God and Robert Browning

[ellenkushner]

In what was probably a case of youthful show-offiness, 19c poet Robert Browning wrote a nearly impenetrable poem called Sordello, which made even Tennyson feel stupid when he read it. Some years later, the story goes, someone asked him to explain a particularly obscure passage - and Browning replied:

'When it was written, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant; now only God knows.'*

I have been driven lately to quote that line more than once, as my French & Finnish translators ask me whether that capital letter in Swordspoint or strange locution in Thomas the Rhymer was intentional, or just an uncaught typo.

Hey. I wrote those books a long time ago.

*If you're sure you've heard it before, it was used in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a delicious 1931 play by Rudolph Besier which was made into a movie in 1934 (and deliciously spoofed by Emma Thompson & Stephen Fry.

Comments

[renesears.livejournal.com]

Oh, thenk you so veddy much for the link to that spoof! Fentistic!

a long time ago

[calimac.livejournal.com]

That reminds me that, on re-reading The Lord of the Rings 15 years after finishing it, Tolkien wrote:

"I am bound to say that my admiration for the tightness of the author's construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it."

(Letters, p. 356)

Re: a long time ago

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely!

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

I remember my 10th grade lit teacher using that line, but he told the story differently, attributing it to Tennyson (and swapping out T's name for B's), who had given it as the answer to a question about one of his poems when asked by a group at a reading.

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Definitely Browning. I remember it arising in an A level English Lit class . . . oh my God, THAT many years ago!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Annoyingly enough, it is only an apocryphal story - no good documentation. But I feel sure more than one author must have said it over the years . . . .

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Of course, I trusted my English teacher absolutely. After all, Louis Barnett spoke as though he'd known Browning personally (and I was too young to do the sums . . .)

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

Pity the lot of the translator, who has to guess (and guess right!) about things even the author isn't sure about...

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Ego te absolvo.

[lmarley.livejournal.com]

I had such a delightful conversation with my French translator over a non-sexual slang word I had used (in THE GLASS HARMONICA) to describe a girl's breasts. Somehow we figured it out, and he came up with what I gather is the perfect French word.

I want an Italian translation, so I can read it myself!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

A friend who reads Japanese informs me that when she came to a scene where the barmaid was displaying her charms, the charms were rendered "omamori" which are literally little good luck charms.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Now I'm reminded of the repeated vignettes in David Lodge's Small World of the extremely working-class English novelist who keeps getting letters from his baffled Japanese translator asking him to explain cryptic slang terms.