The International Byron Societies 2021
- The International Byron Societies 2021
- Byron Society of America
In January 2021, the BSA sponsored its forty-eighth annual session at the Modern Language Association Convention, held virtually due to the pandemic. In keeping with our ongoing celebration of Romantic bicentennials, the panel was entitled, 'Byron in 1821: A Retrospective'. Omar Miranda (San Francisco) organised and chaired the session, featuring talks by Rajarshi Banerjee (Western), Marc Gotthardt (Cambridge), Peter Manning (Stony Brook), and Chris Washington (Francis Marion).
Other events for the year were again postponed, including the Romantic Bicentennials Curran Symposium, co-sponsored with the Keats-Shelley Association of America. This symposium, entitled '1820: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Legacies of Romanticism' and organised by Sonia Hofkosh, Deidre Lynch, and Jonathan Mulrooney, will now be held virtually on 29 October 2021. It will feature panels on the 1820 volumes of John Keats and Percy Shelley, along with an virtual exhibition of relevant materials from the Houghton Library.
Looking ahead to 2022, the BSA will sponsor an MLA Convention session on Friday, 7 January in Washington D.C. The topic will be 'Byron's Stanzas: The 1822 Cantos of Don Juan ', organised by Mai-Lin Cheng (Oregon). Speakers will include Celeste G. Langan (Berkeley), Deidre Lynch (Harvard), Omar F. Miranda (San Francisco), Emily Rohrbach (Durham), and Mariam Wassif (Panthéon-Sorbonne).
Also in 2022, the BSA will continue its partnership with the Keats-Shelley Association in contributing to events commemorating the death of Percy Shelley in London and Rome. As we look to the conclusion of our Romantic Bicentennials project, the BSA is gearing up for a major event in 2024, and we would very much welcome expressions of interest from other societies in coordinating events and activities honouring the bicentennial of the death of Byron.
- Japanese Byron Society
The 2021 annual conference of the Japanese Byron Society should have been held in July 2021, in the City of Nagoya, one of the oldest cities in the middle of the main island of Japan. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from carrying out the programme of our annual conference. It has been postponed to late July 2022.
As we have already said it in the previous report, nineteen members of the JBS have devoted themselves to the publication of the Japanese edition of a Byron Dictionary for ten years (since 2011). The initial idea was presented by Prof. Takehiko Tabuki in 2010. On 19 August 2019, he sent the completed manuscripts to the publisher, Otowashobou-Tsurumishyoten, based in Tokyo.
This book is a readers' companion, in which Japanese readers will be able to learn about the entirety of the poet Lord Byron. It covers almost all information about the poet. We want to introduce Japanese readers to all contexts about Lord Byron; our predecessors have never initiated such a project. The readers will be able to refer to Lord Byron's biography, chronology, historical background, information about almost all of [End Page 175] Byron's works, letters, journals, the poet's friends and acquaintances, his influence on music, arts, and Japan, among other aspects of his legacy. It will also include portraits of Byron and his friends, pictures of the places (cities, towns, villages) or buildings which he visited or lived in during his lifetime. Our Japanese readers will also find in this book maps of Byron's tours and various pictures taken by the members of JBS in recent years in Europe.
We have read the third proofs, and are going to publish the volume in the winter of 2021. Prof. Tabuki, the chief editor, would be delighted if the IABS could help the JBS with this unprecedented project of Japanese Byronists.
Prof. Itsuyo Higashinaka is going to publish the Japanese translation of Byron's Don Juan . He has finished the fifth proofs, and the publisher is Otowashobou-Tsurumishyoten, based in Tokyo. This translation will be published in December 2021. This is the most recent and complete translation of Byron's most famous work Don Juan.
The JBS Newsletter No. XXV will be published at the end of 2021, edited by Associate Professor Keiko Ikeda. This issue will include...
