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

of modern European literature, which grew out of his broader cultural interests. His first
book in the field of classical studies was his translation into free verse of Pindar's
Pythian Odes (1928); this was followed by The Oxford Book of Greek Verse (1930),
edited with Gilbert Murray and others, an edition of Pindar's verse Pindari Carmina
(1935) and The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (1938). His studies of
classical authors include Tradition and Design in the Iliad (1930), Greek Lyric Poetry
(1936), Early Greek Elegists (1938), Sophoclean Tragedy (1944) and Pindar (1964) – a
prolific range of publications sustained all the way through to the last years of his life.
Throughout the 1930s, Bowra also continued to develop his parallel interest in
modern European literature. He produced a number of essays and translations for the
periodical press. In 1932, for example, he published an essay on Blok, including his
translations of the poet's verse. 19 To check these translations he enlisted the help of a
remarkable Russian-speaking undergraduate, Isaiah Berlin, who subsequently became a
life-long friend and accompanied him on his first visit to Ivanov in 1947. 20 His
fascination with Russian poetry led to the compilation of A Book of Russian Verse
(1943), for which he prepared his first three translations of Ivanov. His first published
book of criticism on modern European literature was his well-known study of post-
Symbolist poetry The Heritage of Symbolism (1943), consisting of five chapters on
Valéry, Rilke, Stefan George, Blok and Yeats, based on earlier essays written for
personal enjoyment during the 1930s. 21 In From Virgil to Milton (1945) he studied the
literary epic in the works of Virgil, Tasso, Camões and Milton. These last two books
19 C.M. Bowra, ‘The Position of Alexander Blok’, in Criticism, xi, 44, April 1932, 422-38, cited in
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Vintage, 2000), 310.
20 For an amusing account of Isaiah Berlin's first meeting with Bowra in 1931 and of their disagreement
over a point of ornithological translation, see Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, 51.
21 See the preface, dated 23 October 1942, in C.M. Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism (London:
Macmillan, 1943), v. For an account of Yeats's reaction to the chapter on his verse, first written in 1934,
see Bowra, Memories, 240-41.
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