So. I have titled this talk Pirates, Poets and Plagiarism.
With plagiarism in scarecrows. Partly because who doesn't love pirates?
Just check out the number of children's picture books that feature such popular villains.
Poets, perhaps less so, although in Byron pirates and poets have surprisingly a lot in common.
Figures at once. Romantic. And mercenary, making their livings on the edges of polite society.
Plagiarism, added an important third piece to the title.
I had considered princesses.
But this is a talk largely about borrowings back and forth between Byron and Greek poetry, his translation of Greece and its translation by Greece.
We think of plagiarism as intellectual dishonesty, intentional, unacknowledged stealing.
Byron sometimes does, and sometimes does not kind of point us to the sources of his borrowings or stealing.
I'm going to go with stealing. Since Byron here is a mature poet.
But I also liked that. And in this case, the etymology of plagiarism points us to piracy,
the Latin plucky artist being a kidnapper of kin or stealer of slaves, then coming to me in a kidnapper of words,
a reticulate metaphor fetched up out of marshal, actual kidnapping, as well as the impressing of and transfiguration of words and figures.
Plots and tropes will feature here.
Byron visited Greece twice, once in 1809 when he was 21, with a traveller in his travelling companion Hobhouse,
when he had direct experience of shipwreck and of pirates, nearly captured himself, and also arguably engaging in a little like privateering.
And then for 100 days.
In 1824, he returns to Greece when he joins the Greek struggle for independence, offering his time and treasure and ultimately his life for the cause.
His failure to liberate Greece in some very real way contributing to the liberation of Greece.
In between these visits, he wrote most of his greatest works and all of his mature work.
I'm particularly interested because I am a poet who lives in Greece.
In those works that touch on Greece or are set there.
So in particular Canto two of the travelogue and autofiction Child Herald and
the shipwrecked on an Island episode in his unfinished masterpiece dungeon,
a modern, antic epic or verse novel. And this episode, which I like to call Romeo and Heidi, the pirates daughter.
Covers part of Canto two. Canto three entire and much accounted for.
So in the middle of the Greek Island episode of The Undoing, which is a whole novella inside the epic,
um, where Don Giovanni is rescued by a beautiful Greek maiden, Heidi.
Um, in the middle of Canto three is embedded one of Byron's most famous poems,
The Isles of Greece, which is usually, um, anthologised completely out of context.
Um, so we're going to look a little bit at the poem and then recontextualize the poem and contextualise the context.
Um, so, uh, many of you will know at least the first four stanzas, which are the most famous stanzas.
Um, the Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece were burning.
Sappho loved and sung. Where grew the arts of war and peace.
Where Dylan's rose and Phoebus sprang eternal sunlit sun.
Eternal summer guilds them yet. But all except their sun is set the sky on.
And the ten use the hero's harp. The lovers lute have found the fame.
Your shores refuse their place A birth alone is mute to sound.
That echoes farther west than your sires. Islands of the blessed.
The mountains look on marathon. Maybe we should all do the stanza.
Ready the mountains. Come on! The mountains!
Look! Come on the mountains.
Look on marathon and marathon looks on the sea.
And musing there. An hour alone, I dreamt that Greece might still be free for standing on the persons grave.
I could not deem myself a slave. Um.
I think the beautiful opening lines of that which, um, are almost incantatory.
We've got that classic, um, kind of reversal of marathon, which is literally between the mountains and the sea.
And then we have that personal eye that feels like Byron, that feels like this is Byron speaking.
Um, so we have the reference to marathon and then a king seat on the Rocky Brow,
which looks or Seabourn Salamence and ships by thousands lay low and men and nations all were his.
He counted them at break of day. But when the sun set, where were they?
So we have this nod to the ancient glories of Greece, um, particularly Greek arts and literature.
We have the love poems of Sappho. The skin you skin here is here.
Um, and this stands for Homer and Epic Poetry.
The ten Years is an African who stands in for sympathetic poetry.
So, you know, drinking songs. Um, we have this little nod to, oh, this is an up here.
So that's why you all couldn't chant with me. Why isn't this.
There we go. Oh, see, I missed that moment. We might have to do it again.
All right. Can you see it now? This is this is going on this thing, but not up here.
No wonder I just thought y'all were sorry. There we go.
I'm sorry. We might have to come back for that. There might not be time. Um.
So this feels very personal, but we have these references, um, to the Persian invasions of 49 for 90 B.C. and for 80 B.C., Marathon and Salamis.
We know that Byron visited Marathon and Solomon. In fact, at marathon, he was offered for sale the entire plane of marathon at a very cheap price.
I don't know why not buy it. Imagine how rich he would be today.
Um, so we have these ancient references, and this does feel like Byron.
Um, we have Rodney and Rodney meetings. Wonderful book, Byron's War.
He mentions that modern editors and commenters do not take seriously the evidence of Thomas Medlin, who is Shelley's cousin,
who reported two separate conversations with Byron not long after these cantos had been published of Don Ju in 1821,
in which he claimed that the Isles of Greece had been written years earlier,
at the same time as the second canto of Child Harold, which was begun in Athens in 1809.
So this might really be Byron speaking, and not the anonymous Greek poet of Duns you.
And so he might be resetting this pool. So can we have the next dances?
Um. And where are they? And where art thou? My country.
On thy voiceless. Sure. The heroic lay is tuneless. Now the heroic bosom beats no more and must die.
Liar! So long divine degenerates into hands like mine.
This is clearly not Byron. Um. My country Greece.
Greece is not Byron's country. He does not consider that ancient poetry has degenerated into his own hands.
This is clearly the anonymous poet on the unnamed Greek island who is speaking to something in the dearth of fame,
the linked among a fettered race to feel at least a patriots shame,
even as I sing, suffused my face for what is left the poet here for Greeks, a blessed for Greece a tier must we but week or days more blessed must we.
But bless our father's blessed earth.
Render back from out thy breast a remnant of our Spartan debt.
Of the 300 grants, but three to make a new Thermopylae.
What? Silent, still and silent. Uh, all I know.
The voices of the dead sound like a distant torrent. Spell an answer.
Let one living head but one arise. We come, we come to us.
But the living who are dumb. So we have a change of mood.
From the kind of more contemplative. I dreamt that Greece might be free.
I might still be free to patriots. Shame. Kind of anger.
We have this strange invocation of the 300 dead from the Battle of Thermopylae, where we're talking about the Spartans,
and under King Leonidas, defending the pass of Thermopylae from a much larger army of Persians.
Of course, it's not just the Spartans. They are thespians and other people who are there.
But anyway, um, there's a certain amount of Greek propaganda that carries forth to the present day.
In fact, I feel like I should point out that Thermopylae was not a victory for the Greeks.
I guess you will constantly see rhetoric in which it seems to be a victory.
Um, they're right wing organisations that like to use this rhetoric and like, you know, they lost rings.
Anyway, I would just put that out there. Um, so there's talk of this glorious deed.
Um, there is talk of the dead rising again to help the living.
Maybe there's some thought of Zico in the valley of dry Bones bringing up, um, an army of skeletons.
Uh, I will point out, um, that it's a pretty common trope, and we'll see it again and again.
Felicia, Felicia, Dorothea Heymans, and I don't know how to pronounce your name.
You can correct me afterwards. In her 1817 poem Modern Greece and the Elgin Marbles, which title is later just truncated to modern Greece.
Also mentions of writing the story, um, of a vision of Theseus come back to fight with the Greeks at Marathon.
So it's even there in ancient times, this idea.
These are the next stanzas. Have to check to make sure they're in vein and veins like other chords fill high.
The cup was same in wine.
Now this again fits the situation in which we find the poem in dungeon, where we're in something like a wedding feast and people are drinking wine.
Um, again.
Sam also has an association with an actress, an actress, and who is a poet, associated especially in Byron's time, with frivolous drinking songs.
He also happens to work for a tyrant. Um, leave battles to the Turkish hordes.
That's politically incorrect and said the blood of sky is vine heart rising to the ignoble call.
How answers each bold bacchanal. You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet.
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone of two such lessons?
Why forget the nobler and the manlier one?
Here we have someone addressing a you, addressing a you who are Greeks.
That sort of fits in more with the context you have.
The letters Cadmus gave the Greek alphabet, essentially.
Thank you. He meant them for a slave. Fill hi. The bowl with Sammy and wine.
We will not think of things like these. It made an acronym sung divine.
He served but served. Tis a tyrant.
But our masters then were still at least our countrymen, the tyrant of the curse.
Ease was freedom's best and bravest friend. That tyrant was mill Hyades, important general during marathon.
Oh, that the present hour would lend another despot of the kind such chains as his were sure to bind.
Um, and here we get to the end of the poem, and there's a lot of interesting things that start happening here again.
Phil, hide the ball with Sammy and wine on Sully's rock and Park is sure exists.
The remnants of a line such as the Doric Mothersbaugh.
And there perhaps some seed is sown incorrectly.
I then led my own trust. Not for freedom to the Franks.
So when I was everywhere in modern Greece and we talk about the Franks, what we mean is any Western European foreigner,
anyone who is not Greek and belongs to the European West, those are the Franks.
So that could include and here does include the English.
They have a king who buys and sells in native swords and native rakes.
The only hope of courage dwells. But Turkish force and Latin fraud would break your shields.
However broken it. Filth by the bull would say me in wine our virgins dance beneath the shade.
I see their glorious black eyes shine. But gazing on each glowing made my own.
The burning teardrop leaves. To think such breasts must suckle.
Slaves place me on Sunni arms. Marble steep where nothing save the waves.
And I may hear our mutual murmurs. Sweep their soil like let me sing and die.
The land of slaves shall never be mine. Dashed down.
Yarn cut of saint me and wine. So, um, Don Schumann itself, it's sort of maybe hard to place exactly when it sets, but we find out that, don't you?
And, you know, is, among other things, um, uh, lives at the same time as Catherine the Great.
Um, so we think of it as maybe a bit before Byron's time, but it's not ancient,
and it's not the present, but the two words Suri's rock and park is sure.
Especially with trust. Not for freedom. To the Franks place this poem quite specifically to about November of 1819.
Um, we have met people from Sully and people from Parga and Child Harold, because Byron himself had met them.
Um, Byron and Hobhouse have a near shipwreck or pretty much shipwreck, and they end up on the shore, and they are helped by bandits.
They are helped by the Soviets, who are Christian Albanian bandits who also speak Greek.
But, you know, we're going to end up sort of talking about them as Greeks. But I just want to phrase that a little bit more carefully.
Um, and we even have his description, um, where child Harold is afraid to go on land because of the bandits there.
But this was a vain fear. The sea outstretched, the welcome hands led them or rocks and passed the dangerous swamp.
Kinder than Polish slaves, though not so bland, and piled the hearth and wrung their garments damp,
and filled the bowl, and trimmed the cheerful layer, and spread their fair, the homely, all they had.
Um. So we have this idea of brave bandits, honour among thieves, and a kind of native generosity to these shipwrecked people.
Parga is. There's also the issue of the silly at war.
So in around 1803, the ciliates who are start fighting against Ali Pasha Ali Pasha is the local Ottoman ruler.
Byron meets with him. He's also known as the Lion of Yuan, and, uh, he is the Balkan Napoleon, the Balkan Bonaparte,
um, a very educated and civilised person, he was also capable of amazing savagery.
The ciliates, uh, started to resist and fight against him.
And there's an incident, uh, when Byron was a teenager in 1803, about the same time,
Elgin is removing a bunch of sculptures from the Parthenon and shipping them to England.
Um, there's an incident in the Civil War that's widely recorded in poetry, folksong and academician art.
Um, it's the dance of so long ago. 50 women with their children in their arms are supposed to have thrown the children off a cliff to their deaths,
rather than have them be enslaved, and then themselves danced off the cliff to the rhythm of the sea or to the sea or toe,
which means dragging or tugging is a slow dance, performed hand in hand,
where the dancers kind of move forward a bit and dance in place a little, and then move forward a bit more.
Um, you can see how it might possibly work with women kind of dragging themselves over the cliff one by one to their deaths.
Um, uh, it goes it's very romanticised in the West and in Greece.
It's this idea of liberty or death, which becomes one of the important mottos of the Greek Revolution.
But I'd like us to keep the image of dancing girls and mothers in our mind who prefer death to slavery for themselves and their children,
because it returns only a couple of stanzas later,
and the otherwise pretty stanza about the dancing girls whose breasts will suckle slaves who do not,
in other words, throw their children off a cliff or dance themselves to death.
So, um, there's a bit of judgement here, perhaps. Um, it's also an incident.
Um, that. So this. Heavens. And here's one of the paintings.
Um, this is the Silhouette Women, uh, by uh, Scheffer, depicting the folklore suicide of silhouette women known as the dancers.
Long, uh, um, this is, uh, uh, Greek Theosophists, um, painting of the same incident.
Uh, Felicia Hammons, of course, includes it in modern Greece and in a kind of overblown way.
And she also has a poem called The Slit Mother. Um, she's probably more famous today for Casablanca.
Casablanca? That poem that starts. The boy stood on the burning deck from the battle of the Nile.
She really likes to write poems about suicidal, patriotic, suicidal mothers and children.
It's. It's actually her thing. Um Parker, though more places the poem to a time and place.
So Parga is on the mainland. Um.
Byron has also met with people from Parga who are again.
The idea is kind of bandits.
Pirates who are also, um, very brave.
Um, from Child Herald. We have then the pirates of Parga that dwell by the waves and teach the pale Franks what it is to be slaves.
So shall live on the beach, the long galley and or and track to his culvert.
The captive on sewer. So there are kind of also romanticised people associated with the ciliates.
Um, they're on the mainland, but they are traditionally collective with the seven Ionian islands.
Uh, it's a part of the Greek speaking world, and the only part of the Greek speaking world that never fell under the Ottoman yoke.
That is, until 1819. So from 1815 until 1864, the Ionian Island group, the United States of Ionian Islands, was a British protectorate.
But in 1819 the British sold off Parga to the notorious Ali Pasha.
Um Ali had his eyes on Parga for a long time, and the targets had kind of resisted this.
And then suddenly the British simply sell it to him.
This is considered in the the larger European world and in Greece, and maybe in parts of England,
to be a huge betrayal of a Christian population to Muslim slavery.
Um, so another plagiarism. So that's how it is viewed at the time.
And Byron knew a lot about it because Ugo first, Carlo, the Italian poet was born on the Greek island of Zakynthos,
writes an enraged essay letter about it into the Edinburgh Review, which is published in October of 1819.
He describes something kind of like, uh, the ago, the population, when they find out they have been sold to Ali Pasha,
threatens to kill themselves, every last one of them man, woman and child.
The English are appalled, um. And give them safe passage to Corfu.
Um, but again, they do something kind of surprising.
They all march out of the city together, and, um, they first exhume the bones of their glorious ancestors.
Um, and the priest does a blessing of them, and they are burnt in a giant funeral pyre.
So we have a literal exhuming of the bones of the ancient ancestors.
Um, so, again, this very much places the poem, um, in a kind of political sphere and at a moment in time,
which is completely outside in some weird ways of its setting and undoing.
The last stanza of the Isles of Greece is not my favourite.
I think it's kind of week ending.
Uh, I think Byron felt, you know, I need to go back to marathon and to Salome's and maybe even remembers sitting there,
um, uh, um, next to the marble temple at the temple to Poseidon and carving his name in it quite famously.
Um, so we have this ending with its ambiguous, ambiguous dash down the cup.
Does that mean to sit down, or does it mean to hurl it aside?
So let's go back a little bit to the poem itself.
Um, here we have this painting where Byron is depicted as Don Ju in a portrait of Byron is kind of stuck on to Don Julian.
And we have Heidi in this beautiful cave. Um, they live together and become lovers and, um, end up in a kind of wedding celebration.
Although it's not technically a wedding where we have this poet. But let's look a little bit at the poet, and then we'll go outward.
Um, the poet at their festivities is described as a sad, trimmer, but very pleasant fellow.
He is clearly categorised with the talent at this festival and not with the gifts.
And now they were diverted by their sweet dwarves, dancing girls, black eunuchs and a poet.
Which made their new establishment complete. The last was of great fame and liked to show it.
His verses rarely wanted their defeat, and for his theme he seldom sung below it.
He being paid to satirise or flatter, as the psalm says, indicting a good matter.
He deemed being in a lone isle among friends that without any danger of a riot,
he might for long lying make himself amends and singing as he sang in his warm youth.
Agree to a short armistice with truth.
He had travelled amongst the Arabs, Turks and Franks to get Franks are all Europeans and knew the self of the different nations,
and having lived with people of all ranks, had something ready upon most occasions.
That's usually when he was asked to sing. He gave the different nations something national.
Twas all the same to him. God save the king or suck it up according to the fashion of his muse.
May increment of anything from the high lyric down to the low rational.
If Pindar sing horse races, what should hinder himself from being pliable as Pindar?
So, like one of my favourite couplets in Byron. Um, I think partly I love the Hinder and Pindar rhyme.
I, as an American born classicist, would probably say Pindar.
Um, but clearly, if you're an aristocrat who went to hero, the correct pronunciation is Pindar.
I love it when rhymes tell us how to pronounce things.
I also like to sing horse races, because Pindar does have this appellation odes to victorious athletes.
And he kind of starts off with a victorious horse whose name is victory bearer.
Um, but also, I like that kind of political sense. We might be getting in here of singing horse races.
Um, there's something I think political going on there. Um, and then, you know, in Greece, he said he'd sing some sort of him like this to you.
It's interesting that he mentions that a hint. So on the one hand, we are prepared for the poet to give us some sort of truth,
but we are also told we are going to get something national with the mention of,
on the one hand, God save the Queen, King and of a French revolutionary song.
And in fact, Byron's The Isles of Greece ends up having an intimate entanglement with solemn forces him to liberty,
which will become the Greek national anthem. More on that later.
So even the hymn here ends up being present, and this will be directly responded to in Greece's national hymn.
After the performance of the Isles of Greece, we start to lose sight of our anonymous poet.
And Byron begins to back-pedal about the truthfulness even of this reportage and Paul's what I like to call a facilities.
The song, or would or could or should have.
So the modern Greek intolerable verse.
In dungeon. We do have reference to the language Modern Greek, but I think this is the only incident where a person is referred to as a modern Greek.
And I think that we might consider that this is a term tossed about in debates in the Edinburgh Review about, you know,
whether this occupied people, um, has the sense to handle, you know, their freedom, whether they are worth being freed.
Um, it's the sort of term we see in Shelley's introduction to Hellas, which is a verse play, models on the Persians,
and it's dedicated to Prince Maverick Cortez, who also happens to be Mary Shelley's Greek tutor.
It's all very embroiled. Um, and Shelley says such stuff in this overblown introduction as we are all Greeks, our laws, our literature, our religion.
What? Our arts have their roots in Greece, but for Greece we might still have been savages and idolaters.
The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious being.
Byron mentions Modern Greek in a catty aside to his and Felicia Timmins publisher John Murray about her poem Modern Greece,
which has been sent to him.
Modern Greece and the Elgin Marbles is very much a response to, um, Child Herald and its, um, upset ness about the Elgin Marbles.
Um, and he says modern Greece good for nothing, written by someone who has never been there.
Besides, why modern? You may say modern Greeks, but surely Greece is rather more ancient than ever.
It was. So for some in Europe, the modern Greek is degenerative or not even related to figures like Leonidas or Pericles,
and to others, the modern Greek is the descendant of glorious beings.
But this is exactly the sort of nonsense that Byron, who has actually been to Greece and met Greeks, would never say.
Instead, in the notes of child Harald, we have.
But instead of considering what they have then and speculating on what they may be, let us look at them as they are.
Well, now get a little bit into the plot in which this, um, poem and poet, uh, comes on stage.
The young hero Don juin is the sole survivor of a shipwreck that is part raft of the Medusa, part ryme of the Ancient Mariner,
and part out of Byron's grandfather's own narrative of his own shipwreck off the coast of Chile.
Um. Byron's grandfather was the vice Admiral John Byron, also known as Foul Weather Jack.
That's a great name for a pirate. It's much better than Jack Sparrow, I think.
Um, so he takes a lot of points directly from foul weather.
Jack. Um, but once a shipwrecked sailor has washed ashore.
The sole survivor, of course. Um. And as it turns out, onto this minor and unnamed island in the 60s in the Aegean.
Naturally, we are in more romantic and less obviously tragic territory.
So we're in The Tempest, say, or a scene out of The Argonaut or the Odyssey.
This section of the poem. Um. Uh, I I've already made my Romeo and Heidi the Pirates daughter joke.
Turn it. As a rule, shipwrecked sailors are saved or assisted by virgin princesses.
It is naturally a highly erotic situation, as by literary tradition.
Shipwrecked sailors are also, besides coincidentally, being young and handsome.
In the entries in this interesting state of being more or less naked.
So that kind of helps things along. This is a Ford Madox Ford painting.
It does not look like grease at all to me. It's very brown. It's not look like the 60s.
And she looks like she's performing actual CPR. It was.
So it is with Don, you and a girl, Heidi of 17, with jet black eyes and auburn or dark gold hair, who is not technically a princess.
Byron goes out to say, but she is the sole heiress of the iron, so she is a princess along with her slightly older companion, the handmaid Zoe.
Zoe means life. It's a very common Greek name, and we might remember that Byron uses it in the refrain of The Maid of Athens.
Zoe moves us out of her. Um, Heidi, which is not a common Greek name, but is a fairly common.
I guess maybe Swiss name would seem to come from hi, devil, I caress, and so her name literally means pet.
Um, Byron steals the name from a Greek folk song that he himself translated in 1809, but more on that a little bit later.
So the young women rescue the the man and clothe him, but so as not to arouse suspicion of Haydn's father, hide him in a cave.
Conveniently, Heidi has no mother or siblings, only a father, Lamberto, whose work happens to be piracy.
Other. Byron enjoys calling him things like a sea solicitor or sea attorney she cares
for doing in a cave where she brings in broth and a delicious breakfast.
And I like that Byron goes into the details of the breakfast. Um, this sounds like a very nice.
A good breakfast for breakfast of eggs, coffee, bread and fish.
And then later it's eggs, fruit, coffee, bread, fish, honey and wine.
And of course, it's the responsibility of a princess who finds a shipwreck sailor to provide him with a nice shirt.
We've had that out of the Odyssey. And so they do that. They furnished him entire except some stitches with a clean shirt and very spacious britches.
I, I think the original painter didn't pay attention to that.
Um, he can't understand Greek, but she speaks to him in good modern Greek, with an Ionian accent, low and sweet.
Um. Later, though, he says her, and as he interrupted, not Heidi went, eking her speech out to her protege and friend,
to pausing at the last breath, at her, at the last, her breath to take.
She saw he did not understand. Roommate.
Uh, so Romeo is another way to refer to modern Greek?
Um, because the Greeks thought of themselves as Romans.
See. Okay. So when bro, whom Byron also calls a sea attorney and a sea solicitor, goes ah, pirating again.
Um, Heidi and Julian, who have already become lovers.
Heidi is a virgin and apparently knows nothing about the facts of life whatsoever, and sees nothing wrong with this.
Um. Uh. So they progressed to becoming lovers.
And when Lambros goes pirating again, um, now he can come up to the house.
They can live openly as lovers or even as common law husband and wife, though they are not technically married.
And it's during this time that Lambros in his piracy is rumoured to have died.
So I guess they mourn him a little bit, but then they sort of have a big wedding feast and have celebrate that he's not there.
Of course, as you know, this is exactly the moment when Lambros, who is not dead, is going to return.
Um. And he's not happy. He is not happy instead of mourning him.
Um. Uh, there's there's feasting. There is dancing.
He is very, very upset about the extravagant expense.
Um, anyway, the pirate Lambo is not the first Pirate Lamberto to have appeared in a Byron tale in The Bride of Abydos,
one of his Turkish tales, the hero Saleem has been part of a crew of pirates under a Greek pirate.
Lembra and Byron, in a note, points us to a real pirate and a revolutionary.
Um, he says Lambros can gun Sonny, but it's clearly Lambros got sonis.
I love that there's a DVD you can rent about his life. I haven't found it yet.
Um, he's a very important Greek revolutionary. Um, so important that four ships of the Hellenic Navy are named after him.
So he's not an obscure pirate revolutionary.
And he's, in fact, only one level of distance from Byron.
Um, his godson is Andreas and Drusus, who happens to be the half brother of the Greek girl that Trelawney gets married to.
Anyway, one point, um, in a lot of ways, uh, the one thing that Lambros had,
the one person in the poem Lambros has anything in common with is with the anonymous poet.
They both kind of read which way the wind Blows. They're complicated and full of mixed feelings about Greece.
They've made a career out of convenience.
Um, they're also possibly stored with a fire that, under some conditions, might lead him not to be a pirate, uh, but to be a revolutionary.
Um, so Lambros arrives at this wedding feast. His reception at his people's banquet was such as fire accords to a wet blanket.
Again, one of my favourite couplets. Um. And we talk about his country's wrongs and his despair to savour had stung him from a slave to an enslaver.
The love of power and rapid gain of gold, the hardness of long habits produce the dangerous life in which he had grown old.
The mercy he had granted oft abused the sights he was accustomed to behold.
The wild seas and wild men with whom he cruised had cost his enemies a long repentance, and made him a good friend but bad acquaintance.
But something of the spirit of old Greece flashed over his soul.
A few heroic rays, such as let onward to the Golden Fleece, his predecessors in the cold and days.
Jason is, of course, also a pirate. Tis true he had no ardent love for peace.
Alas, his country showed no path to praise hate to the world and war with every nation he waged in vengeance of her degradation.
So what happens is, of course, he is not happy to see dungeon.
He threatens to sell him into slavery or just kill him on the spot.
Hide as is the way a princess's pleads for the life of her beloved um.
But instead, what happens is she's so shocked that she falls into a dead faint out of like a stroke,
falls into a coma, and some days later actually dies with.
And this is a very sad point, the unborn child within her.
So she's actually two people. And there's a very charming stanza about that.
Don Julian is sold into slavery and so his adventures go forward.
Or you might say he's plagiarised into slavery. Um, so there's a strange though postlude to this.
After this Greek episode with Heidi perished and Don ju and sold into slavery, um, Byron says.
B I o is now all desolate and bare, its dwellings down, its tenants cast away none but her own.
And father's grave is there. And nothing outward. Tells of human clay.
No stone is there to show. No tongue to say what was no dirge.
Except the hollow sees mourn or the beauty of the 60s.
So this is very strange. It's almost as if this is in a distant mythological past, um, even further away than we thought we were.
But many a Greek made in a loving song sighs or her name, and many an islander with her side story makes the night less long.
Valour was his, and beauty dwelt with her.
Um. So we have the sudden disorientation of being in the distant past.
Um, this could almost be a mythological past. And in fact, only four stanzas later we're describing, uh, um, a barrow on the fields of Troy.
So there's a kind of merging of this ancient Greeks idea.
But also, it's been long enough that Heidi has entered folk song and, um, become a song herself.
So we kind of feel like this might be a long time, although this could happen more quickly.
And then there's a second song about her sire, or perhaps the telling of stories, which could be any number of Cliff songs.
I'm sure there's long songs about cut Sonis, or indeed could be the Odyssey itself, and there's a lot of similarities to that.
Um, so in Don two and he alludes to this loving song, but he is pointing us directly to translation.
Of the remix song in the notes to Child Herald, where we have been on Mr. Petty Valley or Delta t hiding and we get this translation I end to.
It's very bouncy. It sounds a little bit like Annabel Lee.
I enter the Garden of Roses, beloved and fair eyed.
It's morning where Flora reposes for Shirley. I see her in the eye.
Lovely. That's how I implore thee. Receive this country for my tongue which utters that song to adore thee.
Yet trembles for what is sung. As the branch of the bidding of nature.
Adds fragrance and fruit to the tree through her eyes, through her every feature shines the soul of the young lady.
Um. We didn't really know how awful this was for a long time because, uh, the the Greek poem was missing and only.
And this is also the only source. Byron is the only source for this particular Greek folk song.
But it did emerge in the 40s. And then we got we were like, whoa!
Okay, first of all, um, Byron expands 16 lines to 36.
So there's a lot of filler. Um, Byron is the only source of.
But this poem, the copy of the folk song was made by Doo Doo Rock.
Um, who is the cousin of the maid of Athens? She's half Greek and half French.
Um, uh, whoever transcribed this poem, I think, was illiterate in Greek and is translating it pretty phonetically.
We have misspellings. We have problems with word spacing and so forth.
Um, uh, and we can now see the changes that Byron has made.
Um, I have a slightly different translation on my page, but follow what you have up there.
I come into the garden, most lovely Heidi, where you gather roses and flowers at dawn.
I beseech you, girl, um, with all your wisdom, that my tongue may utter two words to you.
And she, a good and modest girl, breaks off and gives me a branch of the lemon tree.
This is part of this language of flowers that Byron is sort of fascinated with,
where girls in the audience, who are not taught to read and write and communicate by flowers,
and truly an eye from bitterness, will see no flowers but bitter Daphne or oleander to chew it, um, or oleander is poisonous and truly orient.
Oleander is very bitter. Their lovely and decadent beauty. Open the gates of [INAUDIBLE].
Turn the keys to unlock them. That, my dear miserable soul may enter.
And the two arrows you shot with your eyes. Struck me, lady, and wounded me.
Body and soul. But tell me my light. How long lost I thought back.
How long will I torture my heart for you? Um.
This is a better poem, I think. Obviously, even in this not very good translation.
Um, it's a more modern poem. It's a more oblique poem. It's a darker book.
Um, there is no suggestion in the Greek that Heidi is false, which Byron adds in his translation, only that she will not yield.
The Heidi and Duncan is very yielding and utterly true.
And in fact, the word for wisdom here is related to the same word as we have, like with the wise and foolish virgins.
Um, in the New Testament. And Heidi is definitely a very foolish virgin.
That's how she loses her virginity in the first place.
Um, so Byron changes to the poem are conscious, if not admirable, and he seems to go back to the original,
though, when he's describing Hades eyes in dungeon because he describes them not as lances but as arrows.
Um, Byron has mentioned a second. Oh, this is the actual transcription and Byron's actual attempt to translate it.
And this is it, put to music.
Byron has mentioned a second poem or oral tradition at the end of the Socratic episode and the event, the adventures of her sire.
Any number of Greek clef songs might supply this, as we said, but there is a second Greek source for the plot of the Greek episode In dungeon.
Though there is some debate about the influence, but I am utterly convinced that they are completely entangled.
It's an anonymous, creeping Renaissance poem, so roughly from Shakespeare's time, and printed as all such poems were in Venice.
Byron might have got hold of it there. Um, he, in a couple of letters, mentions this poem.
He mentions it as damn nonsense, and he deplores the quality of it's Greek, but it's in it's in Crete, in medieval Greek.
So it's like Greek, Old Greek with a Venetian accent.
Um, and I don't think he I mean, even in this version, it's with the parallel modern Greek translation.
So it's not particularly easy.
Um, uh, there's the connection of the plot and the poem share some folksong imagery with the love song eyes as Eros, a fragrant garden.
Death being referred to as Hades. That's really standard for Greek folk songs, but I think must have struck, um,
Byron as as quite wonderful that in modern Greek songs the underworld is Hades.
Maybe there's even a connection in his mind with Heidi. Um, briefly, the plot of Evil Scapula, the shepherdess.
Um, it is, like most pastoral poetry, quite sophisticated in its folk scene as.
So it pretends to be folksy, but whoever has composed it is really highly literate and aware of a lot of literary tropes and so forth.
Um, so it's a pastoral tragedy set on a Greek island, Crete.
A handsome young shepherd meets a beautiful shepherdess who is tending her flock.
The shepherd is so stricken with love at the sight of her.
In fact, her eyes, cupids in her eyes, shoot out arrows at him, and he falls down into a dead faint.
This might be the dam. Nonsense. He falls into a dead faint, and the the shepherdess thinks he is actually dead.
She revives him and takes him to a very comfortable and well-appointed cave.
Um. She also feeds him cheese, cheese curds, cold roasted lamb, spring water and wine.
I like that we get these lists of food. Um. The shepherdess, like Heidi, has no mother or siblings.
Only an old father. But he is away building a wall.
They spend the night and promised to see each other again in a month, when the father will again be away.
The shepherd makes this promise, but when the time comes, he is ill, so he does not make the appointments.
And he is late by a month. You can imagine what happens when he arrives, um, at the meeting place.
He does not meet the beautiful shepherdess, but her old father,
who is in black and is in deep mourning for his daughter, who has died of lovesickness.
She has fallen into a kind of deathly swoon like Heidi.
Um, and so there are a lot of similarities there too.
Also, as the shepherd is feverish, he has a set of prophetic dreams, three prophetic dreams, which we also have in Giovanni.
Um, so it seems to me that there's just not any kind of doubt that, um, similarities, uh, are not coincidences.
And there's a triangulation among the shepherdess,
which is also being read around the same time by Greek poets looking for a fresh idiom for a new literature.
And the folk song that Byron has translated, um, in the folk song, the lover threatens to die.
But in both The Shepherdess and Don't You? And it's the beloved girl who dies.
And then in Dawn and when he goes to describe Heidi's eyes, her hair, I said, what was auburn?
But her eyes were black as death. That seems to go back to.
You know, I didn't translate that poem very well. And he makes those eye glances, arrows and not lances, even though lances glances and enhances.
Doesn't take it this time. Rains in it. Um.
He translates two Greek, uh, poem. Three Greek poems in the the end of Child Herald.
Um, and there's another one which is the war song of Regas.
Regas also was mentioned in that note together with the pirate.
Um, so it's one of the remix songs, the song which is known as the Greek Marsyas.
Um. And sung to the same tune. Um uh was thought to be by Regas.
It may not be. We have Hobhouse as account of how they came to hear it.
Senior Lando of Rosti is the son of the person who may be said to govern the Morea.
That's the Peloponnese. On hearing the name of Riga, Riga Piraeus, who is a poet and revolutionary, though he does not look like one.
Um, when he was playing with me, a party of chess jumped suddenly from the sofa.
I threw over the board and, clasping his hands,
repeated the name of the patriot with a thousand passionate exclamations, the tears streaming down his cheeks.
The same person recited with ecstasy the war song of the unfortunate Greek.
George Findlay, in his History of Greece, written 30 years later, has a further embroidery of the tale via Byron.
Lord Byron used to describe an evening passed in the Company of London in 1809,
with a spirit that rendered the scene worthy of a place in dungeon, and in fact it kind of exists within it.
Um. After supper Lindos commenced singing through his nose.
Regas, Hymn to Liberty, and a new Cadi, passing near to the house, inquired of the cause of the discordant hubbub, and native Musselman replied,
it is only the young primate London, who is drunk, and who was singing hymns to the new year of the Greeks, whom they call and left there.
Yeah, panacea is the Virgin Mary, but could be here a goddess.
Um, so it's Our Lady of Freedom. It's a hymn to freedom.
Um. Hobhouse and Byron both translated this poem, and they're both chatty about each other's translation.
Um, Hobhouse makes a point that Byron has completely misconstrued the metre, and Byron says that Hobhouse is translation is meant.
And they're both correct. So this is completely the wrong metre.
Um, again, this should be able to be sung to the French tune.
We will notice, though here that we have again the idea of the 300 of Sparta.
Sparta. Sparta. Why in slumbers? Lethargic. Does that lie?
Awake and join their numbers, with Athens old ally Leonidas recalling the chief of ancient Song who saved he once from falling the terrible,
the strong, who made that bold diversion in old Thermopylae and warring with the Persian to keep the country free.
Hobhouse is much more literal.
He keeps the metre. Exactly.
And one of the things that Byron has changed is, in the Greek Um Leonidas um is victorious, completely victorious at Thermopylae.
I think Byron realises that, uh, his English audience is probably more up to date with their Greek history than the average Greek patriot.
And so he, he he's a little pedantic and he simply changes it.
But we see that Hobhouse keeps that bit at Thermopylae victorious or the flying Persian fans.
Um, I'll just mention that, um, there's a nod to the Persians in both of these.
Um. We're rounding the corner. So there is a Greek poem that responds.
Um, I mentioned that Greek poets in the run up to the Greek Revolution were also reading the Shepherd s, but they were reading Byron as well.
And the poet in particular I am thinking of is Dionysius Solomon's ten years younger than Byron.
Born on him to us, and educated in Italy. They may have met each other.
They certainly, um, kind of could have crossed paths.
So, um, he is a Venetian patrician blood, or at least partly, um, who had themselves been refugees from Crete.
Um, he is bilingual. He has been educated as most of the Ionian Islands, educated entirely in Italian and in Italy.
His earliest poems are written in Italian and published in Italian.
He returns to Zakynthos in 1818. Canto three with the Isles of Greece.
Um has been written in 1819 and will be published in 1821.
So imagine a Greek poet reading the isles of Greece, and the description of the kind of shifty Greek poet singing the song.
Um, and what your reaction might be. Um.
In 1822. Suleiman's had an encounter with spirito chickpeas, the poet and statesman who would deliver Byron's funeral oration,
and he who would become the new nation's first prime minister on and hearing almost as excellent Italian poetry,
is supposed to have said, your aptitude reserves for you a place on the Italian Parnassus.
But the first places there are already taken. The Greek Parnassus does not yet have its daunting.
I mean, that's quite an inspiration for a young poet.
Like like we don't have this in our literature. Why don't you come be our first great poet?
Um, in the modern time? Uh. Solomon's demurred. He said his Greek was not fluent enough.
But your group has started him on a course of study with a focus on the demotic language.
That is, the language of the people and of the folksongs.
So Solomon is studying the same sorts of poems, um, romantic folk songs, revolutionary hymns,
and Cretan Renaissance works, and in some cases the exact same poems that Byron is reading.
Um, so his first poem in Greek, and indeed his only completed poem, The Hymn to Liberty,
was written in May of 1823 and published in Messalonskee in 1824, probably on the very printing press Byron brings with him.
Um. The opening, as with Byron's Isles of Greece, shares elements of Regas poem.
This idea of, um, people rising from the dead, the holy bones of the ancient Greeks, and his later, even more specific, um, with the 300.
The poem directly addresses addresses the goddess of freedom in 158 stanzas in rhyme to 15 syllable couplets,
turned into quatrains that treat of the War of Independence thus far.
But around stanzas 83, um, we suddenly have a pastoral interval of dancing girls, and we are back at the wedding of Don Dewan and Heidi.
It's not a translation of the Isles of Greece, but it is a direct response or rebuttal of it.
And the girls who will suckle slaves are redeemed from the plagiarism.
Um, as one critic has said, among the most moving responses of a Greek poet to a foreign poem, we'll see.
He's speaking back to Byron. Byron was writing before the revolution.
Um, and we are now the writing after the revolution has begun.
In the shade, hand in hand in the shade. I also see.
So the Greek poet of dungeon has seen it. But now this Greek poet is there in the same room.
I also see the lily fingered virgins where they do their dance in the dance.
They sweetly turn their lovely erotic eyes and the dark breezes toss their all gold hair.
My soul rejoices. Had the breast of each girl.
Sweet bosoms. Bosom readies the milk of courage among the grass and the flowers.
I do not raise my cup. Freedom loving songs like Pindar, I sing out.
Risen from the holy bones of the Greeks. And with the courage of old days.
Hail, Liberty! Hail! Interestingly, um, Solomon says he doesn't expect these virgins to dance over a cliff or to suckle slaves.
He expects them to be the mothers of free men.
And he's also fully aware not just of the isles of Greece, but of the context of the Isles of Greece.
We know this because he mentions Pindar. So Pindar is no longer singing horse races, but he is singing freedom loving songs.
And then he quotes the refrain of his own poem. So that's kind of a neat trick.
Um, so we have this, uh, Byronic knot in the middle of the Greek national anthem.
Um, this is how it was first printed. He does get a little bit of Dante in there, and this is the actual part of the printing press that has survived.
This is the poem set to music. This is the part of the poem that has become the Greek national anthem.
Um, set to music in 1826 but only adopted as the national anthem in 1864.
And, um, the musical now forgive me. Signori zarrab DynCorp C2.
Spath U you didn't Romy Signori the lab you know c pool your maitre d optical girl of no.
Many tonali no. Diana okay, so I brought, uh, um, the nominee here.
Okay. And I left the case, um, brought, um, there are many heroes.
Yeah, I left the, uh, case.
I brought, uh, um, real money here.
The hero left very. I love this hymn.
I love this hymn and its deep entanglements with Byron.
I love Byron and Solomons and their mutual piracy, which are also in the hands of poets.
The taking and the granting of liberties.