The Byron Society of Georgia
- The Byron Society of Georgia
The year 2012 was full of interesting meetings and events for the Byron Society of Georgia. First of all we have to mention the activities arranged by the students of the Byron School of Tbilisi: one on 22 January – a short performance ‘The Boy Byron’ staged in the Ada Theatre (The Byron School) – the other, held on 19 April, reciting Byron in two languages: English and Georgian.
The Georgian Academy of Sciences invited Professor Innes Merabishvili to deliver a public lecture on Byron and Galaktion. Galaktion Tabidze (1891–1956) is the greatest Georgian poet of the twentieth century who came under Byron’s spell and he became known as ‘the Georgian Byron’. This lecture was delivered on 20 June 2012 and two books were launched that day. The first is a monograph entitled Galaktion’s Meri: In Search of a Prototype by Innes Merabishvili, that aims to prove that one of the most enigmatic characters of Georgian poetry, Mary, was composed under the influence of Lord Byron’s unreciprocated love for Mary Chaworth, artistically developed in Russian poetry by Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok and others. The other book is a bilingual volume of Galaktion Tabidze’s poems published in Nottingham in 2011 by Critical, Cultural and Communication Press.
The end of the year 2012 was mostly dedicated to the arrangement of Lord Byron’s 225th anniversary on 22 January 2013, which was hosted by Tbilisi State University. The event was attended by the ambassadors of Great Britain, Italy and Greece and reported in the Georgian Journal, an English-language newspaper. Nugzar B. Ruhadze wrote: ‘The 600-seat hall of the University Theater was packed full with lovers of poetry and adherents to Lord Byron. [Innes Merabishvili] read excerpts from Byron’s works together with the British Ambassador and one of her colleagues in her own translation […] musical numbers were performed by the graduates of the Byron School of Tibilisi […] The impression was truly grand’. The finale of the event was a recital of ‘Brindisi’ from Verdi’s La Traviata.
