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

versions would be worse than they are but for kind help from Mr. I. Berlin and Dr. S.
Rachmilevitsch.’ 17 Bowra clearly had some Russian, but the manner of its acquisition
and its precise level remain something of a mystery. Did he pick up the language during
the few months he spent in Petersburg in 1916? Did he perhaps take lessons later in
Oxford or attempt to teach himself? He does not write about this in his Memories, nor
do the published memoirs of his contemporaries cast any light on the subject. 18 My own
attempts to find out from witnesses how good his Russian was have yielded two results,
suggesting that his ability to memorise literary texts far exceeded his grasp of the living
language. Isaiah Berlin, describing to me the occasion when he accompanied Bowra on
his first visit to Ivanov in Rome in 1947, recalled that Bowra conversed with Ivanov in
French, as his spoken Russian was very poor. 19 Timothy Binyon, a former Fellow of
Wadham College and Tutor in Russian, informed me that in later years Bowra could
quote Russian poetry from memory at great length, though in rather a strange accent,
and remembered Bowra reciting to him occasionally in the College common-room after
dinner (possibly a long passage from Lermontov's ‘Mtsyri’). 20
How, therefore, did Bowra approach the task of translating Ivanov? His general
method as a translator was strongly influenced by the classes given by Murray on
translation from Greek that he had attended as an undergraduate in Oxford; as Isaiah
Berlin perceptively commented, Bowra ‘virtually alone in England happily (and
successfully) parsed the obscurest lines of modern Russian poets as he did the verse of
17
Bowra (ed.), A Book of Russian Verse, v; Bowra (ed.), A Second Book of Russian Verse, v.
18
Apart from Ivanov's daughter, who comments in her memoirs that Bowra ‘knew Russian well’. Lidiya
Ivanova, Vospominaniya. Kniga ob ottse, ed. John Malmstad (Paris: Atheneum, 1990), 293.
19
Personal communication to the author from Isaiah Berlin, All Souls College, Oxford, 26 November
1980.
20
Personal communication to the author from T.J. Binyon, July and August 2002. Most sadly, Timothy
Binyon died unexpectedly on 8 October 2004. According to his obituary, Bowra ‘bid’ for him to become a
Fellow of Wadham in 1968 and was his chief mentor when he began teaching at the College (Paul Levy,
The Independent, 13 October 2004).
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