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

Dear Professor Ivanov,
11
Bowra – Ivanov
19 September 1948 77
116
September 19th
I was extremely sorry not to see you again in Rome, but I was only there for a few hours,
and in these I had a great deal to do. 78 I hope it will not be long before I see you again. I greatly
enjoyed your delightful hospitality and the gracious friendliness which I met in your household.
It was extremely kind of you to be so good to me.
I leave for the United States on Friday, and hope that I shall have some time there to
pursue my Pindar studies. 79 I am greatly encouraged by what you said to me and have continued
to think about Pindar and to read what I can about him. Much of the Wissenschaft 80 on him is
very poor, and it is surprising how much better the old scholars are than the new, not merely on
textual questions but in the whole interpretation of his poetry.
I will make contact with the Harvard Press as soon as possible and stir them up about
77 RAI, Bowra folder. Typescript, one sheet, on printed stationery of The Warden’s Lodgings, Wadham College,
Oxford. Envelope addressed to Professor V. Ivanov, Via Gian Battista Alberti 5 (S. Saba), Rome, Italy. Postmarked
Oxford, 19 September 1948; Rome, 22 September 1948. Bowra has once more mistakenly written Gian instead of
Leon (Battista Alberti) in the address.
78 Bowra had evidently visited Ivanov during his week in Rome from 22 to 29 August 1948, but was unable to visit
him again when passing through Rome for a few hours at a later date, probably on his way back to England.
79 Bowra first visited Harvard in the autumn term of 1936; he returned again for a few months in the college year
1948-9 as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry to deliver a series of lectures on the English Romantic poets,
later published in The Romantic Imagination (1950). Ivanov and Bowra both shared a life-time interest in Pindar.
Ivanov's earliest publication was a version of Pindar's first Pythian ode (1899), while Bowra published translations
of Pindar’s Pythian odes in 1928, an edition of his verse in 1935, and a study of his work, Pindar, in 1964. Bowra’s
edition and study of Pindar have recently been republished and are widely considered by many scholars in the field
to be among his finest work.
80 ‘Science’; here ‘scholarship’.