Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: annotations and whatnot
Summary of Canto 1: A British lord, suffering from some sort of vague depression, goes on a walk-about through Spain and Portugal. Bad things happen. The author talks out loud a lot. The Lord is still dpressed but, as Byron put it, "… a little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an adventure of any lively description" (Journal entry for 22 Nov. 1813). Wouldn't taking up daily exercise be easier?
There! I have worked my way through Byron's first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, all 93 stanzas. There were certain themes I worked harder on than others to footnote — I enjoyed seeing where Byron's ideas of the Byronic hero came from and as a history lesson through the Napoleonic War it was curiously spelled but cute. Other themes, such as the bullfight and the Maiden Warrior I decided would be too time consuming to concern about. If anyone can lay their hands on the works I cited in the Works Cited sections, such scholars as Chew (1936), Coleridge (1899), McConnell (1978) will be a delight and interest. My books all came from the Michigan State University libraray, and as I noted in footnote 1 of the first stanza, Perhaps there is a hell for those who write in library books, we can only hope so. Indeed! MSU has some very valuable Byron books. It is too bad they are heavily underlined in purple pen and yellow highlighters.
There was a method behind all this madness. Originally I was going to keep track of the misogyny, the violence and the pop cultural references (I think those were my words as well) that I assumed were sprinkled throughout the poem; but there were surprisingly fewer than I had thought, at least in the first canto. I was also going to write a long, curious essay on something very time consuming about the poet and this poem. But, again, life is short and why waste it on essays no one but three friends will ever read? They prove nothing except a sort of terrible hubris I assoicate with English departments throughout the United States. So I will go back to translating my Spanish poet, Amalia Iglesias Serna — a living person with living poems.
Arrivederci, George Gordon, baby!