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Don Juan
Probably few subjects fitted Byron's particular talents better than Don Juan.
In this rambling, exuberant, conversational poem, the travels of Don Juan are used as a vehicle for some of the most lively and acute commentaries on human societies and behaviour in the language. The manner is what Goethe called 'a cultured comic language'-a genre which he regarded as not possible in Geman and which he felt Byron managed superbly.
In this rambling, exuberant, conversational poem, the travels of Don Juan are used as a vehicle for some of the most lively and acute commentaries on human societies and behaviour in the language. The manner is what Goethe called 'a cultured comic language'-a genre which he regarded as not possible in Geman and which he felt Byron managed superbly.
584 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1819
About the author
Lord Byron
3,897 books1,969 followersGeorge Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.
Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.
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November 23, 2017
“But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”
If you know anything about Byron, you will know this poem will involve lots of sex, women and Byron/Don Juan getting exactly what he wants from every situation imaginable. He is an anti-hero so he does not possess the standard characteristics a normal hero would; he is not brave or strong, though he is intelligent and cunning; he serves no greater goal and works only for his own survival and self-gratification. And survive he does. He gets out of so many close encounters and near death experiences, often being the only person alive as the plot moves into the next canto.
The poetry here feels natural. It’s not the sort of verse that a poet has sat down and fussed over in order to achieve the most artistic and creative arrangement of words; it feels like he has written it straight out of his head, completely free flowing, making it almost conversational. Byron was a very selfish man, and that’s just part of his poetic persona, so I would go as far to say that this is poetry written for one person: Lord Byron. He wrote it for himself, it is all one big fantasy in which a character, not entirely unlike its author, goes on a long adventure.
As such Byron provides the biggest example of an author filibuster I have ever come across; he uses every opportunity available to him to insert his own opinion regarding other writers and critics of the age. He destroys Wordsworth and Coleridge and goads reviewers, informing them that he is going to do more of what they criticised him for just because he can. You have to admire his tenacity and his ability to write whatever he wants regardless of public opinion, which is, essentially, one of the reasons he became so popular to begin with.
“Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them.”
This is very much Byron’s poem. It goes on massive tangents as the plot disappears for stanza upon stanza whilst Byron addresses all sort of random issues. And this, in part, is what makes the work so delightfully clever. It’s what you would expect from Byron. He set out to write his own epic, and by the standards of his own overbearing personality, if he wrote anything less than what he did here it would have been a failure.
He even says a few things that would pre-date the modernists:
“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”
Byron is so just so ridiculously entertaining to read. The plot of this poem is just beyond what you would expect from a poem. We have men forced into cannibalism, the central character disguised as a woman in order to survive, and, above all, so much revealing honesty about his own perceptions. To relate back to the quote I added at the start, this poem holds so much of Byron’s authorial persona and it certainly did survive him: it made him immortal.
Come read this and learn exactly who Byron was.
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”
If you know anything about Byron, you will know this poem will involve lots of sex, women and Byron/Don Juan getting exactly what he wants from every situation imaginable. He is an anti-hero so he does not possess the standard characteristics a normal hero would; he is not brave or strong, though he is intelligent and cunning; he serves no greater goal and works only for his own survival and self-gratification. And survive he does. He gets out of so many close encounters and near death experiences, often being the only person alive as the plot moves into the next canto.
The poetry here feels natural. It’s not the sort of verse that a poet has sat down and fussed over in order to achieve the most artistic and creative arrangement of words; it feels like he has written it straight out of his head, completely free flowing, making it almost conversational. Byron was a very selfish man, and that’s just part of his poetic persona, so I would go as far to say that this is poetry written for one person: Lord Byron. He wrote it for himself, it is all one big fantasy in which a character, not entirely unlike its author, goes on a long adventure.
As such Byron provides the biggest example of an author filibuster I have ever come across; he uses every opportunity available to him to insert his own opinion regarding other writers and critics of the age. He destroys Wordsworth and Coleridge and goads reviewers, informing them that he is going to do more of what they criticised him for just because he can. You have to admire his tenacity and his ability to write whatever he wants regardless of public opinion, which is, essentially, one of the reasons he became so popular to begin with.
“Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them.”
This is very much Byron’s poem. It goes on massive tangents as the plot disappears for stanza upon stanza whilst Byron addresses all sort of random issues. And this, in part, is what makes the work so delightfully clever. It’s what you would expect from Byron. He set out to write his own epic, and by the standards of his own overbearing personality, if he wrote anything less than what he did here it would have been a failure.
He even says a few things that would pre-date the modernists:
“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”
Byron is so just so ridiculously entertaining to read. The plot of this poem is just beyond what you would expect from a poem. We have men forced into cannibalism, the central character disguised as a woman in order to survive, and, above all, so much revealing honesty about his own perceptions. To relate back to the quote I added at the start, this poem holds so much of Byron’s authorial persona and it certainly did survive him: it made him immortal.
Come read this and learn exactly who Byron was.
June 19, 2021
Byron has been my favorite Romantic poet--as he was during the Romantic period--since I have been able to read with ease (say, since grad school).
His "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" sets the standard for English Satire since Jonson and Dryden. It is very funny at the expense of an intellectual elite much less doubtful than ours today. We need another Byron.
His "Don Juan" is without equal in English literature; maybe Ariosto's similar in Italian, though I think Byron more witty. Recounting his high school (Brit, "college") he diminishes his achievement,
"For there one learns--'tis not for me to boast,
Though I acquired-- but I pass over that,
As well as all the Greek I since have lost,
I always say there's the place--but 'Verbum sat'..."
He ends the First Canto with his parody 18C "address to the reader":
"But for the present, gentle reader! and
Still gentler purchaser! the bard-- that's I
Must, with permission, shake you by the hand...
'Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters--go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.'
When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise--
The first four rhymes are Southey's, every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine!"
His Canto II takes Juan (rhymes with "new one") on maritime adventure, where his ship is dismasted, on its side. The Longboat is readied for a twenty people, out of 300 aboard.
"...while this
Was going on, some people were unquiet,
That passengers would find it much amiss
To lose their lives, as well as spoil their diet."
Next stanza begins, "There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms
As rum and true religion..."(II. 34).
Such wit leads to terrible losses in the lifeboat, like Juan's grampa's dog, eaten by the starving, and his tutor Pedrillo draws the bad lot to be killed and eaten. Adventure story a la the films I do not attend. But Byron rescues Juan, the only one who survives--because he can swim, began in the Guadalquivir in his native Seville.
Byron's, and his Don Juan's, main literary legacy is the greatest of all Russian poems, Евгений Онегин. I have read perhaps one-fourth of Pushkin's great work in Russian, and it has struck me as a cross between Byron and Wordsworth.
Since I have spent many hours translating Latin and Renaissance Latin, I admire Byron's exact critiques of classical poets like the epigrammatic satirist Martial--"the nauseous epigram of Martial" according to Don Juan's/ Byron's mother.
I could add much, but it gets late/early. Please see my review of Lord Byron: the Major Works..
But I shall add this: Byron lived in the far end of the Mocenigo Palazzo, on the Grand Canal in Venice, within sight of the Rialto Bridge, across from the San Toma stop: The VERY PLACE where Giordano Bruno stayed, and was denounced to the Inquisition by the Bad Student Evaluation of his 33-yr old Mocenigo host, Gianni.
His student told him, "I invited you to Venice to teach me, and you haven't." (My theory is Gianni wanted to learn magic, along with math and memory, Bruno had written on; but Gianni does not tell the Inquisition that part.)
His "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" sets the standard for English Satire since Jonson and Dryden. It is very funny at the expense of an intellectual elite much less doubtful than ours today. We need another Byron.
His "Don Juan" is without equal in English literature; maybe Ariosto's similar in Italian, though I think Byron more witty. Recounting his high school (Brit, "college") he diminishes his achievement,
"For there one learns--'tis not for me to boast,
Though I acquired-- but I pass over that,
As well as all the Greek I since have lost,
I always say there's the place--but 'Verbum sat'..."
He ends the First Canto with his parody 18C "address to the reader":
"But for the present, gentle reader! and
Still gentler purchaser! the bard-- that's I
Must, with permission, shake you by the hand...
'Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters--go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.'
When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise--
The first four rhymes are Southey's, every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine!"
His Canto II takes Juan (rhymes with "new one") on maritime adventure, where his ship is dismasted, on its side. The Longboat is readied for a twenty people, out of 300 aboard.
"...while this
Was going on, some people were unquiet,
That passengers would find it much amiss
To lose their lives, as well as spoil their diet."
Next stanza begins, "There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms
As rum and true religion..."(II. 34).
Such wit leads to terrible losses in the lifeboat, like Juan's grampa's dog, eaten by the starving, and his tutor Pedrillo draws the bad lot to be killed and eaten. Adventure story a la the films I do not attend. But Byron rescues Juan, the only one who survives--because he can swim, began in the Guadalquivir in his native Seville.
Byron's, and his Don Juan's, main literary legacy is the greatest of all Russian poems, Евгений Онегин. I have read perhaps one-fourth of Pushkin's great work in Russian, and it has struck me as a cross between Byron and Wordsworth.
Since I have spent many hours translating Latin and Renaissance Latin, I admire Byron's exact critiques of classical poets like the epigrammatic satirist Martial--"the nauseous epigram of Martial" according to Don Juan's/ Byron's mother.
I could add much, but it gets late/early. Please see my review of Lord Byron: the Major Works..
But I shall add this: Byron lived in the far end of the Mocenigo Palazzo, on the Grand Canal in Venice, within sight of the Rialto Bridge, across from the San Toma stop: The VERY PLACE where Giordano Bruno stayed, and was denounced to the Inquisition by the Bad Student Evaluation of his 33-yr old Mocenigo host, Gianni.
His student told him, "I invited you to Venice to teach me, and you haven't." (My theory is Gianni wanted to learn magic, along with math and memory, Bruno had written on; but Gianni does not tell the Inquisition that part.)
September 13, 2020
Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda water the day after.
The legend of Don Juan appears to be one of the most productive stories in all of literature. After its first setting by Tirso de Molina—still a classic of the Spanish stage—it has been adapted innumerable times. Molière’s powerful version may be the most famous for the theater, and Mozart’s opera is considered to be among the greatest works of music ever sounded. After speaking in French verse and singing in mellifluous Italian, the infamous seducer of Seville lived on—though much altered—to speak iambic pentameter in Lord Byron’s comedic epic.
Nonetheless, Lord Byron’s use of the legend is free to the point that it may as well have been discarded entirely. The protagonist is, indeed, an attractive young man from Seville with a formidable sexual appetite. Byron’s Juan, however, is usually the seducee rather than the seducer. He does not lie to get his way, he does not have a wisecracking servant, he does not kill the fathers of his victims, and he does not meet his end at the hands of a living statue. There is none of that here. Instead, Don Juan is an attractive young boy with a good heart who runs into a lot of trouble, mainly because every woman who sees him wants him. It is a pleasant twist on an old tale.
Though a member of the Romantic age, Byron does not strike me as a Romantic poet. His poetry is witty, snappy, sharp, irreverent, and lean. There is nothing sentimental, meditative, or wistful in this long poem. Indeed, the verse is so prose-like that it is hardly even poetical. His most obvious literary forebear is not Milton or Donne, but Pope—another witty versifier. It seems strange, then, that of all the great English Romantic poets, it was Byron who was arguably the most famous and influential. Perhaps tastes did not change as much as we are prone to believe.
This epic poem has a loose and baggy structure. That is to say that it is full of holes and an awful lot of wind blows through it. Byron appears to have begun with a fairly concrete idea in mind, and the first three or four cantos are brilliant fun. Soon thereafter the poem falls apart—dissolving into an endlessly long aside, in which the main action is lost. The poem ceases to be the comic epic of Don Juan and instead becomes a vehicle for Byron’s own endless editorializing. This is still mostly worth reading, for Byron’s wit if not for his logic, but it is not exactly a work of high art.
Poor Don Juan is left in the lurch, and never does get to meet his final end—whatever that may have been. Byron met his own end before he could give one to Don Juan. If not for that, this poem may have gone on for twenty cantos more. But at the rate the story was progressing, twenty more may not even have been enough to bring this sprawling story to a satisfying conclusion. So let us be thankful for what we have. The parts that are weak are readable, and the parts that are strong are pure delight.
February 13, 2013
Byron's famous verse-novel is kind of uneven, but when he's on form it's both moving and witty. My favorite sequences are near the beginning, when the beautiful Donna Julia has fallen in love with young Juan and is having qualms of conscience. First she decides that she can no longer continue to see him, but then she reconsiders. After all, that would be selfish of her! It's just a question of keeping her feelings under control, and she could help him so much:
He might be taught, by love and her together—
I really don't know what, nor Julia either.
October 22, 2017
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
Byron's long, digressive, wildly funny, outrageously rhymed Don Juan is a wonderful satire of the epic poem, of the legend of Don Juan, and of the mores of Byron's own times. It is written throughout in octava rima, an 8-line stanza that, in English, given the paucity of rhymes, is inevitably humourous. Byron uses the structure variously, often giving us a clinching final couplet that reflects bathetically back on what has gone before.
Inverting the legend of Don Juan, the arrogant, rakish, Lothario who ends up dragged to Hell, Byron's 'hero' is a rather passive young man, girlishly beautiful rather than handsome at the start, who falls in love with the various women he meets. Taking issue with the epic martial heroes of Homer and Virgil, this is more akin to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, though wider-ranging and more intentionally scurrilous.
Juan travels from his native Spain to the Greek islands via a shipwreck (during which his tutor gets eaten by the hungry sailors!), is sold at the slave market in Constantinople and enters the seraglio dressed up as a girl for the pleasure of the sultan's fourth wife... He goes on to fight with the Russian army before being taken to the court of Catherine the Great and, finally, on to London where he is embroiled in high aristocratic society and meets a ghostly friar in a Gothic ruin (of course!).
In between the story are Byron's ruminations on everything: from a tongue-in-cheek assessment of erotic poetry ('Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him | Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample | Catullus hardly has a decent poem | I don't think Sappho's ode a good example') to scathing views on marriage and fidelity, on gender and masculinity, and on the younger Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey) for whom Byron generally had little time.
Written in stages between 1818 and 1824, this remains unfinished at Byron's death. Anyone only knowing the lyrical Byron ('She Walks in Beauty', 'So We'll Go No More A-Roving') or the 'Turkish' tales like 'The Giaour', will meet here the brilliant, mercurial, Byron of the letters.
October 6, 2021
Twenty Five 'Reviews' In One Day: Book 14
Here's another poetry classic that I've been meaning to read for years. Byron's most famous work is great all the while he sticks to the plot but, much like his prose soulmate Victor Hugo, Byron's work is comprised of more only-vaguely-relevant tangents than it is the main story.
Perhaps it's actually all about the tangents and the actual plot is just an excuse to string together a bunch of loosely-related observations on life?
The quality of the writing is great, though; almost Shakespearian at times. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this one.
————————————————
… aaaannd that’s where my ill-fated ‘Twenty Five Reviews in One Day’ screeched to a halt!
The reason being, our car broke down on the motorway and we didn’t get home until bedtime! We also broke down in a WiFi black spot, so I couldn’t even pass the time waiting for the tow truck writing the rest of the reviews. I then woke up the next morning with a nasty case of the flu, which sent me to bed for a week! Oh, well, it clearly wasn’t meant to be…
Here's another poetry classic that I've been meaning to read for years. Byron's most famous work is great all the while he sticks to the plot but, much like his prose soulmate Victor Hugo, Byron's work is comprised of more only-vaguely-relevant tangents than it is the main story.
Perhaps it's actually all about the tangents and the actual plot is just an excuse to string together a bunch of loosely-related observations on life?
The quality of the writing is great, though; almost Shakespearian at times. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this one.
————————————————
… aaaannd that’s where my ill-fated ‘Twenty Five Reviews in One Day’ screeched to a halt!
The reason being, our car broke down on the motorway and we didn’t get home until bedtime! We also broke down in a WiFi black spot, so I couldn’t even pass the time waiting for the tow truck writing the rest of the reviews. I then woke up the next morning with a nasty case of the flu, which sent me to bed for a week! Oh, well, it clearly wasn’t meant to be…
November 2, 2014
Le Don Juan de Lord Byron (1788-1824), est un poème satirique et pamphlétaire de dix-sept chants, dans lequel il brosse une satire mordante, cynique et bachique de l’état de l’Europe post-Napoléonienne de son temps. Pour servir de fil à cet exposé, l’auteur prend pour prétexte les pérégrinations involontaires et mésaventureuses d’un Don Juan de pacotille, velléitaire, naïf, totalement à l’opposé de son modèle, et qu’il promène de naufrages en enlèvements d’Espagne vers la Grèce, la Turquie, la Russie pour le faire finalement échouer en Angleterre. Au lieu du personnage prométhéen, intelligent, brave, séduisant, dangereux, maléfique de Tirso ou de Molière, on n’a plus qu’une espèce de mauviette falote que l’auteur prend un malin plaisir de rendre la victime d’amours que lui portent des femmes ridicules.
Chaque étape de cette Odyssée sans but est l’occasion de se moquer copieusement des travers supposés des locaux, véhiculés par les poncifs les plus éculés, avec un bonheur plus ou moins grand. Mais c’est surtout l’occasion pour l’auteur pour faire des plaisanteries et de s’évader dans de longues digressions folles, pétulantes et débridées : critique littéraire, il éreinte sans prendre de gants les auteurs qui lui déplaisent, il déchire avec rage la nouvelle Europe qui a partout réinstallé les tyrans sur leurs trônes, avec la bénédiction d’une Angleterre qu’il aurait préférée amie de la liberté plutôt que des despotes ; il s’en prend enfin au conservatisme moral et à l’hypocrisie qui a fait des progrès considérable à cette époque.
J’ai beaucoup aimé le premier quart du roman qui m’a tenu en haleine par sa nouveauté: le mélange des genre, les passages du grave au doux, du sévère au badin. Même si sa pudeur naturelle l’empêchait de trop verser dans le pathétique, et qu’il s’enfuie dans quelque pirouette vers un ton railleur, comme s'il craignait de montrer quelque faiblesse à son armure, on sentait une âme sensible capable d’émouvoir sublimement. Il me semblait que Byron pouvait tenir la longueur, mais à partir du retour du père de Haïdée, le tout tourne franchement à la farce , et je n’ai plus suivi le reste de la lecture que d’un œil à demi indifférent : l’aventure avec la sultane dans le harem est grotesque, les plaisanteries sur la guerre russo-ottomane pénibles, les invectives acharnées contre l’Angleterre usantes.
Il n’y a de place que pour l’exubérance féroce de Byron, qui arrive heureusement à nous tirer de temps en temps l’impression désagréable où il nous cantonne par quelque pointes et traits d’esprits piquants, mais cette mélancolie désespérée que cachent mal des agitations de cabotin et ce ton ironique constant finissent par accabler plutôt que divertir. Aussi, je lui en veut un peu de ce qu'il fait de Don Juan, réduit à un bellâtre insipide privé de toute dimension subversive. Mon impression est donc mitigée, arrivé bout de cette lecture : à la fois j’admire les qualités d’esprit de l’auteur, son engagement sincère pour la liberté et sa juste indignation, ses qualités poétiques et son invention, mais son humour inégal devient intempestif, son dépit fâcheux, et ses incessantes criailleries le rendent peu à peu monocorde, et font finir le poème en eau de boudin.
August 13, 2022
هو يفعل ما يتمنى كل رجل ان يفعله و لكن عشرات الموانع الدينية و الأنسانية توقفهم و لا توقف دون خوان
الذي بدا باحثا عن مثال للجمال و الحب و لكنه لم يقع عليه ابدا
فانغمس في المتع لا يشبع منها و لا يكف عن مطاردنها
هاربا من الملل ينتقل من امرأة لاخري دون ان يقر له قرار
دون جوان هو احد اهم خمس شخصيات ادبية جمعت كل السمات الأنسانية
و من فرط نجاحه صار اسمه يطلق علي رجل يجتذب قلوب النساء رغم يقينهم مما سيصيبهن من ألم علي يديه
المكروه الفاتن دون جوان
الماجن الذي اقام علاقات مع ١٥٠٠ امرأة
و موليير سيظل افضل من قدم اسطورة فاتن شبيليه عام ١٦٦٥ في مسرحية اجتماعية فلسفية كثيفة قصيرة مرحة؛ و هي المتممة لثلاثية مدرسة الزوجات و الطرطوف
و سيظل في الثقافات الشرقية المرادف للاغواء و و الخلاعةو الفسوق هو اسم دون جوان
February 15, 2019
"¡Qué hermosa estaba! Su corazón maduro
ardía en sus mejías y no sentía ningún desdoro.
Oh amor, cuán perfecto es tu aire místico,
que da fuerzas al débil y aplasta al fuerte.
Cuán engañados están los mortales más doctos,
a los que tu señuelo ha arrastrado.
Era inmenso el precipicio que ante ella se abría,
tanto como su fe en la propia inocencia.
Pensaba en su fuerza y en la juventud de Juan,
en lo débiles que son los temores del recato,
en la virtud victoriosa, en la realidad doméstica
y en los cincuenta años de Don Alfonso.
Bien desearía yo que así no fuera,
pero a esta edad rara vez se hace uno querer
y, en toda ocasión, ya bajo el sol o en la nieve,
discorda con el amor aunque abunde el dinero."
Viendo los versos de arriba uno puede pensar tantas cosas, una de ellas la diferencia entre generaciones pasadas y las actuales. Recuerdo un escrito francés crucificado, insultado por medio mundo por el hecho de afirmar que "no podría enamorarse de una mujer de 50 años" y Byron con líneas arriba era tomado de revolucionario, satírico, un ser que se adelantó a su tiempo y muy polémico, tanto que parece ser más famoso por su vida que por su propia obra. ¿El mundo actual es diferente a la hipocresía que siempre se asocia los siglos anteriores? ¿la religión era y es el gran abanderado de esta hipocresía? O es que en la actualidad tenemos nuevas herramientas (redes sociales) que como armas de difusión masiva juegan con esa misma hipocresía protegida esta vez por lo "políticamente correcto".
Tengo sentimientos encontrados con esta obra, me ha gustado pero también hay partes que me decepcionaron. Debo decir en primer lugar que Byron fue una gran influencia en su época y para generaciones posteriores pero gran parte de ésta lo fue por el tipo de vida que llevó, sus aventuras, sus hazañas y un largo etcétera. De su obra aún no puedo opinar demasiado, este "Don Juan" me ha parecido en gran resumen regular. Es una obra épica, de eso no cabe duda, por más que muchos estudiosos se acuchillan tratando de encontrar la verdad absoluta. Su composición está en octavas, y en general se trata de una poesía con rimas pero que es más una historia de tipo épica, claro, en realidad es una épica burlesca. No estamos ante la exaltación de un personaje legendario, estamos ante cuentos y situaciones dramáticas, divertidas y aderezadas siempre por un desprecio a lo que la gente pueda pensar, Byron es bastante autosuficiente, ni desprecia ni engalana su propia obra.
El aspecto que me hizo desmerecerla es el orden, yo siempre digo que debe haber un poco de coherencia en la historia, en este caso la hay pero el texto está inundado por disgresiones a la trama principal, Byron utiliza cientas de hojas a sus meditaciones pero ni siquiera en el estilo de Rousseau, coherente con la trama, sino tiene escapes de pensamiento que duran demasiado muchas veces. No sólo son éstos maneras de ver la vida o posturas frente a dictámenes morales sino muchas veces (y esto es lo que menos me gustó) eran ataques personales contra sus enemigos, Southey (un poeta que a la vez era crítico de Byron) o el mismo Duque de Wellington, vencedor de Napoleón pero posterior conservador que según el autor perjudicó a Inglaterra. Y probablemente todos estos versos dedicados a poetas, ministros y un largo etcétera eran muy interesantes para la época en lo cual publicó pero pierde un poco de interés para el lector actual.
Otro aspecto importante es la personalidad de Juan, no es el mismo que está retratado en todos los demás autores que han hablado del personaje, no es el Juan enamorador experto, que donde va conquista mujeres, o que gusta de usarlas para luego dejarlas sin ningún remordimiento, este Juan parece más joven, inexperto, enamora pero a la vez se enamora y tiene un corazón grande. Eso no me gustó tanto por el tipo de historia que se hubiera esperado. Lo vemos atravesando muchas penalidades y situaciones engorrosas aunque no podría calificar toda su historia de divertida, sino más bien el humor viene de afuera, en los comentarios de Byron. La historia en sí es un poco simple, las situaciones que hubieran podido ser muy enaltecidas no son aprovechadas (hablando en un aspecto épico). Sin embargo, en las descripciones del amor puro y simple entre dos personas es donde hay mejores frases que puedan ser rescatadas.
Y es que yo llegué a esta obra a partir, como siempre, de Stendhal que citó una frase muy buena, tanto que parece que es la única superlativa que hay en todo el libro, qué tal ojo de Stendhal en verdad, pues hay muchas páginas en el libro a mi parecer prescindibles y es que el texto también fue muy extenso pero incompleto, Byron avanzaba y publicaba.
A veces estaba tentado en pensar que lo que el mismo autor colocó en su texto:
"Yo escribo sobre lo primero que me viene a la cabeza
Este relato no intenta ser relato,
sino una mera excusa fantástica e inconsistente
para decir cosas vulgares y a veces tópicos."
era cierto.
Pero hay muchas cosas que se pueden sacar de este gran relato, un ejemplo de épica burlesca, heredada de los grandes maestros italianos del renacimiento, un estilo neoclásico más que romántico como apunta el prólogo, una visión del siglo XIX, Byron habla bastante de su Inglaterra y cosas contemporáneas que me interesaron bastante.
Por el lado de Juan hay episodios que tienen grandes frases aunque la historia en sí se me hizo un poco floja. Tiene así mismo todo el desparpajo del autor para hablar de lo que venga en gana y con la posición que le venga en gana. Esa autosuficiencia de la cual hablaba al inicio que ahora es vista como revolucionaria por ser antigua pero que actualmente en una persona real sería quizás de lo peor, una bajeza. Byron vivió como quiso y murió de igual manera.
Se lo recomiendo a aquella persona realmente interesada en conocer más al autor, no quizás a cualquier persona. Igual me aporta muchos datos valiosos pues ya leyendo tantos poemas épicos tengo más base para algún día escribir uno como tengo proyectado.
ardía en sus mejías y no sentía ningún desdoro.
Oh amor, cuán perfecto es tu aire místico,
que da fuerzas al débil y aplasta al fuerte.
Cuán engañados están los mortales más doctos,
a los que tu señuelo ha arrastrado.
Era inmenso el precipicio que ante ella se abría,
tanto como su fe en la propia inocencia.
Pensaba en su fuerza y en la juventud de Juan,
en lo débiles que son los temores del recato,
en la virtud victoriosa, en la realidad doméstica
y en los cincuenta años de Don Alfonso.
Bien desearía yo que así no fuera,
pero a esta edad rara vez se hace uno querer
y, en toda ocasión, ya bajo el sol o en la nieve,
discorda con el amor aunque abunde el dinero."
Viendo los versos de arriba uno puede pensar tantas cosas, una de ellas la diferencia entre generaciones pasadas y las actuales. Recuerdo un escrito francés crucificado, insultado por medio mundo por el hecho de afirmar que "no podría enamorarse de una mujer de 50 años" y Byron con líneas arriba era tomado de revolucionario, satírico, un ser que se adelantó a su tiempo y muy polémico, tanto que parece ser más famoso por su vida que por su propia obra. ¿El mundo actual es diferente a la hipocresía que siempre se asocia los siglos anteriores? ¿la religión era y es el gran abanderado de esta hipocresía? O es que en la actualidad tenemos nuevas herramientas (redes sociales) que como armas de difusión masiva juegan con esa misma hipocresía protegida esta vez por lo "políticamente correcto".
Tengo sentimientos encontrados con esta obra, me ha gustado pero también hay partes que me decepcionaron. Debo decir en primer lugar que Byron fue una gran influencia en su época y para generaciones posteriores pero gran parte de ésta lo fue por el tipo de vida que llevó, sus aventuras, sus hazañas y un largo etcétera. De su obra aún no puedo opinar demasiado, este "Don Juan" me ha parecido en gran resumen regular. Es una obra épica, de eso no cabe duda, por más que muchos estudiosos se acuchillan tratando de encontrar la verdad absoluta. Su composición está en octavas, y en general se trata de una poesía con rimas pero que es más una historia de tipo épica, claro, en realidad es una épica burlesca. No estamos ante la exaltación de un personaje legendario, estamos ante cuentos y situaciones dramáticas, divertidas y aderezadas siempre por un desprecio a lo que la gente pueda pensar, Byron es bastante autosuficiente, ni desprecia ni engalana su propia obra.
El aspecto que me hizo desmerecerla es el orden, yo siempre digo que debe haber un poco de coherencia en la historia, en este caso la hay pero el texto está inundado por disgresiones a la trama principal, Byron utiliza cientas de hojas a sus meditaciones pero ni siquiera en el estilo de Rousseau, coherente con la trama, sino tiene escapes de pensamiento que duran demasiado muchas veces. No sólo son éstos maneras de ver la vida o posturas frente a dictámenes morales sino muchas veces (y esto es lo que menos me gustó) eran ataques personales contra sus enemigos, Southey (un poeta que a la vez era crítico de Byron) o el mismo Duque de Wellington, vencedor de Napoleón pero posterior conservador que según el autor perjudicó a Inglaterra. Y probablemente todos estos versos dedicados a poetas, ministros y un largo etcétera eran muy interesantes para la época en lo cual publicó pero pierde un poco de interés para el lector actual.
Otro aspecto importante es la personalidad de Juan, no es el mismo que está retratado en todos los demás autores que han hablado del personaje, no es el Juan enamorador experto, que donde va conquista mujeres, o que gusta de usarlas para luego dejarlas sin ningún remordimiento, este Juan parece más joven, inexperto, enamora pero a la vez se enamora y tiene un corazón grande. Eso no me gustó tanto por el tipo de historia que se hubiera esperado. Lo vemos atravesando muchas penalidades y situaciones engorrosas aunque no podría calificar toda su historia de divertida, sino más bien el humor viene de afuera, en los comentarios de Byron. La historia en sí es un poco simple, las situaciones que hubieran podido ser muy enaltecidas no son aprovechadas (hablando en un aspecto épico). Sin embargo, en las descripciones del amor puro y simple entre dos personas es donde hay mejores frases que puedan ser rescatadas.
Y es que yo llegué a esta obra a partir, como siempre, de Stendhal que citó una frase muy buena, tanto que parece que es la única superlativa que hay en todo el libro, qué tal ojo de Stendhal en verdad, pues hay muchas páginas en el libro a mi parecer prescindibles y es que el texto también fue muy extenso pero incompleto, Byron avanzaba y publicaba.
A veces estaba tentado en pensar que lo que el mismo autor colocó en su texto:
"Yo escribo sobre lo primero que me viene a la cabeza
Este relato no intenta ser relato,
sino una mera excusa fantástica e inconsistente
para decir cosas vulgares y a veces tópicos."
era cierto.
Pero hay muchas cosas que se pueden sacar de este gran relato, un ejemplo de épica burlesca, heredada de los grandes maestros italianos del renacimiento, un estilo neoclásico más que romántico como apunta el prólogo, una visión del siglo XIX, Byron habla bastante de su Inglaterra y cosas contemporáneas que me interesaron bastante.
Por el lado de Juan hay episodios que tienen grandes frases aunque la historia en sí se me hizo un poco floja. Tiene así mismo todo el desparpajo del autor para hablar de lo que venga en gana y con la posición que le venga en gana. Esa autosuficiencia de la cual hablaba al inicio que ahora es vista como revolucionaria por ser antigua pero que actualmente en una persona real sería quizás de lo peor, una bajeza. Byron vivió como quiso y murió de igual manera.
Se lo recomiendo a aquella persona realmente interesada en conocer más al autor, no quizás a cualquier persona. Igual me aporta muchos datos valiosos pues ya leyendo tantos poemas épicos tengo más base para algún día escribir uno como tengo proyectado.
October 31, 2021
I have to agree with the Goodreads blurb that this poem is "rambling". However something about it was just so compelling and mesmerizing to read. It was easy to get caught up with the beautiful language of the poem and get invested in the story. It took me far to long to pick up something by Lord Byron as I was so sure I wouldn't like it.
January 20, 2013
I dont know why, I have no clue
How one day this idea grew:
Byron's works I've had read zero
And that's a shame, I'm greek-and he's our hero!
I went to bookstores for his poems but in vain!
Apart from letters and biographies there was no gain.
It was then, when desperation was ample
When i saw it: Don Juan in kindle sample.
Language was my fear, if I would get it right
But what the hell I said, i ll try it!
And lo: some words were old, pain in the ass
Not even on the dictionairy alas!
Its style too I could not define
The poem seemed childish, like mine!
But I would really laugh and lol
Such witty rhymes I dont recall!
Yet Byron's not only fun and joke
Great meaning his verses would provoke.
Serious or sad, with ease the rhyme he preserves
Some people have it so easy-it breaks your nerves!
Like Juan womanizing in every city...
The bastard was he lucky or was he indeed so pretty??
His adventures many, I cannot summarize
Read for yourselves, his fate a surprise!
But hear this, don't get me wrong
The poem is masterful but it is also long.
Cantos, stanzas on and on
Should you finish or abandon?
Do as you please the choice is yours
I made it though, through charms and bores.
And if an advice I am allowed
It reads better when read aloud!
How one day this idea grew:
Byron's works I've had read zero
And that's a shame, I'm greek-and he's our hero!
I went to bookstores for his poems but in vain!
Apart from letters and biographies there was no gain.
It was then, when desperation was ample
When i saw it: Don Juan in kindle sample.
Language was my fear, if I would get it right
But what the hell I said, i ll try it!
And lo: some words were old, pain in the ass
Not even on the dictionairy alas!
Its style too I could not define
The poem seemed childish, like mine!
But I would really laugh and lol
Such witty rhymes I dont recall!
Yet Byron's not only fun and joke
Great meaning his verses would provoke.
Serious or sad, with ease the rhyme he preserves
Some people have it so easy-it breaks your nerves!
Like Juan womanizing in every city...
The bastard was he lucky or was he indeed so pretty??
His adventures many, I cannot summarize
Read for yourselves, his fate a surprise!
But hear this, don't get me wrong
The poem is masterful but it is also long.
Cantos, stanzas on and on
Should you finish or abandon?
Do as you please the choice is yours
I made it though, through charms and bores.
And if an advice I am allowed
It reads better when read aloud!
August 23, 2018
This is doggerel but sublime doggerel. It is brilliant more often than nought for the first ten cantos but then it goes into a ghastly fish-tale that Byron is unable to pull himself out of before he dies. Had he lived, Byron might have been able to get things back under control. The way it stands the reader is simply glad at the end of Canto XVII that the whole thing is over.
This much said, I enjoyed the thing from beginning to end. I read it hoping to get to know the poet about the poet that Pushkin, Stendhal, Berlioz and Mickiewicz held it awe. To this end I was well served. What the anglo-saxon world needs is a critic or doctoral student who can find a way to put Byron back on the pedestal he merits.
This much said, I enjoyed the thing from beginning to end. I read it hoping to get to know the poet about the poet that Pushkin, Stendhal, Berlioz and Mickiewicz held it awe. To this end I was well served. What the anglo-saxon world needs is a critic or doctoral student who can find a way to put Byron back on the pedestal he merits.
July 27, 2017
Don't be afraid. This book only looks intimidating. It's actually one of the most hilarious and comically sharp books I've ever read. Byron was a genuis, poet status notwithstanding. Poetry has little to do with it actually, with all that is awesome about Don Juan!
March 29, 2014
Don Juan is a somewhat-scathing, exceedingly witty, epic social commentary that was told by a revolutionary mind with great skill and reverence for the crafting of words. In Lord Byron's cantos of this poem, I see "social networking" centuries before its time with Byron's 'asides' about his contemporaries. And his protagonist, young unfortunate Don Jewan, is tossed about haphazardly from country to country by the strangest events, narrating a dissection of every society he comes upon... which, unfortunately, we read only a fraction of what Lord Byron was planning for the character before the poet's untimely death, leaving the poem unfinished, and yet still one of the best writings ever put to paper. Timeless.
Byron's worldview was notably pessimistic, but it was damned eye-opening. For example, on *shrugh* "nationalism" I suppose, in Canto IV, Stanza 101:
Hell yeah, the boy spoke some truths that I daresay still flips the world on its side (can you imagine China or America being merely a legend one day, as scoffed about then as Atlantis is today?). And his 'rivals' or critics wanted to 'save' him. But Byron argued (paraphrasing) that his was the MOST MORAL poem of the day. Moral, yes; and why? Because it was truthful.
I have it listed in my Top 5, which should include the Bible, Inferno/Purgatorio, Dosty's Brothers K, and probably a Kafka; and Good God I hate to mention Paradise Lost... but! as another reviewer here put it, while Milton's work attempted to tell God's side to humanity, Lord Byron told humanity's side to God. (Successfully, though.) And we're the lucky ones who glimpsed at least some of Byron's tellings before he died. Yes, I find it very moral, AND it keeps me rolling on the floor, laughing.
And being a Catholic Anglican Christian type (or so I like to think), it is my sincere hope that we'll hear the remainder of Don Juan in Heaven one day, where I'm sure Lord Byron entertains the angels. (*not that way!*)
Byron's worldview was notably pessimistic, but it was damned eye-opening. For example, on *shrugh* "nationalism" I suppose, in Canto IV, Stanza 101:
Hell yeah, the boy spoke some truths that I daresay still flips the world on its side (can you imagine China or America being merely a legend one day, as scoffed about then as Atlantis is today?). And his 'rivals' or critics wanted to 'save' him. But Byron argued (paraphrasing) that his was the MOST MORAL poem of the day. Moral, yes; and why? Because it was truthful.
I have it listed in my Top 5, which should include the Bible, Inferno/Purgatorio, Dosty's Brothers K, and probably a Kafka; and Good God I hate to mention Paradise Lost... but! as another reviewer here put it, while Milton's work attempted to tell God's side to humanity, Lord Byron told humanity's side to God. (Successfully, though.) And we're the lucky ones who glimpsed at least some of Byron's tellings before he died. Yes, I find it very moral, AND it keeps me rolling on the floor, laughing.
And being a Catholic Anglican Christian type (or so I like to think), it is my sincere hope that we'll hear the remainder of Don Juan in Heaven one day, where I'm sure Lord Byron entertains the angels. (*not that way!*)
March 30, 2009
What can you say about Byron? He's insane, he's brilliant, he's a romantic and so much more. Don Juan is a classic twisted with English humor and the puns are abounding. My favorite, favorite lines are:
"Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy" I.CCV
In 80,000 lines of rhyming verse he attacks cant, politics, and the Lakers (18th c poets, NOT the basketball team), revels in failed romance, and massacres the Spanish language with hilarity. Any novel, whose title is a pun, right there I'm in. Also, when he rhymes "intellectual" with "hen peck'd you all"...I'm a little in love.
"Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy" I.CCV
In 80,000 lines of rhyming verse he attacks cant, politics, and the Lakers (18th c poets, NOT the basketball team), revels in failed romance, and massacres the Spanish language with hilarity. Any novel, whose title is a pun, right there I'm in. Also, when he rhymes "intellectual" with "hen peck'd you all"...I'm a little in love.
July 30, 2019
Keşke Lord Byron bu roman-şiirini (?) bitirebilseymiş ve biz de okuyabilseymişiz. Kitap, bizlerin Casanova ile aynı olduğunu düşündüğü Don Juan'ın Lord Byron tarafından anlatılan hayat hikâyesi üzerine kurulu. Yalnız Casanova denince akla gelen o "çapkın" imajından daha farklı bir Don Juan okuyoruz. Herhalde toplumda "çapkın" olarak yer etmesinin nedeni farklı zamanlarda da olsa birden fazla sevgilisinin olması ve biraz hızlı bir şekilde "yeniden âşık olabilme kapasitesi". Don Juan'ın sadece gönül işlerinde "şanslı" olmadığını belirtmekte de fayda var, başına gelen her felaketten kazançlı bir şekilde kurtulduğunu da söylemek gerek.
İlk başlarda aldığım tadı sonlara doğru bulamadığımı üzülerek belirtmek zorundayım. Özellikle ilk üç yüz sayfa masalsı bir havada ilerlerken sonlara doğru anlatım, bir hikâye anlatımından ziyade Lord Byron'ın farklı hususlar üzerindeki fikirlerini okuyucuyla paylaştığı bir şiire dönüşüyor.
Çevirmen Halil Köksel'in de -bence- oldukça zor olan bir metni başarıyla çevirdiğini düşünüyorum. Tabii bu kanıya varabilmek için orijinalinden de okumak lazım; ancak sonuç olarak ortaya çıkardığı metni ben çok zevk alarak okudum.
İlk başlarda aldığım tadı sonlara doğru bulamadığımı üzülerek belirtmek zorundayım. Özellikle ilk üç yüz sayfa masalsı bir havada ilerlerken sonlara doğru anlatım, bir hikâye anlatımından ziyade Lord Byron'ın farklı hususlar üzerindeki fikirlerini okuyucuyla paylaştığı bir şiire dönüşüyor.
Çevirmen Halil Köksel'in de -bence- oldukça zor olan bir metni başarıyla çevirdiğini düşünüyorum. Tabii bu kanıya varabilmek için orijinalinden de okumak lazım; ancak sonuç olarak ortaya çıkardığı metni ben çok zevk alarak okudum.
June 25, 2018
It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I would give this poem the highest rating. Lord Byron's "Don Juan" is the greatest piece of writing I have ever read. It is my favorite piece of writing. I like it better than Joyce's "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Any serious student of literature, who has not already read this masterpiece, needs to read this sublime piece of writing. I have read it enormous times and have always learned something new and never do I fail to marvel at its brilliance, beauty, and wit.
July 4, 2016
Sentiment and Satire
Although I normally read and review only novels, I was intrigued by the short excerpts from Byron's "Epic Satire" Don Juan that Stendhal used as chapter-epigraphs in Le rouge et le noir, and read both simultaneously. Published between 1819 and 1824, in sixteen cantos containing an average of 125 eight-line stanzas in each, Byron's work is essentially a vast novel in verse, a coming-of-age story, an erotic romp, and a fount of social commentary all in one. He reverses the normal characterization of Juan, turning the serial seducer into a pretty innocent who is himself seduced by woman after woman; he also changes the pronunciation, now rhyming with "true one." It is easy to see why Stendhal wanted to quote him. Both books begin with easily-seduced heroes; both take them into many different walks of society; and both are punctuated by philosophical commentary from their respective authors. In Byron's case, though, the commentary is almost more the point than the plot; it is certainly entertaining—he can be a very funny writer.
Byron left the epic uncompleted at his death, but there is enough there already for several novels. Seduced at sixteen by a married woman, Juan is sent to Italy in the charge of a strict tutor. Surviving shipwreck (and a touch of cannibalism), he is washed up on a almost-deserted island, which becomes a second Eden in the arms of a girl of his own age, Haidée. His further adventures see him enslaved in a Turkish harem, taking part in a bloody siege, serving in the court of Catherine the Great, then engaging in amorous and diplomatic adventures at the English court, to end on the bosom of the "full, voluptuous, but not o'ergrown bulk" of the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke.
The ribaldry here is one of the dominant characteristics of the poem, although it is seldom used so suggestively as to rhyme the Duchess' name with "bulk." Byron writes in eight-line stanzas, the ottava rima of Ariosto, with the rhyme-scheme abababcc. That final couplet gives a kind of punch line to each stanza. So he ends a passage on blue-stocking women with:
And Byron's commentary is always amusing. Some contemporary references may require annotation, but his views on literature are still stimulating. He had little time for the "glassy brooks and leafy nooks" of the Lake Poets, for example:
Although I normally read and review only novels, I was intrigued by the short excerpts from Byron's "Epic Satire" Don Juan that Stendhal used as chapter-epigraphs in Le rouge et le noir, and read both simultaneously. Published between 1819 and 1824, in sixteen cantos containing an average of 125 eight-line stanzas in each, Byron's work is essentially a vast novel in verse, a coming-of-age story, an erotic romp, and a fount of social commentary all in one. He reverses the normal characterization of Juan, turning the serial seducer into a pretty innocent who is himself seduced by woman after woman; he also changes the pronunciation, now rhyming with "true one." It is easy to see why Stendhal wanted to quote him. Both books begin with easily-seduced heroes; both take them into many different walks of society; and both are punctuated by philosophical commentary from their respective authors. In Byron's case, though, the commentary is almost more the point than the plot; it is certainly entertaining—he can be a very funny writer.
Byron left the epic uncompleted at his death, but there is enough there already for several novels. Seduced at sixteen by a married woman, Juan is sent to Italy in the charge of a strict tutor. Surviving shipwreck (and a touch of cannibalism), he is washed up on a almost-deserted island, which becomes a second Eden in the arms of a girl of his own age, Haidée. His further adventures see him enslaved in a Turkish harem, taking part in a bloody siege, serving in the court of Catherine the Great, then engaging in amorous and diplomatic adventures at the English court, to end on the bosom of the "full, voluptuous, but not o'ergrown bulk" of the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke.
The ribaldry here is one of the dominant characteristics of the poem, although it is seldom used so suggestively as to rhyme the Duchess' name with "bulk." Byron writes in eight-line stanzas, the ottava rima of Ariosto, with the rhyme-scheme abababcc. That final couplet gives a kind of punch line to each stanza. So he ends a passage on blue-stocking women with:
But oh, ye lords of ladies intellectual,Or Juan's distress on his exile from Spain:
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
No doubt he would have been much more patheticAnd as we have seen, Byron can also be quite naughty; here he is describing the interior of a harem, into which Juan has been smuggled disguised as a woman:
But the sea acted as a strong emetic.
'Twas on the whole a nobly furnish'd hall,Every now and then, Byron resists the temptation towards comedy and writes passages of pathos with even a touch of the sublime:
With all things ladies want, save one or two.
And even those were nearer than they knew.
Thus to their hopeless eyes the night was shown,Some of the descriptions of the feasting of Juan and Haidée on her father's island have echoes of Homer or Virgil, and his famous elegy on departed grandeur, "The Isles of Greece," also comes from this section. I could personally have done with more seriousness and less comedy, and these moments were welcome when they came.
And grimly darkled o'er the faces pale,
And the dim desolate deep: twelve days had Fear
Been their familiar, and now Death was here.
And Byron's commentary is always amusing. Some contemporary references may require annotation, but his views on literature are still stimulating. He had little time for the "glassy brooks and leafy nooks" of the Lake Poets, for example:
There poets find materials for their books,Pointing out that "All tragedies are finish'd by a death; all comedies are ended by a marriage," he asks:
And every now and then we read them through,
So that their plan and prosody are eligible,
Unless, like Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible.
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,For the most part, Byron's philosophy is the comfortable one of taking life as it comes:
He would have written sonnets all his life?
Well—well, the world must turn upon its axis,But towards the end of the epic, he reaches towards a deeper explanation of the Romantic search for wider and wilder experiences:
And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails,
And live and die, make love and pay our taxes,
And as the veering wind shifts, shift our sails.
The new world would be nothing to the oldThe soul's antipodes: those indeed are destinations worth punching on one's ticket!
If some Columbus of the moral seas
Would show mankind their souls' antipodes.
December 27, 2017
The moment when you realized, you've just spent the last two years reading something, thinking being the original Don Juan.
August 13, 2016
This was a lot more enjoyable than I expected. And very funny in parts.
February 23, 2011
"Man's love is of his life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence. Man may range the court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart; sword, gown, gain, glory offer in exchange pride, fame, ambition to fill up his heart, and few there are whom these cannot estrange. Man has all these resources, we but one, to mourn alone the love which has undone." (Canto I, Stanza 194)
"There still are many rainbows in your sky, but mine have vanished. All, when life is new, commence with feelings warm and prospects high; but time strips our illusions of their hue, and one by one in turn, some grand mistake casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake." (Canto V, Stanza 21)
"But these are foolish things to all the wise, And I love wisdom more than she loves me; My tendency is to philosophise On most things, from a tyrant to a tree; But still the spouseless virgin Knowledge flies. What are we? and whence came we? what shall be Our ultimate existence? what's our present? Are questions answerless, and yet incessant." (Canto VI, Stanza 63)
"O Love! O Glory! what are ye who fly Around us ever, rarely to alight? There's not a meteor in the polar sky Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight. Chill, and chain'd to cold earth, we lift on high Our eyes in search of either lovely light;
A thousand and a thousand colours they Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.
And such as they are, such my present tale is,A non-descript and ever-varying rhyme, A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime. When we know what all are, we must bewail us, But ne'ertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things -- for I wish to know What, after all, are all things -- but a show?" (Canto VII, Stanzas 1-2)
Above are written some of the most striking lines inscribed in Lord Byron's magnum opus Don Juan, the greatest epic in the English language composed since Milton's Paradise Lost. In grand contrast, however, to Milton's Biblically-inspired work set out to "justify the ways of God to man", Lord George Gordon Byron, in his characteristically hedonistic and sensual style, gives us the unfinished tales in verse of Don Juan to achieve a different feat, perhaps more like a reverse of Milton's ambition, in justifying the ways of man to God. Byron, who was one of the finest poets of the British Romantic period, certainly possessed more than the other Romantics the sensational personality and temperament that typifies the Romantic soul. He attained notoriety in his lifetime for what was perceived as a scandalous and decadent lifestyle, marred by a multitude of love affairs and self-exile from England, drenched in the lavish nectar pools of revelry and consumed by a restless spirit of adventure. His poetry, which is definitely the most crisp and accessible of the Romantics I think, is always seething with an impassioned energy and insatiable vitality, and no where are these qualities invested with more zeal and zest than in the verses of Don Juan. In his epic Byron fleshes out for us the figure of Don Juan, who is a perfect alter-ego for Byron and the consummate incarnate of the so-called Byronic hero: lifted from the legend of the unfettered libertine who seduced, inflamed and then broke the hearts of many a damsel until finally cast into Hell to face eternal retribution for his indecorous life of crime. In this tale however, Don Juan is spiced up and modified in Byron's own flavor. Rather than a heartless rake who ravishes one woman after the other without remorse, Byron's Don Juan is a sympathetic figure who is thrown into a series of larger-than-life misfortunes that pave the adventurous path from one tribulation to the next. The plot itself that propels this tale is fascinating on its own: Don Juan's endless escapades and perils that stem from a single love affair in Spain that ends up being exposed in delicto flagrante to an angry husband, sending him into a sea-borne escape that ends in shipwrecks, delivering him to a remote Mediterranean island where he's a rescued by a voluptuous Greek maiden whose father is a pirate who makes Don Juan a prisoner to in turn be sold to the Turkish sultan, followed by more love affairs, a grandiose battle scene of Homeric scale, moving on to Russia and the Tsarina Catherine the Great and then to Byron's homeland England where sadly the story ends abruptly without closure. I can avow that in the 17 stunning cantos of Don Juan, this lack of finality is the only real disappointment. The stanzas running through the pages simply effervesce with feverish rapture, eloquent paeans of passion, piercing wit, and a subtle humor that could only spring from the inimitable voice of Lord Byron. Besides the unbounded riots of adventure in the story of Don Juan, what is sometimes even more notable are Byron's social commentaries that saturate his verse, often with vitriol, measured contempt, and even smug certitude in his free-thinking ways, but always with wonderful craftsmanship and extremely witty acuity. Byron's frequent digressions often take aim at his contemporaries such as Southey and Wordsworth, whose styles he rejected, as well as many other observations that express Byron's rather cynical worldview and opinions, that in his own day, would be deemed unorthodox or heretical to the mores of the British society. Every subject is fair game for Byron, whether it's the differing sensibilities between men and women, love, religion, philosophy, history, war, politics, social etiquette, etc. One notable line that so well articulates Byron's viewpoint is in Canto IV, Stanza 101: "And so great names are nothing more than nominal, and love of glory's but an airy lust, too often in its fury overcoming all who would 'twere identify their dust from out the wide destruction, which entombing all, leaves nothing 'till the coming of the just', save change. I've stood upon Achilles' tomb and heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome." And there's so many more... In truth, Byron's masterpiece is a veritable treasure-trove of knowledge and enriching lyricism that gushes with emotional electricity traversing the whole spectrum. On a final note, I'd like to quote my own personal favorite description from the epic poem, from the last completed canto, Canto XVI, in which Byron conjures up a ghostly specter, the haunting Blackfriar, with deliciously Gothic gloom that I savor so much.
(Canto XVII, Stanza XIV-21)
XIV
But lover, poet, or astronomer,
Shepherd, or swain, whoever may behold,
Feel some abstraction when they gaze on her:
Great thoughts we catch from thence (besides a cold
Sometimes, unless my feelings rather err);
Deep secrets to her rolling light are told;
The ocean's tides and mortals' brains she sways,
And also hearts, if there be truth in lays.
XV
Juan felt somewhat pensive, and disposed
For contemplation rather than his pillow:
The Gothic chamber, where he was enclosed,
Let in the rippling sound of the lake's billow,
With all the mystery by midnight caused;
Below his window waved (of course) a willow;
And he stood gazing out on the cascade
That flash'd and after darken'd in the shade.
XVI
Upon his table or his toilet, -- which
Of these is not exactly ascertain'd
(I state this, for I am cautious to a pitch
Of nicety, where a fact is to be gain'd), --
A lamp burn'd high, while he leant from a niche,
Where many a Gothic ornament remain'd,
In chisell'd stone and painted glass, and all
That time has left our fathers of their hall.
XVII
Then, as the night was clear though cold, he threw
His chamber door wide open -- and went forth
Into a gallery, of a sombre hue,
Long, furnish'd with old pictures of great worth,
Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too,
As doubtless should be people of high birth.
But by dim lights the portraits of the dead
Have something ghastly, desolate, and dread.
XVIII
The forms of the grim knight and pictured saint
Look living in the moon; and as you turn
Backward and forward to the echoes faint
Of your own footsteps -- voices from the urn
Appear to wake, and shadows wild and quaint
Start from the frames which fence their aspects stern,
As if to ask how you can dare to keep
A vigil there, where all but death should sleep.
XIX
And the pale smile of beauties in the grave,
The charms of other days, in starlight gleams,
Glimmer on high; their buried locks still wave
Along the canvas; their eyes glance like dreams
On ours, or spars within some dusky cave,
But death is imaged in their shadowy beams.
A picture is the past; even ere its frame
Be gilt, who sate hath ceased to be the same.
XX
As Juan mused on mutability,
Or on his mistress -- terms synonymous --
No sound except the echo of his sigh
Or step ran sadly through that antique house;
When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh,
A supernatural agent -- or a mouse,
Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass
Most people as it plays along the arras.
XXI
It was no mouse, but lo! a monk, array'd
In cowl and beads and dusky garb, appear'd,
Now in the moonlight, and now lapsed in shade,
With steps that trod as heavy, yet unheard;
His garments only a slight murmur made;
He moved as shadowy as the sisters weird,
But slowly; and as he pass'd Juan by,
Glanced, without pausing, on him a bright eye.
"There still are many rainbows in your sky, but mine have vanished. All, when life is new, commence with feelings warm and prospects high; but time strips our illusions of their hue, and one by one in turn, some grand mistake casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake." (Canto V, Stanza 21)
"But these are foolish things to all the wise, And I love wisdom more than she loves me; My tendency is to philosophise On most things, from a tyrant to a tree; But still the spouseless virgin Knowledge flies. What are we? and whence came we? what shall be Our ultimate existence? what's our present? Are questions answerless, and yet incessant." (Canto VI, Stanza 63)
"O Love! O Glory! what are ye who fly Around us ever, rarely to alight? There's not a meteor in the polar sky Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight. Chill, and chain'd to cold earth, we lift on high Our eyes in search of either lovely light;
A thousand and a thousand colours they Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.
And such as they are, such my present tale is,A non-descript and ever-varying rhyme, A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime. When we know what all are, we must bewail us, But ne'ertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things -- for I wish to know What, after all, are all things -- but a show?" (Canto VII, Stanzas 1-2)
Above are written some of the most striking lines inscribed in Lord Byron's magnum opus Don Juan, the greatest epic in the English language composed since Milton's Paradise Lost. In grand contrast, however, to Milton's Biblically-inspired work set out to "justify the ways of God to man", Lord George Gordon Byron, in his characteristically hedonistic and sensual style, gives us the unfinished tales in verse of Don Juan to achieve a different feat, perhaps more like a reverse of Milton's ambition, in justifying the ways of man to God. Byron, who was one of the finest poets of the British Romantic period, certainly possessed more than the other Romantics the sensational personality and temperament that typifies the Romantic soul. He attained notoriety in his lifetime for what was perceived as a scandalous and decadent lifestyle, marred by a multitude of love affairs and self-exile from England, drenched in the lavish nectar pools of revelry and consumed by a restless spirit of adventure. His poetry, which is definitely the most crisp and accessible of the Romantics I think, is always seething with an impassioned energy and insatiable vitality, and no where are these qualities invested with more zeal and zest than in the verses of Don Juan. In his epic Byron fleshes out for us the figure of Don Juan, who is a perfect alter-ego for Byron and the consummate incarnate of the so-called Byronic hero: lifted from the legend of the unfettered libertine who seduced, inflamed and then broke the hearts of many a damsel until finally cast into Hell to face eternal retribution for his indecorous life of crime. In this tale however, Don Juan is spiced up and modified in Byron's own flavor. Rather than a heartless rake who ravishes one woman after the other without remorse, Byron's Don Juan is a sympathetic figure who is thrown into a series of larger-than-life misfortunes that pave the adventurous path from one tribulation to the next. The plot itself that propels this tale is fascinating on its own: Don Juan's endless escapades and perils that stem from a single love affair in Spain that ends up being exposed in delicto flagrante to an angry husband, sending him into a sea-borne escape that ends in shipwrecks, delivering him to a remote Mediterranean island where he's a rescued by a voluptuous Greek maiden whose father is a pirate who makes Don Juan a prisoner to in turn be sold to the Turkish sultan, followed by more love affairs, a grandiose battle scene of Homeric scale, moving on to Russia and the Tsarina Catherine the Great and then to Byron's homeland England where sadly the story ends abruptly without closure. I can avow that in the 17 stunning cantos of Don Juan, this lack of finality is the only real disappointment. The stanzas running through the pages simply effervesce with feverish rapture, eloquent paeans of passion, piercing wit, and a subtle humor that could only spring from the inimitable voice of Lord Byron. Besides the unbounded riots of adventure in the story of Don Juan, what is sometimes even more notable are Byron's social commentaries that saturate his verse, often with vitriol, measured contempt, and even smug certitude in his free-thinking ways, but always with wonderful craftsmanship and extremely witty acuity. Byron's frequent digressions often take aim at his contemporaries such as Southey and Wordsworth, whose styles he rejected, as well as many other observations that express Byron's rather cynical worldview and opinions, that in his own day, would be deemed unorthodox or heretical to the mores of the British society. Every subject is fair game for Byron, whether it's the differing sensibilities between men and women, love, religion, philosophy, history, war, politics, social etiquette, etc. One notable line that so well articulates Byron's viewpoint is in Canto IV, Stanza 101: "And so great names are nothing more than nominal, and love of glory's but an airy lust, too often in its fury overcoming all who would 'twere identify their dust from out the wide destruction, which entombing all, leaves nothing 'till the coming of the just', save change. I've stood upon Achilles' tomb and heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome." And there's so many more... In truth, Byron's masterpiece is a veritable treasure-trove of knowledge and enriching lyricism that gushes with emotional electricity traversing the whole spectrum. On a final note, I'd like to quote my own personal favorite description from the epic poem, from the last completed canto, Canto XVI, in which Byron conjures up a ghostly specter, the haunting Blackfriar, with deliciously Gothic gloom that I savor so much.
(Canto XVII, Stanza XIV-21)
XIV
But lover, poet, or astronomer,
Shepherd, or swain, whoever may behold,
Feel some abstraction when they gaze on her:
Great thoughts we catch from thence (besides a cold
Sometimes, unless my feelings rather err);
Deep secrets to her rolling light are told;
The ocean's tides and mortals' brains she sways,
And also hearts, if there be truth in lays.
XV
Juan felt somewhat pensive, and disposed
For contemplation rather than his pillow:
The Gothic chamber, where he was enclosed,
Let in the rippling sound of the lake's billow,
With all the mystery by midnight caused;
Below his window waved (of course) a willow;
And he stood gazing out on the cascade
That flash'd and after darken'd in the shade.
XVI
Upon his table or his toilet, -- which
Of these is not exactly ascertain'd
(I state this, for I am cautious to a pitch
Of nicety, where a fact is to be gain'd), --
A lamp burn'd high, while he leant from a niche,
Where many a Gothic ornament remain'd,
In chisell'd stone and painted glass, and all
That time has left our fathers of their hall.
XVII
Then, as the night was clear though cold, he threw
His chamber door wide open -- and went forth
Into a gallery, of a sombre hue,
Long, furnish'd with old pictures of great worth,
Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too,
As doubtless should be people of high birth.
But by dim lights the portraits of the dead
Have something ghastly, desolate, and dread.
XVIII
The forms of the grim knight and pictured saint
Look living in the moon; and as you turn
Backward and forward to the echoes faint
Of your own footsteps -- voices from the urn
Appear to wake, and shadows wild and quaint
Start from the frames which fence their aspects stern,
As if to ask how you can dare to keep
A vigil there, where all but death should sleep.
XIX
And the pale smile of beauties in the grave,
The charms of other days, in starlight gleams,
Glimmer on high; their buried locks still wave
Along the canvas; their eyes glance like dreams
On ours, or spars within some dusky cave,
But death is imaged in their shadowy beams.
A picture is the past; even ere its frame
Be gilt, who sate hath ceased to be the same.
XX
As Juan mused on mutability,
Or on his mistress -- terms synonymous --
No sound except the echo of his sigh
Or step ran sadly through that antique house;
When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh,
A supernatural agent -- or a mouse,
Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass
Most people as it plays along the arras.
XXI
It was no mouse, but lo! a monk, array'd
In cowl and beads and dusky garb, appear'd,
Now in the moonlight, and now lapsed in shade,
With steps that trod as heavy, yet unheard;
His garments only a slight murmur made;
He moved as shadowy as the sisters weird,
But slowly; and as he pass'd Juan by,
Glanced, without pausing, on him a bright eye.
June 22, 2018
Byron’s least--or most--Byronic poem, depending on how you understand that term.
So what does Byronism mean? The gothic affectations of Childe Harold, Lara & Manfred? Melancholia split with voluptuous pleasure, the delicate with the desolate; the paradigm for the lothario in exile? Sighing in soliloquy that the annihilation of hedonism always fails to banish the morbid chill of ennui--but doing it again anyway? Half mad aristocrats, those revenants from medievalism, bedeviled by a chthonic ambiguity? And how about the antiheroes of those ghastly Russian novels? The stylized Byron & Byronism of hollywood?
Of course not. At least, not in Don Juan.
Byron’s satires, Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don Juan, are sometimes read as a carnivalesque break from the mortifying self seriousness of his early ‘Byronic’ work; of course, ‘English Bards & Scotch Reviewers’ imperils this periodization. And even in the high gothic baroque or in swashbuckling nautical adventures, Byron’s usually pretty funny (although it’s not always intentional). But from his first poems to his last, he’s incautious, never discerning or tasteful, he overwrites everything & spares no one.
There’s just a certain foppishness to Byron. He’s ridiculous. I would suggest that whether he is writing romantic melodrama or puckish satire, he is always writing camp. The worst stuff Byron did, and he produced his fair share of doggerel, was always bleating with sincerity. Earnestness just wasn’t his bag. As he says in Canto VII; ‘but ne’er the less, I hope it is no crime / to laugh at all things --for I wish to know / what, after all, are all things--but a show?’
(this is not to say Byron never wrote an emotionally stirring piece; he did, but his bad poetry all leans into capital-R Romanticism and his best stuff, generally speaking, swerves in the opposite direction)
Don Juan is a scalpel to cut the last scabrous flesh away from clean white bone. Everything is funny here; cannibalism, blasphemy and lost innocence are all punchlines. Who could write such a cynical poem but the rouéish author of Childe Harold & Manfred? Who else but this same man, touched by the first grey hues of senescence, hungover from the adventure & scandal of his youth, could write with such exasperating wryness, write as if to deliberately incense the entire world? Whatever the case, the continuity between Byron’s early and late work is very clear. The item which Byron’s arch seriousness and bathic silliness have in common is extravagance; always flamboyant, whether in reflection or opposition. Always bold & vigorous, even when sneering in disdain. This is true in sickness & health; in his youth and in the final years of his tragically short life.
Byron possessed in spades the qualities which make for a good satirist; he was a flirt, a gossip, a dandyish poseur, playful & ironic--self indulgent, vindictive & subversive. Kinda belligerent. He hated rules but trembled with fury at injustice. He had morals but no ethics. A great capacity for both introspective self knowledge & worldly understanding, but a childish incapacity for application thereof in practical matters. And above all, a smirking sense of humor which was injurious and raunchy. As literary devices, spitefulness and obscenity exist precariously between the twin magnetic poles of the awkward and the entertaining. Whether they’re unsightly or uproarious is entirely down to the confidence of their operator; and despite his oft-overlooked shyness & self consciousness (he’s always miscast in adaptations as macho & domineering--if only to foil Shelley), Byron was a supremely confident writer.
In ‘Don Johnny’ Byron offers a counterweight to his own reputation as an sybaritic libertine; Juan is a naive ingenue, so witless of his own charms as one of Anne Radcliffe’s plucky governesses. But with significantly less gumption and good sense. The array of licentious encounters making up the Don Juan legend are here slapstick accidents, where Juan is preyed on by social climbing vultures. Byron describes his hero as ‘A mischief making monkey from birth’ but he is quickly disabused of his natural disobedience & curiosity by an overly pious education. We are led to believe that Juan might grow up to be the jocular narrator, or at least of a kind with him; and, yeah, Byron encourages that we draw parallels between Juan and himself. This stretches credulity; all we see of Juan is an honorable but airheaded young man. Passionate, but guileless. There is something very quixotic about Juan and it is hard to imagine this quality maturing into the insouciant narrator’s (and by extension Byron’s own) rather dramatic touch.
Juan’s upbringing is a naked refutation of the popular myths of Byron’s marriage; his own marriage to Annabella Milbanke, a spectacularly bad match for them both, is dilated across sing-song posey with his wife (more or less) taking the place of Juan’s mother, Donna Inez. She, like Annabella, is ‘mathematical’, ‘magnanimous’ and incapable of wit. ‘Perfection she was, but as perfection is / insipid in this naughty world of ours’. Byron’s descriptions of her usually swerve into plainly autobiographical territory;
'T’is pity learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
This is a typical passage in Don Juan. A smug, conversational tone with rhymes that can barely keep pace with his tangential rambling. Of Juan’s father, many ‘whisper’d he had a mistress, some said two / but for domestic quarrels one will do’. His final verdict on marriage comes later, in Canto III; ‘think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife / he would have written sonnets all his life?’
After Juan’s departure from home, the poem loses focus. Byron instead discusses his obsessions--classical antiquity, English hypocrisy, panhellenism, seafaring adventure--only occasionally remembering to tell the story of Juan. By the last Canto, Juan is scarcely mentioned. But his asides are always amusing; at one point in Canto XIII, I laughed out loud for the first time at a poem, ‘Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; / Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.’ In the (nominally) main narrative, I think Juan was being hosted by wearying English prigs. I barely remember. But so many of these sharp epigrams are splintered into my memory; the best character in Don Juan is not Juan himself, but the narrator. It’d probably be uncontroversial to say that the best character in any of Byron’s poems is Byron himself.
After all, Byron’s not an inadept writer. Does he possess the lyrical genius of Wordsworth or Keats? The hallucinatory vision of Coleridge or Blake? I mean, no. Definitely not. But he’s the funniest poet with anything resembling canonicity. What he lacks as a Bard he more than makes up for as a storyteller and wit. I don’t know that there’s any 19th century author who’s so fun to read. At the beginning of Canto IV, he says ‘nothing so difficult as a beginning / in posey, unless perhaps the end’. He never got to muse properly on endings, as the poem remained unfinished at his early death. Bloom called this poem ‘unfinished and unfinishable’ and I wonder if that’s true. That Byron had a few more Cantos in him is beyond question, but how does this poem end? Well, the man himself said, with ‘Juan in either in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest’. That would do.
So what does Byronism mean? The gothic affectations of Childe Harold, Lara & Manfred? Melancholia split with voluptuous pleasure, the delicate with the desolate; the paradigm for the lothario in exile? Sighing in soliloquy that the annihilation of hedonism always fails to banish the morbid chill of ennui--but doing it again anyway? Half mad aristocrats, those revenants from medievalism, bedeviled by a chthonic ambiguity? And how about the antiheroes of those ghastly Russian novels? The stylized Byron & Byronism of hollywood?
Of course not. At least, not in Don Juan.
Byron’s satires, Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don Juan, are sometimes read as a carnivalesque break from the mortifying self seriousness of his early ‘Byronic’ work; of course, ‘English Bards & Scotch Reviewers’ imperils this periodization. And even in the high gothic baroque or in swashbuckling nautical adventures, Byron’s usually pretty funny (although it’s not always intentional). But from his first poems to his last, he’s incautious, never discerning or tasteful, he overwrites everything & spares no one.
There’s just a certain foppishness to Byron. He’s ridiculous. I would suggest that whether he is writing romantic melodrama or puckish satire, he is always writing camp. The worst stuff Byron did, and he produced his fair share of doggerel, was always bleating with sincerity. Earnestness just wasn’t his bag. As he says in Canto VII; ‘but ne’er the less, I hope it is no crime / to laugh at all things --for I wish to know / what, after all, are all things--but a show?’
(this is not to say Byron never wrote an emotionally stirring piece; he did, but his bad poetry all leans into capital-R Romanticism and his best stuff, generally speaking, swerves in the opposite direction)
Don Juan is a scalpel to cut the last scabrous flesh away from clean white bone. Everything is funny here; cannibalism, blasphemy and lost innocence are all punchlines. Who could write such a cynical poem but the rouéish author of Childe Harold & Manfred? Who else but this same man, touched by the first grey hues of senescence, hungover from the adventure & scandal of his youth, could write with such exasperating wryness, write as if to deliberately incense the entire world? Whatever the case, the continuity between Byron’s early and late work is very clear. The item which Byron’s arch seriousness and bathic silliness have in common is extravagance; always flamboyant, whether in reflection or opposition. Always bold & vigorous, even when sneering in disdain. This is true in sickness & health; in his youth and in the final years of his tragically short life.
Byron possessed in spades the qualities which make for a good satirist; he was a flirt, a gossip, a dandyish poseur, playful & ironic--self indulgent, vindictive & subversive. Kinda belligerent. He hated rules but trembled with fury at injustice. He had morals but no ethics. A great capacity for both introspective self knowledge & worldly understanding, but a childish incapacity for application thereof in practical matters. And above all, a smirking sense of humor which was injurious and raunchy. As literary devices, spitefulness and obscenity exist precariously between the twin magnetic poles of the awkward and the entertaining. Whether they’re unsightly or uproarious is entirely down to the confidence of their operator; and despite his oft-overlooked shyness & self consciousness (he’s always miscast in adaptations as macho & domineering--if only to foil Shelley), Byron was a supremely confident writer.
In ‘Don Johnny’ Byron offers a counterweight to his own reputation as an sybaritic libertine; Juan is a naive ingenue, so witless of his own charms as one of Anne Radcliffe’s plucky governesses. But with significantly less gumption and good sense. The array of licentious encounters making up the Don Juan legend are here slapstick accidents, where Juan is preyed on by social climbing vultures. Byron describes his hero as ‘A mischief making monkey from birth’ but he is quickly disabused of his natural disobedience & curiosity by an overly pious education. We are led to believe that Juan might grow up to be the jocular narrator, or at least of a kind with him; and, yeah, Byron encourages that we draw parallels between Juan and himself. This stretches credulity; all we see of Juan is an honorable but airheaded young man. Passionate, but guileless. There is something very quixotic about Juan and it is hard to imagine this quality maturing into the insouciant narrator’s (and by extension Byron’s own) rather dramatic touch.
Juan’s upbringing is a naked refutation of the popular myths of Byron’s marriage; his own marriage to Annabella Milbanke, a spectacularly bad match for them both, is dilated across sing-song posey with his wife (more or less) taking the place of Juan’s mother, Donna Inez. She, like Annabella, is ‘mathematical’, ‘magnanimous’ and incapable of wit. ‘Perfection she was, but as perfection is / insipid in this naughty world of ours’. Byron’s descriptions of her usually swerve into plainly autobiographical territory;
'T’is pity learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
This is a typical passage in Don Juan. A smug, conversational tone with rhymes that can barely keep pace with his tangential rambling. Of Juan’s father, many ‘whisper’d he had a mistress, some said two / but for domestic quarrels one will do’. His final verdict on marriage comes later, in Canto III; ‘think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife / he would have written sonnets all his life?’
After Juan’s departure from home, the poem loses focus. Byron instead discusses his obsessions--classical antiquity, English hypocrisy, panhellenism, seafaring adventure--only occasionally remembering to tell the story of Juan. By the last Canto, Juan is scarcely mentioned. But his asides are always amusing; at one point in Canto XIII, I laughed out loud for the first time at a poem, ‘Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; / Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.’ In the (nominally) main narrative, I think Juan was being hosted by wearying English prigs. I barely remember. But so many of these sharp epigrams are splintered into my memory; the best character in Don Juan is not Juan himself, but the narrator. It’d probably be uncontroversial to say that the best character in any of Byron’s poems is Byron himself.
After all, Byron’s not an inadept writer. Does he possess the lyrical genius of Wordsworth or Keats? The hallucinatory vision of Coleridge or Blake? I mean, no. Definitely not. But he’s the funniest poet with anything resembling canonicity. What he lacks as a Bard he more than makes up for as a storyteller and wit. I don’t know that there’s any 19th century author who’s so fun to read. At the beginning of Canto IV, he says ‘nothing so difficult as a beginning / in posey, unless perhaps the end’. He never got to muse properly on endings, as the poem remained unfinished at his early death. Bloom called this poem ‘unfinished and unfinishable’ and I wonder if that’s true. That Byron had a few more Cantos in him is beyond question, but how does this poem end? Well, the man himself said, with ‘Juan in either in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest’. That would do.
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June 28, 2023I had a real fascination with Byron while in university studying the poetry of the romantic period: his disdain for the accepted social norms, his basic renunciation of and/or exile from England, his support of Greek liberation from the Turks: these were all compelling aspects of his character. His facility with verse, which I regarded as exhibiting an almost Pushkin-like ease of expression, in which both rhythm and rhyme seemed to effortlessly balance as if of their own accord, only served to further enhance my admiration.
This work, which Byron left unfinished but on which he worked again and again for almost ten years, was surely his most significant accomplishment. It contains sixteen Cantos of about a thousand lines each, and rather rigorously follows an ottava rima pattern of eight line stanzas with an abababcc rhyming pattern. Only the spirit and the name of the rogue of a seducer are used, since Byron depicts his erstwhile hero as the victim of womanly seductions rather than as the hedonistic rake the name normally brings to mind. Along the way, Byron works to offend virtually all established social and political norms with a truly exuberant sense of satiric glee.
The Jonny Lee Miller movie about Byron's life as well as Maurois' biography both worked to tarnish the glowing image of the true archetype of the antihero I'd built up for myself, but I'll always look back fondly on the intoxication of nonconformist glee I felt while reading this work in my late teens/early twenties.
Highly recommended.
This work, which Byron left unfinished but on which he worked again and again for almost ten years, was surely his most significant accomplishment. It contains sixteen Cantos of about a thousand lines each, and rather rigorously follows an ottava rima pattern of eight line stanzas with an abababcc rhyming pattern. Only the spirit and the name of the rogue of a seducer are used, since Byron depicts his erstwhile hero as the victim of womanly seductions rather than as the hedonistic rake the name normally brings to mind. Along the way, Byron works to offend virtually all established social and political norms with a truly exuberant sense of satiric glee.
The Jonny Lee Miller movie about Byron's life as well as Maurois' biography both worked to tarnish the glowing image of the true archetype of the antihero I'd built up for myself, but I'll always look back fondly on the intoxication of nonconformist glee I felt while reading this work in my late teens/early twenties.
Highly recommended.
December 22, 2012
LOVED IT! One of the funniest poems ever, Byron makes fun of an ordinary well known character who is Don Juan by making him the Byronic Hero who is rather acted on than act, always sees and got effected by the result of the action.
Don Juan is the modern day hero; he is surviving everything he's going through...
March 18, 2015
A rattling good tale, but only Byron could contrive rhymes such as:
'She snatched it, and refused another morsel,
Saying, he had gorged enough to make a horse ill.'
Well, Wordsworth probably could too.
Both evidently had too much time on their hands.
'She snatched it, and refused another morsel,
Saying, he had gorged enough to make a horse ill.'
Well, Wordsworth probably could too.
Both evidently had too much time on their hands.
Want to read
January 7, 2022Am shocked to learn that Lord Byron pronounced it "Don Ju-On" and not "Don Wan"
What the heck, Byron?
What the heck, Byron?
October 21, 2018
92
He thought about himself, and the whole earth,
Of man the wonderful, and of the stars,
And how the deuce they ever could have birth;
And then he thought of earthquakes, and of wars,
How many miles the moon might have in girth,
Of air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia's eyes.
-Canto One
---
Byron's Don Juan is a masterpiece of poetry as understood by me as an eight-year old. That's not meant to sound like an insult. The Ottava rima form is jaunty, fun and rhymes all the time. This is what poetry is, isn't it? People nowadays that don't rhyme are doing something altogether difficult, and perhaps inferior.
I do think that to some extent poetry is so unpopular among the general populace because it doesn't always rhyme - the concept of poetry as understood as an eight-year old is something that lingers in the unconscious. It's difficult to appreciate free verse and more abstruse poems unless one has a strong grasp and appreciation for the plain mechanics of poetry. I don't consider myself to be very well-read poetically, and despite my English degree, tracking rhyme schemes and understanding the rhythms of a poem never quite became intuitive in me. I think Byron does something to force a change in reading.
Don Juan [pronounced Ju-on, as Byron's rhyme demands a lot of deliberate mangling of foreign names] is a work that does what poetry is meant to, according to scholars in nostalgic asides. It's fun. It's very long, and doesn't have an ending, but one cannot help bear affection for it. I assumed this Don Juan would be the one everyone 'knows' as a cultural figure, and it was only when I reached the final few cantos that I discovered that Byron's Juan is more of a reversal of the original Casanova analogue than the defining depiction of the character. He's passive, handsome but harmless, whose adventures are entirely accidental. Women rule over him, and Byron consistently notes that the man/woman dichotomy misrepresents the authentic feminine experience; that their relationship is unjustly unequal.
This exploration of heterosexual relationships is usually delivered in the narrator's frequent (especially in later cantos) digressions, alongside jibes at Byron's contemporaries I'm only half-familiar with and as such couldn't appreciate. Reading Coleridge, Wordsworth and other leading lights of the period before this will likely increase enjoyment. Indeed, the poem is more about the digressions than it is about Juan, which is something of a shame after the great early cantos. Byron wrote without an ending in mind, and this reflects the slapdash, playful quality of the verse and story, but also results in a generally uneven work. It's a great poem to read in small chunks before bed, as a nightcap.
Keep an ironic distance from the story, as there is no resolution, and take your time to savour every rhyme. Some are silly, some are fine. Would I say some approach the divine?
I better stop writing here before I feel inspired to do further damage.
He thought about himself, and the whole earth,
Of man the wonderful, and of the stars,
And how the deuce they ever could have birth;
And then he thought of earthquakes, and of wars,
How many miles the moon might have in girth,
Of air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia's eyes.
-Canto One
---
Byron's Don Juan is a masterpiece of poetry as understood by me as an eight-year old. That's not meant to sound like an insult. The Ottava rima form is jaunty, fun and rhymes all the time. This is what poetry is, isn't it? People nowadays that don't rhyme are doing something altogether difficult, and perhaps inferior.
I do think that to some extent poetry is so unpopular among the general populace because it doesn't always rhyme - the concept of poetry as understood as an eight-year old is something that lingers in the unconscious. It's difficult to appreciate free verse and more abstruse poems unless one has a strong grasp and appreciation for the plain mechanics of poetry. I don't consider myself to be very well-read poetically, and despite my English degree, tracking rhyme schemes and understanding the rhythms of a poem never quite became intuitive in me. I think Byron does something to force a change in reading.
Don Juan [pronounced Ju-on, as Byron's rhyme demands a lot of deliberate mangling of foreign names] is a work that does what poetry is meant to, according to scholars in nostalgic asides. It's fun. It's very long, and doesn't have an ending, but one cannot help bear affection for it. I assumed this Don Juan would be the one everyone 'knows' as a cultural figure, and it was only when I reached the final few cantos that I discovered that Byron's Juan is more of a reversal of the original Casanova analogue than the defining depiction of the character. He's passive, handsome but harmless, whose adventures are entirely accidental. Women rule over him, and Byron consistently notes that the man/woman dichotomy misrepresents the authentic feminine experience; that their relationship is unjustly unequal.
This exploration of heterosexual relationships is usually delivered in the narrator's frequent (especially in later cantos) digressions, alongside jibes at Byron's contemporaries I'm only half-familiar with and as such couldn't appreciate. Reading Coleridge, Wordsworth and other leading lights of the period before this will likely increase enjoyment. Indeed, the poem is more about the digressions than it is about Juan, which is something of a shame after the great early cantos. Byron wrote without an ending in mind, and this reflects the slapdash, playful quality of the verse and story, but also results in a generally uneven work. It's a great poem to read in small chunks before bed, as a nightcap.
Keep an ironic distance from the story, as there is no resolution, and take your time to savour every rhyme. Some are silly, some are fine. Would I say some approach the divine?
I better stop writing here before I feel inspired to do further damage.
December 2, 2015
Let me start my review of Byron's epic poem Don Juan with a short poem of my own:
There was a British poet
and he wrote a famous poem
and Don Juan was what he called it.
When it was good, it was very very good,
but when it was bad it was horrid.
And that sums up how I feel about Don Juan, with the benefit of being much shorter. It started out great! He made jokes, stayed on topic, it was all good. Then he started digressing. In the end, Byron spends more time talking about himself and his opinions than he does telling us about Don Juan. There are whole cantos where hardly more than a paragraph is devoted to the events of Juan's life. All the rest are fixated on Byron. His publishing woes. Pot shots at other famous writers. The public doesn't appreciate him! Or his muse! And they should! (Well, they should, but I wish he'd whine less about how they don't.) I don't know if Don Juan would be half the length if someone had taken all the digressions out.
Speaking of length: seventeen cantos. Essentially seventeen chapters of multiple 8 line paragraphs. Know why it's not longer? Byron died while he was writing it. He talks within the poem about making it 18 or 24 cantos, and how he doesn't know how long it's going to be. So I was a little confused when I looked at the table of contents and saw it was only 17 cantos long. And I was more confused when I got (what I thought was) part way into the 17th canto and the book just ended. It's unfinished, and because Byron didn't leave any notes about what he was planning to do (or make any plans about what he was planning to do) there's no way to posthumously finish the tale. It's very disconcerting to get to the last page, be expecting an ending, and just get a cliff. Especially since, true to form, Byron spent most of that canto writing about himself. Again. I wouldn't have minded so much if the first couple of cantos hadn't gotten my hopes up. Other than being able to get the literary references to it, there isn't much point in reading this. Go read Inferno instead. Or Homer.
There was a British poet
and he wrote a famous poem
and Don Juan was what he called it.
When it was good, it was very very good,
but when it was bad it was horrid.
And that sums up how I feel about Don Juan, with the benefit of being much shorter. It started out great! He made jokes, stayed on topic, it was all good. Then he started digressing. In the end, Byron spends more time talking about himself and his opinions than he does telling us about Don Juan. There are whole cantos where hardly more than a paragraph is devoted to the events of Juan's life. All the rest are fixated on Byron. His publishing woes. Pot shots at other famous writers. The public doesn't appreciate him! Or his muse! And they should! (Well, they should, but I wish he'd whine less about how they don't.) I don't know if Don Juan would be half the length if someone had taken all the digressions out.
Speaking of length: seventeen cantos. Essentially seventeen chapters of multiple 8 line paragraphs. Know why it's not longer? Byron died while he was writing it. He talks within the poem about making it 18 or 24 cantos, and how he doesn't know how long it's going to be. So I was a little confused when I looked at the table of contents and saw it was only 17 cantos long. And I was more confused when I got (what I thought was) part way into the 17th canto and the book just ended. It's unfinished, and because Byron didn't leave any notes about what he was planning to do (or make any plans about what he was planning to do) there's no way to posthumously finish the tale. It's very disconcerting to get to the last page, be expecting an ending, and just get a cliff. Especially since, true to form, Byron spent most of that canto writing about himself. Again. I wouldn't have minded so much if the first couple of cantos hadn't gotten my hopes up. Other than being able to get the literary references to it, there isn't much point in reading this. Go read Inferno instead. Or Homer.
June 26, 2020
There are few writers as sulphurous as Lord Byron who manages to remain sympathetic. Bisexual, lover of his half-sister, handsome dark man who led a life of decadence and debauchery; wandering through Europe with its tamed bear, its Venetian gondolier and other baggage. But also rebellious soul, in love with freedom and justice, having defended the English weavers against industrialization, the Armenians against Turkish persecutions, and died flying to the aid of the insurgent Greeks (very symbolic assistance of the rest according to Trelawney)! But above all, he was a vast and formidable poet.
Contrary to what one might think, this long poetic ode of seventeen songs is straightforward to read. In an extravagant and magnificent style of course, but also full of humour! True to his taste for scandal, Byron revisits the highly pure myth of Don Juan to reverse it completely.
Don Juan is no longer the violent and cynical seducer that we meet from Tirso de Molina to Mozart. He is a naive and good-willed adolescent who seduces women in a completely involuntary way! Circumstances snatch him from one, and already the next takes him; my faith he lets himself go. There is probably an autobiographical side to it; despite his clubfoot, Byron was renowned for his beauty. His fame and the identification of the writer and his heroes only increased his prestige, and even if the term "groupie" is a bit strong to refer to many of his female admirers, he may not be so far from the truth!
Don Juan's travels across Europe and the Orient also echoed his own, especially across the Greek islands. To accentuate the resemblance, he adds long digressions on his own life and takes the opportunity to settle his accounts with his ex mistresses, wife, friends, enemies, rivals, and so on.
He also added original chapters, while the different Don Juan then all took up roughly the same episodes. The one with Haydée notably inspired a magnificent painting by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Brown.
An innovative, satirical and ironic work, therefore. But above all, the final and unfinished work of a dazzling spirit and steeped in the enormous contradictions.
Contrary to what one might think, this long poetic ode of seventeen songs is straightforward to read. In an extravagant and magnificent style of course, but also full of humour! True to his taste for scandal, Byron revisits the highly pure myth of Don Juan to reverse it completely.
Don Juan is no longer the violent and cynical seducer that we meet from Tirso de Molina to Mozart. He is a naive and good-willed adolescent who seduces women in a completely involuntary way! Circumstances snatch him from one, and already the next takes him; my faith he lets himself go. There is probably an autobiographical side to it; despite his clubfoot, Byron was renowned for his beauty. His fame and the identification of the writer and his heroes only increased his prestige, and even if the term "groupie" is a bit strong to refer to many of his female admirers, he may not be so far from the truth!
Don Juan's travels across Europe and the Orient also echoed his own, especially across the Greek islands. To accentuate the resemblance, he adds long digressions on his own life and takes the opportunity to settle his accounts with his ex mistresses, wife, friends, enemies, rivals, and so on.
He also added original chapters, while the different Don Juan then all took up roughly the same episodes. The one with Haydée notably inspired a magnificent painting by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Brown.
An innovative, satirical and ironic work, therefore. But above all, the final and unfinished work of a dazzling spirit and steeped in the enormous contradictions.
December 28, 2007
I've been reading this book for over a year and finally finished it over this break. I was often entertained, often a little bored, and at times astonished by some great poetry. Byron himself points out the flaw with his work:
"Let us ramble on. / I meant to make this poem very short, / But now I can't tell where it may not run. / No doubt if I had wished to pay my court / To critics or to hail the setting sun / Of tyranny of all kinds, my concision / Were more, but I was born for opposition."
So, OK, it's rambly -- as the story goes on, there are large stretches where it's easy to forget that there's a story at all as digression piles upon digression. Yet Byron is a master rhymer, and he's clever and often open-hearted and always interesting -- plus, he's really funny. A favorite, and a famous, example citing Don Juan's martial and amorous accomplishments is: "He'd learn'd the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, / And how to scale a fortress - or a nunnery." But check this out, a variation on Tolstoy's "all happy families are alike":
"For no one cares for matrimonial cooings; / There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss. / Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, / He would have written sonnets all his life?"
The occasional anti-war attitudes in the book also resonated with me as I continue to be frustrated by this seemingly ever-more-violent (or, at least, ever-equally-violent) world. Take this couplet: "The drying up a single tear has more / Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore."
All in all, a worthwhile endeavor. Not sure I'd advise people to plunge in and read the whole thing, but I'm glad I took the time to wade through it.
"Let us ramble on. / I meant to make this poem very short, / But now I can't tell where it may not run. / No doubt if I had wished to pay my court / To critics or to hail the setting sun / Of tyranny of all kinds, my concision / Were more, but I was born for opposition."
So, OK, it's rambly -- as the story goes on, there are large stretches where it's easy to forget that there's a story at all as digression piles upon digression. Yet Byron is a master rhymer, and he's clever and often open-hearted and always interesting -- plus, he's really funny. A favorite, and a famous, example citing Don Juan's martial and amorous accomplishments is: "He'd learn'd the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, / And how to scale a fortress - or a nunnery." But check this out, a variation on Tolstoy's "all happy families are alike":
"For no one cares for matrimonial cooings; / There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss. / Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, / He would have written sonnets all his life?"
The occasional anti-war attitudes in the book also resonated with me as I continue to be frustrated by this seemingly ever-more-violent (or, at least, ever-equally-violent) world. Take this couplet: "The drying up a single tear has more / Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore."
All in all, a worthwhile endeavor. Not sure I'd advise people to plunge in and read the whole thing, but I'm glad I took the time to wade through it.
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