LORD BYRON-HAYERI MASIN

[564312]

Barev Bolorin...Here is part of Byron's letter that I was reading and thought to share it with everyone.

"...a noble nation, which has partaken of the proscription and bondage of the Jews and of the Greeks, without the sullenness of the former or the servility of the letter. This people has attained riches without usury, and all the honours that can be awarded to slavery without intrigue. But they have long occupied, nevertheless, a part of "the House of Bondage", who has lately multiplied her many mansions. It would be difficult, perhaps, to find the annals of a nation less stained with crimes than those of the Armenians, whose virtues have been those of peace and their vices those of compulsion. But whatever may have been their destiny - and it has been better - wathever it may be in future, their country must ever be one of the most interesting on the globe; and perhaps their language only requires to be more studied to become more attractive. If the Scriptures are rightly understood it was in Armenia that Paradise was placed, Armenia, which has paid as dearly as the descendants of Adam for that fleeting participation of its soil in the happiness if Him who was created from its dust. It was in Armenia that the flood first abated. and the dove alighted.

But with the disappearance of Paradise itself may be dated almost the unhappiness of the country, for though long a powerful kingdom, it was scarcely ever an independent one, and the satraps of Persia and the *****s of Turkey have alike desolated the region wheri God created man in his own image".

[vava]

56:

 

Nice post. I believe it was Lord Byron who actually attempted to learn to read & write Armenian because he was looking for a challenge.

 

Apparently he didn't find it very easy. He later wrote about his experience to a friend. I'm not too sure, but I believe the quote goes something like this:

 

[564312]

Vava

 

He actually did manage to learn Armenian and translated an original Armenian Manuscript of Paul the apostle to English. I love his poetry and have great respect for him because of his thoughts on Armenia...Actually I was contemplating same thoughts before I red the above letter… alas the world does not acknowledge Armenia the way Byron did.

[vava]

Hmmm. I have never studied Byron, and have only read excerpts of his works in passing, so please excuse me for not having my facts correctly. But I do recall reading the above quotation (by Byron) expressing his frustation while attemting to learn Armenian.

 

I just wish I could find the source....

 

Thanx, v

[Arpa]

Here is what Armenian sources say about Lord Byron, (born George Noel Gordon Byron 1788, died 1824 Missolounk, Greece.)

 

In 1816 Byron visited Sourb Ghazar in Venice where he acquainted himself with Armenian culture by the Mkhitarist Brotherhood. He learned the Armenian language from Fr. H. Avgerian and attended many seminars about language and history. He wrote "English grammar and the Armenian" in 1817, and "Armenian grammar and the English" (1819) in which he quoted samples from classicanl and modern Armenian. He participated in the compilation of an English Armenian dictionary (1821) and he wrote the preface where he explained the relationship of the Armenians with and the oppression of the Turkish "*****s" and the Persian satrapes, and their struggle of liberation. His two main translations are the Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, several chapters of Khorenatsi's History and sections of Lambronatsi's "Orations". When in Polis he discovered discrepancies in the Armenian v the English version of the Bible and translated some passages that were either missing or deficient in the Englsih version. His fascination was so great that he attempted to replace the Cain story of the Bible with that of the legend of Haik(I don't understand this). He may be credited with the birth of armenology and its propagation. In 1823 he moved to Greece and participated in the revolution against the Ottoman rule where he was commander of one of the battallions. In 1824 he contracted a fever and died as a result. His profound lyricism and ideological courage has inspired many an Armenian poet, the likes of Fr. Gh. Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, H. Toumanian, Ruben Vorberian and others.

[gamavor]

Now I know for sure: Lord Byron WAS Armenian!

 

 

Mail on Sunday (London)

September 21, 2003

 

Byron, sex and the city

 

by DAISY GOODWIN

 

 

THE nonagenarian Contessa glared at me.Her white-gloved hands gripped

the balcony in rage.'You have no right to be here,' she hissed in a

terrifying mixture of French and Italian. 'Lord Byron came here to be

private. Now there are people coming here all the time looking for

him.

 

Surely the people who live here deserve to be left in peace.' As she

spat out the words, a burly concierge with a sinister-looking bandage

round his head emerged from the other side of the oleander-filled

courtyard to escort me off the premises (it was his 12-year-old son

who had unwittingly let me in while his babo was having a siesta).

 

But as I made my way slowly towards the magnificent wrought-iron

gates, I took in the height and the splendour of the rooms where

Byron lived for three years with his 14 servants, illegitimate

daughter and assorted mistresses, and I caught a glimpse of the stone

passageway leading down to the Palazzo's water entrance on the Grand

Canal

 

where the poet kept his fox, wolf, two monkeys and several 'very

good-natured mastiffs'. It was down this passageway that Byron would

saunter to indulge in his two favourite Venetian pastimes: sex

swimming. It was after reading-Byron's wonderfully funny, salacious

and cynical accounts of three-year sojourn in Venice, I was making a

documentary the poet for BBC2, that I decided I wanted to see the

city through his eyes.

 

Having failed, thanks to the Contessa, to revel in the view from his

bedroom window, I decided to retrace one of Byron's most habitual

journeys in Venice: the fouranda-half mile journey from the Palazzo

Mocenigo to the Lido on the rim of the Lagoon.

 

BYRON liked nothing better than to swim this distance. In his time

the Lido was a four-mile stretch of sand where the poet kept his

horses and where the courtesans held naked swimming parties; now the

Lido is one of the most regimented beaches on the planet and while

there are many women in states of near nakedness, none of them is

swimming (I suppose gold leather bikinis and water don't really mix).

 

The day was hot but I was the only person to venture into the sea

beyond calf level. Perhaps this was understandable given the

murkiness of the water.

 

In the early 19th Century the pollution would have been even worse

most of the canals were little better than open sewers, although this

did not appear to deter Byron.

 

He was inordinately proud of his swimming this was the one physical

activity where his club foot was an advantage ... 'a fin is much

better than a foot'. On June 25, 1818, he boasted in a letter to a

friend that he had won a race from the Lido to the Grand Canal

against three younger men and that although 'I was in the sea from

half past four till a quarter past eight without touching or resting,

I could not be much fatigued, having had a piece in the forenoon and

taking another in the evening at ten of the clock.' Byron adds in a

typically selfdeprecatory postscript: 'Wind and tide were both with

me. Please send corn rubbers, two dozen recollect they are light and

can come in letters.' The rubbers were urgently required by the

29-year-old aristocrat he already had at least one illegitimate child

and had endured several doses of the clap but he showed no signs of

flagging. In a letter written to two of his friends he lists his

Venetian mistresses to date: 'The Tarruscelli; the Da Mosti; the

Spineda; the Lotti; the Eleonora da Bezzi (who was the King of

Naples's mistress at least one of them); the Theresina of Mazzurata;

the Glettenheimer and her sister, the Luiga, and her mother, the

Fornaretta; the Santa; the Caligari; the Portiera; the Tentora and

her sister, etc etc. Some are Countesses and some of them cobblers'

wives some noble, some middling, some low...

 

and all whores.' Byron's cheerful bravado about his promiscuity in

Venice was perhaps a reaction to the circumstances in which he left

the 'tight little island' of his birth.

 

His yearlong marriage to heiress Annabella Milbanke had ended amid

rumours of sodomy and incest. As a result the high-society hostesses

shunned him.

 

Byron left England for ever in 1816.

 

He found the Venice of 1816 a refuge a louche backwater, a city in

decline. Ruled by the Hapsburgsit had lost the trading empire that

had given the Serene Republic its strength.

 

Venetian aristocrats were forbidden to work, so they took their

pleasures seriously. When Byron arrived, the city was a byword for

decadence. The Venetian courtesans were famously beautiful and their

swimming parties, which had so amused Casanova, were the secret

ambition of every young nobleman starting out on the Grand Tour.

 

But though Byron may have paid for a few of his 200 conquests, most

of them came without a price tag. He explained this system of

organised adultery in a letter to his sister Augusta: 'A woman is

virtuous here who limits herself to her husband and one lover. Those

who have two, three or more are considered a little wild, but only

those who are indiscriminate, diffuse or who form a low connection

such as the Princess of Wales with her courier are considered as

overstepping the bounds of the modesty of marriage.' Byron took full

advantage of the moral climate. He took lodgings with a merchant

called Segato in the Frezzeria, a shopping street to the north-west

of the Piazza San Marco. The rooms were dark but their shortcomings

were amelioratedby the attractions of the merchant's wife,

22-year-old Marianna Segati. Byron was lavish in his affections

towards Marianna, but she was swiftly followed by La Fornarina, who

was married to a baker.

 

AFTER the neurotic sophistication of his London paramours such as

Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron revelled in the fact that La Fornarina was

an illiterate peasant. He loved the way she would cross herself if

she heard a church bell ringing while they were making love in a city

that had 120 churches.

 

La Fornarina became Byron's housekeeper as well as his mistress when

he moved into the Mocenigo Palazzo in the San Mateo district. I

stayed there in a room overlooking the Grand Canal. At dawn, the view

from the narrow Gothic window must be as breathtaking as it was 175

years ago when Byron wrote: 'O Venice! Venice! When thy marble walls;

Are level with the waters, there shall be; A cry of nations o'er thy

sunken halls; A loud lament along the sweeping sea!' Coming up the

canal from San Marco, the Palazzo Mocenigo is on the right just after

the San Mateo stop. The palace has a plaque to the poet put up by the

Byron Society, but more interesting to me was the tantalising glimpse

of the

 

red plush splendours of the interior where I could just make out the

tiny figure of the Contessa, drinking from a bone china cup.

 

For a better sense of the interiors of Byron's time I visited the

Ca'Rezzonico, the Museum of 18th Century Venice. In the courtyard of

the museum is an original gondola, complete with a felze a wooden

shelter where the blinds could be lowered for complete privacy. This

was the sort of gondola that Byron described in his poem Beppo, A

Venetian Tale: 'It glides along the water looking blackly; Just like

a coffin clapt in a canoe; Where none can make out what you say or

do.' On the third floor of the museum is a perfectly preserved

apothecary's shop, complete with a shelf of remedies for venereal

disease in one corner and a shelf of aphrodisiacs in the other.

 

Byron may have visited this very shop. He took advantage of every

opportunity. He attended the Ridotto, the late-night musical

assemblies, and made countless incognito assignations wearing a mask.

But as Lent approached and the celebrations reached their final

frenzy, Byron ran out of steam.

 

He wrote his most famous poem, So We'll Go No More A'Roving, in a

state of utter sexual exhaustion Byron's 'sword' really had 'outworn

its sheath'.

 

He was now in the mood for some intellectual rigour, which he found

studying Armenian.

 

Byron would take his gondola to the Armenian monastery on the Isolate

San Lazzaro every morning and spend hours in the library taking

instruction from the monks. Today in the monastery shop there is a

postcard with a quote from the poet, saying that after coming to the

monastery 'the visitor will be convinced that there are other and

better things, even in this life'. I think this still stands true

today the monastery is a cool oasis in the heat of a Venetian summer

and the good-natured piety of the Armenian priest who gives the

guided tours is almost palpable.

 

But while Byron's attachment to the monastery was sincere, he was not

about to change his ways: 'Venice and I agree very well in the

mornings I study Armenian, and in the evenings I go out sometimes and

indulge in coition always.' Ironically, considering the number of

notches on his Venetian bedpost, it was in this city that Byron had

his most harmonious, and certainly his most long-lived, relationship

with a woman. The object of his affections was a 20-year-old blonde

called Teresa who was married (of course!) to Count Guicolli, who was

more than 30 years her senior and suspected of murdering his first

wife.

 

THEIR first meeting was in the salon of the Contessa Benzoni, a

former courtesan who had married up and turned respectable. Byron was

initially reluctant. He told the Contessa: 'You know very well I

don't want any new acquaintances; if they are ugly because they are

ugly and if they are pretty because they are pretty.' But his

curiosity got the better of him and the next day he was sending his

personal gondolier, Tita Falcieri, to bring Teresa to his house. She

wrote later: 'I was strong enough to resist at that first encounter,

but was so imprudent as to repeat it the next day, when my strength

gave way for B was not a man to confine himself to sentiment.' No

indeed. Byron later recalled that the essential part of the business

kept them occupied for 'four continuous days'. It was a relationship

that lasted for another four years and ended only when Byron left

Italy to fight in the Greek War of Independence. Teresa went on to

outlive Byron by 50 years, proudly calling herself the poet's one

true love to her many subsequent lovers.

 

Byron's time in Venice was filled with a heady mixture of constant

coition and gruelling physical exertion and yet somehow amid all

these activities he managed to write great poetry, including the

first two cantos of what I consider his finest work, Don Juan.

 

Try reading Beppo, A Venetian Tale and the beginning of Don Juan to

get a sense of Byron's inimitable voice: satirical, worldly, comic

and selfdeprecatory, a tone miles away from the gloomy self-obsessed

posturings of his earlier work. I think it is no accident that

Venice, with its combination of great beauty and utter worldliness,

brought out the best in Byron the poet.

 

Before I left Venice, I took a gondola ride at midnight, the hour

when Byron would take his visitors on a tour of the city, and it felt

like the most genuinely Byronic moment of my trip.

 

The tourists had disappeared, the vaporettos had stopped for the

night and the only sounds were of the water lapping against the walls

of the palazzos and the guttural shouts of the gondoliers. At this

moment, I forgave the city its prices, its pigeons and the tatty

tourist shops. Like Byron I felt that: 'All Venice's disadvantages

are more than compensated by the sight of a single gondola.' . Daisy

Goodwin is presenting a 30-minute arts programme, Essential Byron, on

BBC2 next Saturday at 11.20pm.

 

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg74291.html

 

 

More:

 

http://www.iatp.am/byron/years.htm

 

[nairi]

For anyone who is interested, this Saturday BBC 2 is airing the first part of a two-part drama on Lord Byron. The second part is shown on Sunday. See THIS LINK for more info.

 

Following this drama on Saturday, there's an extra 30-minute documentary on Byron, "Essential Byron". See THIS LINK for more info.

[bellthecat]

Here is Byron pictured arriving at St. Lazare monastery and getting the red carpet treatment from the monks there. It's from a painting by Ayvanovski, done in 1898 - long after the actual event, so I wonder if he was welcomed to the island in quite so grand a way.

 

http://mysite.freeserve.com/virtualani/byron_venice.jpg

[MJ]

Steve,

 

Aivasovski's brother has been a very high profile Mkhitarian monk. I would suspect that Aivazovski has painted the presented painting based on the stories conveyed to him by his brother.

[bellthecat]

Steve,

 

Aivasovski's brother has been a very high profile Mkhitarian monk. I would suspect that Aivazovski has painted the presented painting based on the stories conveyed to him by his brother.

True Martin, but it IS a painting - and since Aivazovski could turn little waves into big stormy ones, I'm sure he could just as easily turn a small welcoming commitees into a big, ceremonial, red-carpeteted one :-)

 

Actually, given that Byron went to Venice to escape attention, it is unlikely that he was well known enough there to have merited such a grand reception.

 

Byron later wrote why his studies of Armenian didn't get quite as far advanced as he had hoped. To paraphrase, he wrote that although his Armenian tutors had stresed to him that Armenia was the original location of Paradise, he was more interested in finding that Paradise in the arms of the women of Venice!

 

Steve

[gamavor]

Byron later wrote why his studies of Armenian didn't get quite as far advanced as he had hoped. To paraphrase, he wrote that although his Armenian tutors had stresed to him that Armenia was the original location of Paradise, he was more interested in finding that Paradise in the arms of the women of Venice!

 

I told you he was Armenian

[nairi]

My two favorite lines in part 1 of the drama I watched tonight:

 

Messenger: "There's a naked lady in the bedroom."

Lord Byron: "I'll have it in a minute."

 

And,

 

"I like a woman to talk, or I'm left with the suspicion that she's thinking."

 

There were many more of course, but these two really struck me.

He hasn't left for Venice yet. Tomorrow is part 2 when he exiles himself. I have a feeling not much, if anything at all, will be said about his stay with the Armenians. I think overall that whole episode with the Armenians is so small and insignificant compared to everything else that happened in his life that it shouldn't be surprising if they leave it out. It's only we, Armenians, who have blown it up and made it look as if his stay at San Lazzaro was the most important thing in his life.

[bellthecat]

For anyone who is interested, this Saturday BBC 2 is airing the first part of a two-part drama on Lord Byron.

I just watched it. It was OK, but nothing startling or very original (and not even any nudity worth mentioning - though Venice is tomorrow night!).

 

Actually parts of the dialogue were unintentionally funny - at times I felt that it might turn into an episode of "League of Gentlemen" or something similar (if anyone knows what on earth I'm talking about!)

 

But maybe I'll start to read that book of Byron's poems that has been lying unread on my bookshelf for the past 5 years. "When We Two Parted" struck a chord with me.

[MJ]

True Martin, but it IS a painting - and since Aivazovski could turn little waves into big stormy ones, I'm sure he could just as easily turn a small welcoming commitees into a big, ceremonial, red-carpeteted one :-)

 

Actually, given that Byron went to Venice to escape attention, it is unlikely that he was well known enough there to have merited such a grand reception.

 

Byron later wrote why his studies of Armenian didn't get quite as far advanced as he had hoped. To paraphrase, he wrote that although his Armenian tutors had stresed to him that Armenia was the original location of Paradise, he was more interested in finding that Paradise in the arms of the women of Venice!

 

Steve

Steve,

 

I would suspect that it is easy to find out. All it may take is to contact the Mkhitarian headquarter and ask what is knowm about Lord Byron's reception by the Mkhitarians.

Edited September 28, 2003 by MJ

[nairi]

Well, clearly the BBC had no idea how Byron was received at San Lazaro since they skipped that whole bit. In fact, as I had predicted, nothing about Armenians was shown at all. But at least we know how he feels about paintings.

 

"I detest paintings. The most pointless of all the arts."