Byron and Italy

Alan Rawes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526126085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did Italy Italianise Byron? And how did Byron Byronise Italy? These are the key questions that the volume sets out to answer.

1

The literature of Italy in Byron’s poems of 1817–20

Nicholas Halmi

Although travel to Italy was an almost obligatory rite of passage for young English aristocratic males in the eighteenth century, the interests of these tourists were typically restricted to seeing and acquiring antiquities. Earlier travellers, such as Thomas Coryat in 1608 and Milton in 1638, had been more interested in contemporary than in ancient Italy, for they had considered travel and an acquaintance with other nations to be beneficial to their participation in a shared humanistic culture. Coryat had observed Italian life keenly and recorded his impressions minutely, while Milton had frequented the learned academies (where he won approval for his Latin poetry) and met Italian intellectuals, including Galileo, then in his fourth year under house arrest. In the eighteenth century, however, the educational aim of Continental travel narrowed from the broadly humanistic to the more specifically aesthetic, centred on classical art; and often enough even that aim was little more than a pretext for the acquisition of a superficial worldliness on an extended holiday.¹ Johann Joachim Winckelmann complained privately about the philistinism of the nominally distinguished English visitors to whom he was expected, as keeper of the Vatican antiquities and Rome’s most prominent antiquarian, to give guided tours of the city.² In this increasingly commodified experience of the Italian past, the living contemporary land largely ceased to be of interest to Grand Tourists except in so far as it assisted (or hindered) their sightseeing and collecting. The eighteenth-century Italian artists most familiar to the English were those who supplied visitors with pictures of themselves and the sights: the portraitist Pompeo Batoni, the view-painters Canaletto and Giovanni Paolo Panini and especially the engravers Giuseppe Vasi and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Thus the growth in the popularity of the Grand Tour across the first three quarters of the eighteenth century was not directly matched by an increased interest in Italian literature and history. It was an Italian expatriate, the critic Giuseppe Baretti, who began to revive British interest in Italian literature with his Remarks on the Italian Language and Writers and Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry, both published in 1753. Translations of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso by Joseph Higgins and William Hoole followed in 1755 and 1783, while Hoole’s 1747 translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata was reprinted seven times between 1764 and 1803. Susannah Dobson’s 1775 Life of Petrarch stimulated translations of his lyrics; two translations of Dante’s Inferno – but not of the other canticles – were published in 1782; and Metastasio’s poetry became a staple of young ladies’ singing lessons. But only in the early nineteenth century, when travel to Italy was impeded by war, did study of the language and literature become more common. This development was motivated, C. P. Brand speculates, by British sympathy for the plight of Italy under foreign occupation and fostered by the presence of literarily active Italian exiles in London, most notably Ugo Foscolo and Antonio Panizzi.³ Among British Romantic writers, J. H. Frere, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Southey, Landor, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, J. H. Reynolds, both Shelleys and Felicia Hemans read Italian literature in the original, while Blake, De Quincey and Keats acquired at least a basic knowledge of the language.

Byron’s reception of the literature, however, was distinctive in its extent and its dual aspect: not only reading but actively appropriating. His letters and notes to his poems attest to an interest that extended beyond Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso to Pulci, Machiavelli, Bandello and Guarini, among Renaissance writers, Filicaja in the seventeenth century, Forteguerri, Goldoni, Casti and Alfieri among eighteenth-century writers and Monti and Foscolo among his contemporaries. This interest had certainly developed before he travelled to Italy, for Italian-language editions of the Furioso and Liberata, Bandello’s Novelle, Dante’s Commedia, Machiavelli’s Opere and Petrarch’s lyrics, as well as several Italian dictionaries and grammars, were among the books that Byron was compelled to auction off in April 1816 to pay his debts.⁴ But only after having visited Ferrara on 19 April 1817, a visit that prompted him to write The Lament of Tasso, did he begin to engage with Italian literature poetically.

Focusing on the poems Byron wrote in the years 1817–20, in particular The Lament of Tasso, The Prophecy of Dante, two stanzas of the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the translation of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, we can see how Byron exploited both the writings and the figures of Italian writers (especially the exiled Dante and imprisoned Tasso) to construct his own cosmopolitan poetic identity. In a famous essay written in 1839, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini described Byron as the exemplary poet of subjective life.⁵ But Mazzini’s understanding of subjectivity in Byron as the projection of a unitary self onto external reality is precisely what Byron’s poetry contests. Indeed, its construction of the ‘Byronic’ self is a central element of its social engagement. Created in dialogue with the reading public and the larger world, the ‘self’ that emerges in his poems is a product of the poet’s responses to others, past, present and future.⁶ Byron himself insisted, in a journal entry of 1813: ‘To withdraw myself from myself (oh that cursed selfishness!) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all; and publishing is also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself’.⁷ However seriously we take this explanation of his reason for writing, as if anticipating T. S. Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, it is a fair description of how he creates his poetic persona – Byron wearing the mask of Byron, so to speak. What is at issue here is not the correspondence (or lack of it) between representation and biographical fact, but the representation itself. And in the poetry Byron wrote between 1817 and 1820 we find him adopting the verse forms and narrative strategies of Italian poets, translating their verse directly, ventriloquising their sorrows and projecting their vindication into a future represented implicitly by the English poet himself.

Byron’s transhistorical identification with these poets derived from a self-consciously historicised sense of alienation from his own time and native land. At the same time, by conjuring up a succession of poets who experienced and opposed tyranny of one kind or another, Byron sought equally to promote the idea of an Italian nation unified by its literary tradition and dedicated to the liberation of the peninsula from foreign domination. But to the extent that it elided the complexities of translating a cultural into a political nationalism, Byron’s certaine idée (to appropriate de Gaulle’s famous phrase) was a wish-fulfilment, betraying an impatient ambition for Italians that they themselves, in their linguistic and cultural and political heterogeneity, could not have realised in the immediate post-Napoleonic years.

In The Giaour, The Corsair and The Siege of Corinth, relying on triangular plots centred on two men and a woman (or two women in The Corsair), Byron had used the manifest confrontation between Eastern and Western characters to suggest latent similarities based on the socio-political and gender hierarchies in both European and Eastern nations. This is particularly true of The Giaour, in which the Venetian Giaour and Turkish Hassan are drawn into a fatal conflict figured as personal resemblance and cultural self-estrangement. But in his Italian poems Byron implied an increasing detachment from his native land by presenting an identification and engagement with Italy – its language (including regional dialects), its literature, its history, its politics. Whereas in the Eastern tales he had confronted the West with itself through the exotic medium of the East, in the Italian poems of 1817–20 he confronted English readers with a defamiliarised representation of himself through the decidedly less exotic, though still foreign, medium of Italianness. The irony of Byron’s well-known reference in stanza 51 of Beppo to selling the English public ‘samples of the finest Orientalism’ is deeper than many commentators have acknowledged, for these words are uttered not in the declarative mood by the poet in propria persona but in the optative by a ‘nameless sort’ of narrator, an English poet who must content himself with repeating an Italian anecdote in an Italian verse form precisely because he is unable to produce those ‘pretty poems never known to fail’ in the English market: ‘Oh that I had the art of easy writing / What should be easy reading’ (Beppo, 51–2). In other words, this figure mock-regretfully differentiates himself from the most popular contemporary author of Eastern tales. As the Byron of the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage claims, ‘I’ve taught me other tongues, and in strange eyes / Have made me not a stranger’ (CHP, IV, 8); but it is now in Italy that Byron ‘rides out’ on ‘Autumn evenings’, dines on ‘becaficas’, watches the ‘Sun set, sure he’ll rise tomorrow’, loves (and speaks) ‘the language, that soft bastard Latin’ and likes ‘the women too’ (Beppo, 42–5). The poet is so thoroughly assimilated into his adopted land that it has ceased to be alien to him and he to it. Yet, of course, as the adjectives ‘other’ and ‘strange’, indicating a residual foreignness, qualify the confident negation of the noun ‘stranger’, so the poet Byron, writing in English to English readers about Italy and Italian writers, recognised that the Italianness of the persona ‘Byron’ consisted in an irresolvable dialectic of identity and alterity.

Byron insinuates a Byronic Italianness in three principal ways: by appropriating Italian texts, whether directly (as in epigraphs) or indirectly (as in translations); by assuming Italian voices, such as Tasso’s in The Lament of Tasso and Dante’s in The Prophecy of Dante; and by adopting attitudes or points of view identified as Italian, as in the untroubled elaboration of Venetian customs in Beppo. By way of introduction to the complexities of these processes, we might consider an extraordinary passage in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Narrating retrospectively the poet’s leisurely journey from Venice to Rome via Ferrara and Florence from April to June 1817, the canto offers an extended affirmation and elaboration (allowing for some geographical licence) of its epigraph from Ariosto’s fourth Satira:

Visto ho Toscana, Lombardia, Romagna,

Quel Monte che divide, e quel che serra

Italia, e un mare e l’altro, che la bagna.

[I have seen Tuscany, Lombardy, Romagna, Those mountains (the Apennines) that divide and those (the Alps) that cut off Italy, and one sea and the other that bathe her.].

For the most part, the ensuing travelogue, with its frequent historical reflections (supplemented by extensive historical notes), offers the perspective of an admiring but not uncritical English observer. Yet Byron also dissolves the distinctions between Englishman and Italian, between foreigner and native, in stanzas 42–3, which are, as his note acknowledges, a translation of Vincenzo da Filicaja’s patriotic sonnet, ‘Italia, Italia, O tu coi feo la sorte’.⁸ Updating the sonnet’s reference to French advances along the Po at the start of the War of Spanish Succession in 1701 to the post-Napoleonic ‘many-nation’d spoilers’ – a change that acknowledges historical particularity within the general patter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Byron in Italy: a chronology
• Introduction: ‘Un paese tutto poetico’ – Byron in Italy, Italy in Byron
• 1 The literature of Italy in Byron’s poems of 1817–20
• 2 Byron’s ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians
• 3 From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron’s Scottish identity in Italy
• 4 The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy
• 5 ‘Something I have seen or think it possible to see’: Byron and Italian art in Ravenna
• 6 ‘Something sensible to grasp at’: Byron and Italian Catholicism
• 7 The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni
• 8 Parisina, Mazeppa and Anglo-Italian displacement
• 9 This ‘still exhaustless mine’: de Staël, Goethe and Byron’s Roman lyricism
• 10 Playing with history: Byron’s Italian dramas
• 11 ‘Where shall I turn me?’: Italy and irony in Beppo and Don Juan
• Select bibliography
• Index