Locating Byron: Languages, Voices, and Displaced Utterances
2007; University of Iowa; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0031-7977
Autores Tópico(s)Translation Studies and Practices
ResumoExhausted and excited after crossing the Alps and sailing on Lake Maggiore, Byron arrived in Milan on 12 October 1816 and, the following day, wrote to his half-sister Augusta with no small degree of satisfaction: I have got to Milan. (1) He had finally reached Italy. Soon after his arrival, he devoted himself to some seriously intensive sightseeing, and, in his next letter to Augusta dated 15 October 1816, listed everything he had seen: I have been at Churches, Theatres, libraries, and picture galleries. If Byron has not much to say to her about the art galleries (he would provide a more expansive account of them to John Murray a few days later), he describes in some detail the manuscript collection (preserved in the Ambrosian library), of original love-letters and verses of Lucretia de Borgia & Cardinal Bembo (BLJ 5:114). And, at this very point in his account, a curious shift occurs, one in which an elaborate interweaving of different places and times suddenly germinates out of his geographical and cultural position in Milan in late 1816. For the manuscripts offer him the opportunity to leave the Lombard capital behind and move on to other geographies and different times. Inspired by Lucretia and Bembo's epistles, his imagination takes him back to England and his relationship with Augusta (one of Lucretia's signatures is a cross, just like those his sister had used in her correspondence with him), to Renaissance Rome and Ferrara (crucial cities in Lucretia's biography), and to a virtual place of multilingual interaction, a zone of polyglottic exchange, between the Spanish of the verses and the Italian of the letters (BLJ 5:115). Based on a pattern established during Byron's Mediterranean Grand Tour, this sudden departure from a specific situation towards one or more different spatio-temporal locations manifests itself each time he arrives in a new city during his peregrinations around the Italian peninsula. What begins as the description of a specific urban landscape for the benefit of family and friends at home mutates into a game of references to other places and times, a projection towards other geographies and cultures. For the poet, each location has the potential to unleash a geo-cultural phantasmagoria. Indeed, it is hardly a controversial statement to observe that Byron's life was deeply embedded in questions of place and location or that his works draw on a of movement, to borrow Philip Shaw's term. (2) Yet, Byron's first encounters with Milan and other Italian cities point up some further, usually overlooked, aspects of his geo-cultural imagination that deserve closer inspection. If, for him, place is a palimpsest interweaving past and present stories and identities, at the same time each location is also an unstable dimension projected towards other places. The sites of his experience and imagination are simultaneously here and somewhere else. As a result, Byron's poetics of place and movement functions through a relentless multiplication of sites that makes it oscillate between a strong sense of emplacement, the awareness of being somewhere (I have got to Milan), and the coincident experience of being propelled towards a multiplicity of other places embedded within one's own initial coordinates. A few days after his return to England from his early travels in the Mediterranean (he landed at Sheerness in Kent on 14 July 1811), Byron wrote to Augusta on 30 August: I shall leave England & all it's clouds for the East again,--I am sick of it already (BLJ 2:85). Following his prolonged and wholehearted exposure to other lands and cultures during his Grand Tour, home and the action of returning home had become disorientating experiences for the young poet. As a reaction to this loss of bearings, he started to pattern language so as to escape from home and relocate himself where he was not at the time of speaking or writing--an attempt at evading place that left significant traces on his life, his myth, and his works. …
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