For
two centuries, Lord Byron’s Armenian connection has become the stuff of
legend, and the fact that one of the greatest British poets took an
interest in the Armenian culture to the point of learning the language
has been widely discussed.
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| Byron's visit to San Lazzaro by Ivan Aivazovsky |
George
Gordon Byron was born on January 22, 1788 in London. He spent his
childhood in Aberdeenshire. His father, a womanizer mired in debts, died
when he was three years old, and he remained under the care of his
mother. After his elementary education in Aberdeen Grammar School and a
private school in Dulwich, from 1801-1805 he studied in Harrow School, a
boarding school in London. In 1805 he went up to Trinity College, in
Cambridge, where he spent three years, engaging in sexual escapades,
boxing, horse riding, and gambling.
Byron had written poetry since his teenage years, and after he recalled and burned a book called
Fugitive Pieces,
he published his actual first book,
Hours of Idleness,
in 1807. It was savagely reviewed in Edinburgh, and Byron responded in 1809 with his first major satire,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
As
it was customary for young noblemen, Byron undertook a grand tour of
Europe from 1809-1811. He avoided most of continental Europe due to the
Napoleonic wars, and instead he traveled through the Mediterranean. He
went over Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece, and he reached the
Ottoman Empire, visiting Smyrna and Constantinople. He returned to
England from Malta in July 1811.
The next year, Byron became a celebrity with the publication of the first two cantos of his poem
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
which established him as a leading romantic poet.
His
last period in England included the production of many works. However,
his rising star was darkened by scandal. Various love affairs, including
rumors of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta
Leigh, and the pressure of debt led him to seek marriage with Annabella
Millbanke in 1815. They had a daughter in the same year, but the
marriage did not end Byron’s escapades, but ended in disaster. His wife
left him in January 1816 and divorced him. Rumors and debts did not end,
and Byron left England three months later for good.
After
a few months in Switzerland, Byron wintered in Venice, where he resumed
his love adventures with two married women. It was natural, then, that
he visited for the first time the monastery of San Lazzaro in November
1816. However, he was not just a random visitor of the Mekharist
Congregation. He made his goal to get acquainted with Armenian culture
and, more importantly, to study the Armenian language with Rev. Harutiun
Avkerian (Pascal Aucher). In a letter of December 1816 to his publisher
Thomas Moore, he wrote: “By way of divertisement, I am studying daily,
at an Armenian monastery, the Armenian language. I found that my mind
wanted something craggy to break upon; and this — as the most difficult
thing I could discover here for an amusement — I have chosen, to torture
me into attention. It is a rich language, however, and would amply
repay any one the trouble of learning it. I try, and shall go on; — but I
answer for nothing, least of all for my intentions or my success.”
He collaborated with his teacher in two books:
Grammar English and Armenian
(1817), an English textbook for Armenians, and
A Grammar Armenian and English
(1819), a grammar of Classical Armenian for the use of English speakers. Byron also translated from Armenian the
Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
, two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi’s
History of Armenia,
and section of Nerses Lambronatsi’s
Orations.
The poet’s lyricism would become an inspiration for many Armenian poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
In Venice, Byron also wrote the fourth canto of
Childe Harold,
and around the same time, he published other poems. He wrote the first five cantos of
Don Juan
between
1818 and 1820, and continued his work in Ravenna from 1819-1821. He
fell in love with eighteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli, a married
aristocrat who abandoned her husband and followed him to Ravenna, Pisa,
and Genoa. Living in this city, in July 1823 accepted an offer from
representatives of the Greek independence movement and left Genoa for
Greece. He first settled in the Ionian Islands and then traveled to the
mainland in January 1824.
Byron
settled in Missolonghi, in southern Greece, and was entangled in the
internal fights of different Greek factions. However, his presence in
Greece would draw the increasing active participation of European
nations. He sold his estate in Scotland to help raise money for the
revolution. When planning an attack on Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf
of Corinth, Byron fell ill in February 1824. He made a partial
recovery, but caught a strong cold in April, and then developed a
violent fever, which caused his death in Missolonghi on April 19, 1824.
His remains were sent to England for burial in Westminster Abbey, but
this was rejected for reason of “questionable morality.” He is buried at
the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
A
statue remembers Byron in Athens, and April 19, the anniversary of his
death, is honored in Greece as “Byron Day.” A street also bears his name
in Yerevan.
