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An audio recording of Canto IX of Byron’s Don Juan

CatherineTheGreat

Here’s a record­ing — about 2-years old — of Can­to IX of Don Juan.

The record­ing (MP3) is in three parts. It’s best to read along with the text of the poem if you can because the verse is quite com­plex. Also please use head­phones. You’ll find the qual­i­ty much bet­ter.

[There is 5–10 sec­onds of silence at the head of each record­ing]

  1. Vers­es 1–21
  • An attack on the Duke of Welling­ton for being a Tory and a leech; too vain to know the true impact his vic­to­ries had on Euro­pean free­dom
  • An apos­tro­phe (“Death laughs..”) to death —- the sub­ject is nev­er far from the sur­face of Don Juan
  • A mean­der­ing philo­soph­i­cal rumi­na­tion on “being” that is short and wit­ty enough to hold its place in the poem
  • An abrupt tran­si­tion to…

2. Vers­es 21–42 

  • A brief glimpse of Juan en-route to St Peters­burg whose dis­tant prospect leads to…
  • An aside on autoc­ra­cy, dem­a­goguery and the abuse of pow­er that ends when Byron seems to remem­ber him­self and returns briefly to…
  • Juan on the snowy road with Leila. Short­ly after­wards, in the midst of a rhetor­i­cal fig­ure about Fame, Byron pre­tends to have lost the thread of his argu­ment and bequeathes it to pos­ter­i­ty… which results in…
  • A spec­u­la­tion about the future and how the Geor­gian era (and George IV) will appear when reduced to being the sub­ject of a future arche­ol­o­gy.
  • Then, once more, Byron pulls him­self up and deter­mines to restart the nar­ra­tive. He cuts straight­way to the court of the Empress Cather­ine where Juan is to present gen­er­al Suvorov’s dis­patch­es from the suc­cess­ful siege of Ismail.

3. Vers­es 43–85 

  • Juan’s appear­ance at Court
  • Catherine’s court, courtiers, her appear­ance, blood­i­ness and promis­cu­ity
  • Juan’s pre­sen­ta­tion to the Queen and her infat­u­a­tion with him
  • A series of asides on lust and pow­er and an apos­tro­phe, to the vagi­na
  • Juan’s flat­tered but ‘gen­tle­man­ly’ acqui­es­cence in an ‘assign­ment’ — in Catherine’s boudoir — like­ly to make him wealthy and pow­er­ful at Court
  • A clos­ing scene in which Juan is tak­en in hand by a woman who “checks-out” the Queen’s prospec­tive lovers.

I hope you enjoy the read­ing. Com­ments are wel­come.

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Don Juan annotated — a work in progress

For some time I have been work­ing, in desul­to­ry fash­ion, on an anno­tat­ed ver­sion of Don Juan. You can down­load the cur­rent ver­sion from that link. Would you kind­ly take a look and tell me whether I’m on the right track?

I am hard­ly the first per­son to have attempt­ed this. Per­haps the most famous — and most accom­plished —  is the emi­nent sci­ence-jour­nal­ist and sci­ence-fic­tion writer Isaac Asi­mov. He pub­lished a won­der­ful vol­ume of an anno­tat­ed Don Juan, illus­trat­ed by the fash­ion­able NY illus­tra­tor Mil­ton Glaser in 1972. I’m the delight­ed own­er of a copy ded­i­cat­ed by Glaser to his own pub­lish­er.

Still, the great­est of the anno­tat­ed texts of Don Juan, from a Byronist’s view­point, is that by the late, great Dr Peter Cochran. These are mag­nif­i­cent (not illus­trat­ed) texts of each Can­to that Cochran care­ful­ly com­piled from a vari­ety of man­u­script and pub­lished sources to re-cre­ate Byron’s own ver­sion of the poem — rather than the ver­sion “amend­ed” by his con­tem­po­rary and lat­er edi­tors at John Murray’s and else­where. Cochran’s text doesn’t shy away from Bryon’s eccen­tric punc­tu­a­tion or cru­di­ties (“mild-ities” today). It includes miss­ing vers­es, and mar­gin­al anno­ta­tions on the drafts and “fair copies” where rel­e­vant. Best of all, Cochran has added foot­notes that draw on his own unpar­al­leled Byron schol­ar­ship, his deep knowl­edge of Shake­speare and his broad research in the lit­er­a­ture famil­iar to some­one such as Byron who had absorbed an 18th cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion.

I owe a great deal to Peter Cochran’s ver­sion of Don Juan. But this draft text is my own attempt to make some­thing a lit­tle lighter than the Cochran ver­sion, a lit­tle less care­ful than Asi­mov (who tends to slide over the dif­fi­cult or naughty) and still look good on the page.

The PDF doc­u­ment attached here con­tains only Can­tos I — IV (with­out the Ded­i­ca­tion — I half-excuse myself on the basis that I have already pro­duced a free, illus­trat­ed, audio-book of the Ded­i­ca­tion and Can­to I). Can­tos I & III are ful­ly anno­tat­ed. Can­to IV has only a few notes at the start and Can­to II… well, noth­ing real­ly except the verse.

I’d be very grate­ful if you’d look this over and let me know your opin­ion of it — so far.

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Highly recommended: A life of “Tita” Falcieri

A por­trait of a gon­do­lier, but not Tita

Bat­tista Falcieri was, at first, Byron’s gon­do­lier when he moved to the Moceni­go palace on the Grand Canal in Venice in 1818. He steered Byron through months of volup­tuous adven­tures in the Car­ni­val. He swam with Byron in the Grand Canal: even dined with his mas­ter in the Grand Canal. Then, in 1820 his craft host­ed Byron’s ear­li­est lia­sons with his last love, the Con­tes­sa Tere­sa Guic­ci­oli. 

Tita — a swarthy, pow­er­ful man with a won­der­ful dark beard and a hap­py dis­po­si­tion — stayed with Byron, faith­ful, pas­sion­ate, pro­tec­tive as a ‘couri­er’ and body­guard for the next six years, endur­ing prison and exile for his patron, until the last days in Mis­so­longhi. He even accom­pa­nied Byron’s body, embalmed in a butt of spir­its, back to Lon­don, sleep­ing along­side in the hold of the ship.

All but des­ti­tute in a for­eign land after the funer­al, the resource­ful Tita made his way some­how to Mal­ta where he was ‘dis­cov­ered’ by a youth­ful Ben­jamin Dis­raeli on his Grand Tour… It was the begin­ning of anoth­er remark­able rela­tion­ship of ser­vice to a lumi­nary of lit­er­a­ture (and a pan­jan­drum of Vic­to­ri­an pol­i­tics).

Clau­dia Oliv­er, a descen­dant of Tita’s Eng­lish fam­i­ly — he mar­ried in Lon­don and worked for many years in the India Office — has gath­ered the threads of this admirable man’s life from archival records in Europe and North Amer­i­ca, includ­ing long-for­got­ten cor­re­spon­dence of the great and pow­er­ful fam­i­lies for whom he worked and the rec­ol­lec­tions of Byron’s cir­cle and Disraeli’s. 

The cul­mi­na­tion of her 20-year project is this emi­nent­ly read­able, inspi­ra­tional book: “A Most Faith­ful Atten­dent: The Life of Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Falcieri”. 

Buy it and enjoy.