Sonnets from the Portuguese (en Inglés) - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese is a collection of forty-four love sonnets. Despite what the title suggests, Browning in fact composed the sonnets in English. She decided to frame them as "translations" because she was concerned they may have been too personal to publish. Fortunately her husband, Robert Browning, convinced her to publish them, and they went on to become some of the most famous and critically-acclaimed love sonnets to this day.

Sonnets from the Portuguese, written c. 1845-1846 and published first in 1850, is a collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular during the poet's lifetime and it remains so today. Despite what the title implies, the sonnets are entirely Browning's own, and not translated from Portuguese.

The first line of Sonnet 43 has become one of the most famous in English poetry: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

Barrett Browning was initially hesitant to publish the poems, believing they were too personal. However, her husband Robert Browning insisted they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare's time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided to publish them as if they were translations of foreign sonnets. She initially planned to title the collection "Sonnets translated from the Bosnian",[1] but Robert Browning proposed that she claim their source was Portuguese, probably because of her admiration for Camões and Robert's nickname for her: "my little Portuguese". The title is also a reference to Les Lettres Portugaises