What is in the Annotated Don Juan Cantos I + II?

The Alexan­der Kor­da film “The Pri­vate Life of Don Juan” was the last film made by Dou­glas Fair­banks Jr. A sort of iron­ic riff on Fair­banks’ own myth, rather like “Don Juan” was for Byron.

In a cou­ple of weeks I’ll be pub­lish­ing my Anno­tat­ed Can­tos I + II to cel­e­brate the two-hun­dredth anniver­sary of their first pub­li­ca­tion in 1819. What can you expect to find in the PDF e‑book?

Prob­a­bly the best way to describe what’s there is to show you part of a page: this is from the ear­ly part of Can­to I. Don José, Juan’s father, has just died and Juan has come into his inher­i­tance.

A few notes on what you can see here.

• The head­er shows the lines of the poem on this page.
• The Stan­zas are num­bered in Roman numer­als because… that’s how the poem was first print­ed.
• The poem occu­pies the left-side of every page where it appears, and…
• Notes occu­py the right-hand col­umn, most­ly.
• Although hard­ly invis­i­ble here, the words, phras­es that are anno­tat­ed have sub­tle under­lines.
• There are ’tim­ing marks’ to allow syn­chro­ni­sa­tion between the record­ing and the text

I hope you will fol­low the nar­ra­tion and skim the notes if you have time. Then, return to the text when and notes lat­er when you have time to read.