Pirates, Poets and ‘Plagiarism’

 

How Byron translated and was translated by

Greek poetry and reality

 

Detail: ‘Byron as Don Juan, with Haidee, 1831’ Alexandre Colin.

This is the title of a lecture given in Oxford on 9 May by Alicia Stallings, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. She is an American classicist and poet who has lived in Athens for the last 25 years and is married to the Greek journalist, John Psaropoulos.
 
We think of plagiarism as intellectual dishonesty. The root of the word is plagiare – Latin ‘to kidnap or steal slaves’. Plagiarism could be seen as ‘a kidnapping of words’. The lecture began with this observation but no charge of ‘plagiarism’ was brought; rather, the lecture explored Byron’s cultural debts and influences: his to Greece and the Greeks to him.
 
Byron travelled twice to Greece: in 1809, aged 21, and again in 1823. He would die there, at Missolonghi, on 19 April 1824. In 1809 he was shipwrecked and encountered some ‘friendly’ pirates. His grandfather, Admiral John Byron, had survived a shipwreck off Chile as a young sailor and no doubt the young Byron heard many tales about what happened next. Between his visits to Greece, Byron completed his two great works, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan.
 
Don Juan tells of the adventures of a young Spaniard who, the sole survivor, is shipwrecked on an unnamed Aegean Island. There he meets Haidee, the daughter of a pirate, and her maid, Zoe. The pirates later sell him into slavery in Ottoman Constantinople.
 
The lecture featured a close reading of ‘The Isles of Greece’, Canto 3 of Don Juan (Stanzas 1-4 below)
 
THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
    Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
    Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
The Scian and the Teian muse,
    The hero’s harp, the lover’s lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse:
    Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires’ ‘Islands of the Blest’.
The mountains look on Marathon—
    And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
    I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
A king sate on the rocky brow
    Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
    And men in nations;—all were his!
He counted them at break of day—
And when the sun set, where were they?
 
Byron acknowledges numerous significant events and individuals in the history and culture of ancient Greece. These verses were first published in 1821 as the Greek struggle for liberation took on a new and decisive energy. Byron memorably writes: ‘Trust not for freedom to the Franks’ by which term he meant ‘the West’, including Britain.
 
The poem honours ‘Suli’s rock, and Parga’s shore’ and Stallings explained the relevance of the Dance of Zalongo in 1803; the syrtaki, the ‘dragging dance’, with which the mothers dragged themselves and their children over the edge of the cliff to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the Ottomans. Clearly, their sacrifice had a powerful effect on Byron.
 
Byron had an empathy with that part of Greece as it had been Christian Albanian pirates / bandits who had helped him when he had been shipwrecked in 1809. Ten years later Britain sold Parga, over which it held a protectorate, to Ali Pasha which Byron saw as an act of betrayal. This is a political poem.
 
Tradition has it that shipwrecked sailors are handsome and, when ‘rescued’ by young maidens, are inevitably all but naked. Stallings saw the origins of the name ‘Haidee’ in ‘χάδι’ – ‘caress’ and might even be translated ‘pet’ – a term of endearment in some parts of Britain. As happened in the Odyssey, when Haidee and Zoe met the shipwrecked Don Juan, they fed and clothed him.
 
The returning pirate, Lambro (based on a real pirate of that name), is not happy to find the young Spaniard being entertained in this way. Don Juan is sold into slavery and Haidee dies carrying his child.
 
Stallings suggested, but then seemed to discount, as a further possible source of Byron’s poem, the Cretan tale of ‘The Shepherdess’ – ‘Η Βοσκοπούλα’ – in which the tragic heroine dies of a broken-heart when the young man she ‘rescued’ was late in keeping their subsequent tryst.
 
The lecture moved on to consider two stand-out songs of the era of the Greek Revolution. Byron wrote that he had heard of Rigas Feraios when he visited in 1809. Stallings compared Byron’s translation of his War Song – Ο Θούριος – with that of Hobhouse.
 
It seems that Byron may have met Dionysios Solomos though that later was ten years younger than him and completed ‘The Hymn to Liberty’ in 1823, only months before Byron’s death. She said that Solomos, from Zakynthos, had been raised in Italy, that his Greek was poor when he returned to Greece but, after something of a crash-course, he acquired enough Greek to write his great work (all 158 stanzas of it). It was set to music in 1828 and adopted as the Greek National Anthem in 1864.
 
In it, Solomos references the tale of Don Juan and Haidee which illustrates that traffic flows in both directions along cultural highways. The lecture ended with Alicia Stallings singing, in a very sweet voice, the Greek National Anthem. To great applause.
 
The writer has found it worthwhile and interesting going up to Oxford to hear the three lectures Alicia Stallings has given on poems with a strong Greek connection in each of the three terms of her first year in the role of Professor of Poetry and looks forward to the ones she will give over the next three years. Had he not brought to these lectures a degree of familiarity with Greek history, language and poetry, the lectures would have been far less rewarding.
 
Richard Devereux