31. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a competent translator, producing, among other works, versions of Aeschylus and Chaucer. Sonnets from the Portuguese, however, was not among her translations. The title was a cover for the author’s own love-poems to Robert Browning, one of which was her famous ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ (no. 43). The choice of ‘Portuguese’ was significant. Robert Browning’s nickname for Elizabeth was ‘the Portuguese’, in reference to a poem of hers published before they had met, ‘Catarina to Camoens’ (the story of Camoens, the poet, and his tragic love for a Portuguese maiden). Reluctant to publish the sonnets as her own work, she introduced them as anonymous lyrics in the 1850 edition of her Poems. Elizabeth explained in a letter to her sister Arabel in January 1851 that the title ‘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.’

But it might have been very different. At least, according to Edmund Gosse it might. In his 1896 collection Critical Kit-Kats he claimed that the title of the book had nearly been (incredibly) Sonnets from the Bosnian:

It was in the second or 1850 edition of the Poems in Two Volumes that the Sonnets from the Portuguese were first given to the public. The circumstances attending their composition have never been clearly related. Mr. Browning, however, eight years before his death, made a statement to a friend, with the understanding that at some future date, after his own decease, the story might be more widely told. [...] When it was determined to publish the sonnets [...] the question of a title arose. The name which was ultimately chosen, Sonnets from the Portuguese, was invented by Mr. Browning, as an ingenious device to veil the true authorship, and yet to suggest kinship with that beautiful lyric, called Catarina to Camoens, in which so similar a passion had been expressed. Long before he ever heard of these poems, Mr. Browning called his wife his ‘own little Portuguese,’ and so, when she proposed ‘Sonnets translated from the Bosnian,’ he, catching at the happy thought of ‘translated’, replied, ‘No, not Bosnian — that means nothing — but from the Portuguese! They are Catarina's sonnets!’ And so, in half a joke, half a conceit, the famous title was invented.

Without Browning’s intervention, then, ‘Bosnian’, not ‘Portuguese’, would have been irrevocably associated in English-speaking countries with the muse of love.

Consulted:
Gosse, Edmund: Critical Kit-Kats (1896)
Taplin, Gardner B.: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1957)

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