Centre for Romanian Studies

Poetry in Translation, (CCXCIX), Elizabeth Barrett BROWNING,
(1806 – 1861), ENGLAND: “The Soul’s Expression”, “Glasul sufletului”


The Soul’s Expression
Elizabeth Barrett BROWNING
(1806, England – 1861, Italy)

With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound

And only answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.

This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:

But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

Glasul sufletului
Elizabeth Barrett BROWNING
(1806, Anglia – 1861, Italia)

Cu buze trenurând şi fără glas
Încerc cu greu ca să înalţ, la cer,
Corala mea din sufletu-mi stingher
Fiind năpădit de gânduri de pripas.

Şi adunând în piept destul curaj
În sunet de un ritm desăvârşit
Cadenţa creşte-n plin spre infinit
Facând din beznă un splendid miraj.

Corala mea trecând peste hotar,

Prin porţi deschise sufletului meu,
Mă-nclin, adânc, slăvitului altar:

Însă de-aş facea-o, trăsnetul, mereu,
Mi-ar pune-ntreaga fiinţă-a mea pe jar:
Infernul ce aşteaptă un ateu.

(Rendered in English by Constantin ROMAN, London
© 2014 Copyright Constantin ROMAN, London)

SHORT BIO: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime.
As a young woman she was introduced by a cousin to the circle of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle.

Browning’s poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Her volume Poems (1844) brought her great success. During this time she met and corresponded with the writer Robert Browning, who admired her work. The courtship and marriage between the two were carried out in secret, for fear of her father’s disapproval. Following the wedding she was disinherited by her father and rejected by her brothers. The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life. They had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Towards the end of her life, her lung function worsened, and she died in Florence in 1861.
(Abridged from Wikipedia)