Vyacheslav Ivanov and C.M. Bowra: a ... - UCL Discovery

implies. 47 How hard it is, for instance, to put any speech of Shakespeare into Greek iambics,
though he wrote for the stage and in a line not absolutely unlike the Greek. 48 But the metaphors,
the movement of the thought, the quality of the emotions, the whole background are different.
Still one goes on trying and enjoys the endless problems which the job presents.
I am sending you my book on Sophocles. 49 On looking at it again I find it rather too
pedantic and philological in the worst sense. But I wrote it as an anodyne in the worst years of
the war, and I am sure that you will make allowances for this.
I will see Konovalov and find out what has happened to him. In Paris I saw Kaplan and
talked to him about publishing your book. 50 I hope he will do so, and I think he is willing and
can get the paper. But I have heard no more. But you may rest assured that we will do
something somehow.
With all good wishes for the New Year and very many thanks,
yours sincerely
C M Bowra
47 An allusion to Ivanov’s reference to the English climate (‘the briny North wind / And the country’s mist and
phantasms of cloud’) in his Greek poem responding to Bowra’s Greek versions of Coleridge and Swinburne at the
beginning of letter 5.
48 This sort of exercise was regularly undertaken by Bowra, one of the seven members of the Oxford informal club
for the practice of Latin and Greek composition in prose and verse, formed in November 1923. Bowra later
published his Greek versions of three excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays in an anthology of compositions produced
by members of the group; see Barrington-Ward, Some Oxford Compositions, 262-5 274-5. Bowra planned to send
Ivanov a copy of this anthology when it was published; see letter 11. Shakespeare wrote his dramas in iambic
pentameters. Greek iambics are based on quantity (the alternation of long and short syllables), not stress; the line is a
trimeter, in which one metron, consisting of two feet, is repeated three times.
49 C.M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945). A copy of this book (reprinted with
corrections from the first edition of 1944) survives in Ivanov's library in Rome; it contains a printed slip ‘With the
Author's Compliments’, but no inscription.
50 M.S. Kaplan (1893-1979) was the owner of the Paris émigré publishing-house, Dom knigi (Maison du livre
étranger), which published Ivanov's poem Chelovek in 1939 as the ninth item in its series ‘Russkie poety.’ On 22
December 1946 (eight days before Bowra wrote this letter) Konovalov had already informed Ivanov that the Oxford
publisher Blackwell had not agreed to printing Ivanov’s book of verse, despite Bowra’s approach, but was prepared
to take on its distribution; this had only become clear at the beginning of November, at which point Konovalov had
immediately written to Kaplan in Paris, asking him to send an estimate for 4,200 lines. Bowra happened to be in
Paris at this time and spurred Kaplan on. Kaplan agreed (a subsidy of $150 was offered) and offered two different
107