• “Having dared to touch with bloody hands the verses”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Embodied Approach to the Homeric Corpus
• Allison Scheidegger Reising (bio)

In an 1845 letter to Anne Thomson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB) expresses serious reservations about the value of classical learning, particularly for women:

the Greek language [. . .] swallows up year after year of studious life. Now I have a “doxy” . . . that there is no exercise of the mind so little profitable to the mind, as the study of languages. It is the nearest thing to a passive recipiency . . is it not? . . as a mental action— though it leaves one as weary as ennui itself.¹

EBB worries that popularizing “the mere fashion of scholarship among women” would be “disagreeable” and “worse than vain,” and wishes that English women would read and appreciate con temporary poets. Yet in the year she wrote this seeming disavowal, EBB was engaged in multiple short translations from Greek commissioned by Thomson herself, as well as a complete retranslation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.² In her case at least, learning Greek did not lull her mind into mere “passive recipiency.” In this essay, I suggest that EBB’s scholarly relationships, critical practices, and short Homeric translations can help us reconcile her expressed concerns regarding classical study with her own avid scholarly practice and frequent re-encounters with Greek texts. EBB’s embodied imagining of the Homeric text and Homeric criticism enables her to take a nurturing and expansive approach that stands in contrast to the pedantic and limiting focus on textual purity common in the classical scholarship of her time.

At least part of EBB’s expressed ambivalence about classical scholarship stemmed from lingering embarrassment over her first translation of Prometheus [End Page 161] Bound, published in 1833, which she described to her friend Mary Russell Mitford as a “hard dry unvital translation” that failed “poetically,” albeit not “scholastically.” After describing her mortification that this translation had been published and was still receiving public attention, EBB critiques what she calls “linguaism”:

As for the ancient languages, or any acquirement in the particular department of languages, you cant [sic] think how little I care for it. It puts me out of patience to see people glorying, evidently however silently, in the multitudes of grammars, when the glorious rich literature of our own beloved England lies by their side without a look or a sigh that way. And then a dictionary life is the vainest & least exalting of lives. No occupation claims the time which the acquisition of a language does, with an equal non-requital to the intellect.

Further on in this letter, however, EBB moderates her critique of “linguaism” in a way that gives clues as to why, in spite of “how little” she claims to care for skill in “the ancient languages,” she would go on to translate Prometheus Bound twice, and even revise that second revision twice over the following six years:

there are you know, peculiar aptitudes to languages, which like other talents cry out for cultivation. For my own part, my learning Greek was a child’s fancy . . achieved for Homer’s sake; & for Homer’s sake, . . that is, for poetry’s generally, I have never repented one year of my hard working ones.³

For EBB, learning Greek was both “a child’s fancy” and hard work engaged in for the sake of personal encounter with Homer, and therefore with poetry—an unmistakable assertion of the relevance of classical genius for modern poetry.

Although the influence of Greek on EBB’s poetics is generally taken as lasting and pervasive, her scholarly work still tends to be construed as a necessary but insipid apprenticeship for her later project of writing a modern English epic in Aurora Leigh (1857). Clara Drummond, for example, argues that for EBB the pursuits of poetry and classical scholarship were “inseparable,” but also assumes that classical scholarship is unimaginative in contrast with poetry: “a serious study of Greek requires a meticulous and assiduous nature, while composing serious poetry requires a passionate and imaginative one, and a sensitivity to the sublime.” ⁴ Jennifer Wallace has observed that feminist scholars’ anxiety about women writers trying...

• “敢于用血淋淋的双手触摸诗句”：伊丽莎白·巴雷特·勃朗宁对荷马语料库的具体化方法
• 艾莉森·谢德格尔·雷辛（简介）

在1845 年写给安妮·汤姆森的信中，伊丽莎白·巴雷特·勃朗宁（Elizabeth Barrett Browning，以下简称 EBB）对古典学习的价值（尤其是对女性而言）表示严重保留：

希腊语[. 。.] 吞噬了年复一年的好学生活。现在我有了一个“doxy”。。。没有什么运动比学习语言更对大脑没有什么益处了。这是最接近被动接受的事情。。不是吗？。。作为一种精神行为——尽管它让人感到疲倦，就像无聊一样。¹

EBB 担心普及“女性学术的时尚”会“令人不快”且“比虚荣更糟糕”，并希望英国女性能够阅读和欣赏当代诗人。然而，在她写下这篇看似否认的文章的那一年，EBB 受汤姆森本人委托，进行了多部希腊语短译，以及对埃斯库罗斯的《被缚的普罗米修斯》的完全重译。²至少就她而言，学习希腊语并没有让她的思想陷入单纯的“被动接受”。在这篇文章中，我建议 EBB 的学术关系、批评实践和简短的荷马翻译可以帮助我们调和她对古典研究表达的担忧与她自己热衷的学术实践和频繁接触希腊文本。EBB 对荷马文本和荷马批评的具体想象使她能够采取一种培育和扩展的方法，这与她那个时代的古典学术中常见的对文本纯粹性的迂腐和有限的关注形成鲜明对比。

EBB 对古典学术的矛盾心理至少部分源于她对 1833 年出版的首版《普罗米修斯 》[完第 161 页]《 束缚》感到挥之不去的尴尬，她向她的朋友玛丽·拉塞尔·米特福德 (Mary Russell Mitford) 描述该译本是“硬而干、无生命力的翻译”，但失败了。 “诗意地”，尽管不是“学术地”。在描述了她对这部译本已经出版并且仍然受到公众关注的羞愧之后，EBB 批评了她所说的“语言主义”：

至于古代语言，或者特定语言部门的任何习得，你不能[原文如此]认为我对它有多么不关心。当我们心爱的英格兰辉煌而丰富的文学就躺在他们身边，却没有那样的眼神或叹息时，看到人们在众多的语法中明显地但默默地夸耀，这让我失去了耐心。那么，字典式的生活是最虚荣、最不崇高的生活。没有任何职业比学习语言更需要时间，同样也不需要智力。

然而，在这封信的进一步内容中，EBB 缓和了她对“语言主义”的批评，其方式提供了一些线索，说明为什么尽管她声称“多么不关心”“古代语言”的技能，但她会继续下去翻译《被缚的普罗米修斯》两次，甚至在接下来的六年里对第二次修订进行了两次修改：

你知道，有一些特殊的语言天赋，就像其他天赋一样需要培养。就我而言，学习希腊语只是孩子的幻想。。为了荷马而实现；为了荷马的缘故，. 。也就是说，对于诗歌来说，我从来没有后悔过一年的努力。³

对于 EBB 来说，学习希腊语既是“孩子的幻想”，也是为了与荷马个人相遇而付出的艰苦努力，因此也是为了与诗歌接触——这是古典天才与现代诗歌相关性的明确断言。

尽管希腊语对 EBB 诗学的影响通常被认为是持久而普遍的，但她的学术工作仍然倾向于被解释为她后来在《奥罗拉·利》（Aurora Leigh，1857）中撰写现代英国史诗的计划的必要但平淡的学徒期。例如，克拉拉·德拉蒙德 (Clara Drummond) 认为，对于 EBB 来说，对诗歌和古典学术的追求是“密不可分的”，但她也认为古典学术与诗歌相比缺乏想象力：“认真研究希腊语需要一丝不苟和刻苦的天性，而创作严肃的诗歌需要激情和想象力，以及对崇高的敏感度。” ⁴詹妮弗·华莱士（Jennifer Wallace）观察到，女权主义学者对女性作家尝试……的焦虑。