sir,
Very truly yrs
W S Landor
The conversation[s] I would select are
Dante and Beatrice
Dante and Gemma Donati
Michel Angelo
The Pentameron—in its five separate parts.
Tasso and Cornelia
Galileo and Milton
Alfieri and Metastazio [2]
I would add as Preface these words,
There may be opinions, in one or other of these Conversations, which belong to the characters and age of the interlocutors, and which have been expresst by them in their writings, yet which can have no influence on our happier times. They therefor are published in every edition of their immortal Works.
Publication: BBIS-5, p. 31 (without assigned date).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. From the formal nature of the salutation and close, it is apparent that Landor intended RB to show this letter to a potential translator/publisher. The way in which EBB mentions this topic in a letter of [13] October [1860] (ms at Morgan) indicates that this is an earlier letter.
2. The works listed here were not published in Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (5 vols., 1824–29). The Pentameron and Pentalogia was issued as a separate title in 1837. “Dante and Beatrice”; “Dante and Gemma Donati”; “Vittoria Colonna and Michel-Angelo Buonarotti”; “Tasso and Cornelia”; and “Galileo, Milton, and a Dominican” were published in The Works of Walter Savage Landor (2 vols., 1846). All of these, except “Dante and Gemma Donati” first appeared in periodicals between 1839 and 1845. “Alfieri and Metastasio,” first published in Fraser’s Magazine for April 1856, was not collected in Landor’s lifetime.
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