Cobridme de flores: (Un)Covering Flowers of Portuguese and Spanish Poets in Sonnets from the Portuguese

A small bound book that Elizabeth Barrett Browning used for Part II of her  diary (1832), contains unpublished notes in her hand that give us more informaion on what she read, translated, and studied around the time of her diary entries.¹ Like many of her precursors, she was engaged in a rigorous and disciplined study of the ancients that would lead to her major contribution to poetry and the addition of her voice to the great poetic discourses that had preceded her. A note EBB recorded on these unpublished journal pages attests to her ambitions: "Ordinary talent is a low sound; & to hear it one must listen—but genius, like thunder does not require our attention—it exacts it."² On page three recto she begins a seven-page list of Spanish and Portuguese poets.³ Exploring the fifty-eight poets she lists is an exhaustive education in the history of Spanish and Portuguese literature; it includes representatives of the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods and many genres thereof. EBB made her list from John Bowring's 1824 Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain, recording the name of every poet and all the titles of their poems in the order they are listed in Bowring's book.⁴

Scholars have long accepted that the title EBB chose for her forty-four love sonnets, Sonnets from the Portuguese, was a cover to hide their personal nature. Dorothy Mermin tells us that EBB's Sonnets were "named from Robert Browning's delight in 'Catarina to Camoens,'" and further explains in an endnote that "the title was a disguise agreed on by the Brownings together; it suggests without actually saying so that the poem is a translation."⁵ EBB wrote to her sister Arabella on January 12, 1851, after the poems' publication, that the title was chosen "after much consideration" and that it "did not mean (as we understood the double-meaning) 'from the Portuguese language' . . though the public (who are very little versed in Portuguese literature) might take it as they pleased."⁶ While Mermin and others have recognized the title's reference to the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoens via EBB's poem "Catarina to Camoens," exploration of Portuguese literature and "the double-meaning" has ended there. In a previous article I explored EBB's knowledge of Camoens and Portuguese literature and argued that this context is critical to our understanding of her Sonnets from the Portuguese and her lineage as a love poet⁷. Discovery of EBB's seven-page journal list further substantiates her knowledge of and interest in Portuguese and Spanish literature. Not only can we assume that EBB read Bowring's entire collection, but also, given our knowledge of EBB's intellectual pursuits at the time she made this list, we can surmise that his anthology probably represents only part of her study of Portuguese and Spanish poets.

That she knew more than she could learn from reading Bowring's anthology is evidenced by the presence of poet "Luis de Camoes" on her list, though the two poems in Bowring's book that EBB noted make no mention of his beloved Catarina or his epic poem Os Lusiads.⁸ EBB made her first draft of "Catarina to Camoens" in November 1831, during the time she was writing her diary, revealing that she knew more about his life and work than Bowring's anthology could give her.⁹ In addition, EBB mentions Camoens and his Lusiads in her poem "A Vision of Poets" (Poems, 1844), followed by De Vega (Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, 1562-1635) and Calderon (Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1600-1681), two giants in Spanish literature who are not in Bowring's anthology. EBB had a scholarly and an artistic interest in making her own translations throughout her career and probably would have recognized that Bowring's translations into English verse of the Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain might not give her sufficiently direct experience of these poets. Armed with her knowledge of Latin, French, and Italian, she...