Byron e il Segno Plurale: Tracce del sé, Percorsi di Scrittura ed. by Diego Saglia (review)

This collection contains an extended introduction and eleven essays, all in Italian, though six of the essays were originally written in English and have been translated into Italian either by the editor or one of the contributors, Chiari Rolli. All of the essays are published for the first time with the exception of the first, Jerome McGann’s famous ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism’ (‘L’eroe dai mille volti: la retorica del byronismo’) from 1992, presented here as a kind of keynote essay for the whole volume, foregrounding as it does the notion of Byron’s sustained poetic ‘masquerade’, one of the key themes that tie the collection together.

Diego Saglia’s introductory ‘presentation’ and essay lay out the central aims of the volume: to ‘define the contours’ of Byron’s originality and explore what ‘continues to make’ Byron ‘a nucleus’ of ‘inexhaustible’ and ‘varied’ influence (all translations from Italian here are mine). His introduction, ‘Il dilemma del sistema: Byron e la scrittura poetica tra azione e reflessione teorica’ (‘The dilemma of the System: Byron and Poetic Writing between Action and Theoretical Reflection’), details some of the things that contribute to Byron’s originality but also make it notoriously difficult to pin him down, ranging from his epistemological ‘excess’, ‘ironic mode(s)’ and habit of ‘playing with’ his readers to his ‘refusal’ to ‘adhere unconditionally’ to the dominant early nineteenth-century ‘identity of a man of letters’, his complicated relation to the practices and ideology of the literary marketplace and his ‘deinstitutionalisation’ of poetry, and from his ‘corporeal conception of writing’, ‘poses of insouciance’ and rejection ‘of any ideological or aesthetic system’ to his combination of the neo-Classical and the Romantic, indeed his complex and creative relationship to precursors and poetic models generally. For Saglia, Byron’s writing presents us with a ‘mosaic of diverse positions’, ‘a tangle of literary signs and personae’, an ‘opening-up’ to endless ‘returns’, ‘multiplicities’ and ‘ambiguity’. The essays that follow, says Saglia, aim at ‘a wide-ranging and critically up-to-date’ engagement with Byron’s work and literary personae that brings the ‘multiplicity’ and ‘ambiguity’ of this ‘mosaic’ into sharp relief for modern Italian readers. They succeed admirably.

Part 1 of the collection, on ‘Identity’, offers three essays on ‘the vulnerability of the “I” of a writer who elaborates images and figures of himself that repeatedly evade his attempts to control them’. The first essay is McGann’s well-known reading of Byron’s poetic ‘masks’ and ‘masquerades’ in Sardanapalus and other works, translated here by Saglia. The second essay, ‘“I am a very unlucky fellow”: maschere e immagini di Byron adolescente’ (‘“I am a very unlucky fellow”: maschere e immagini di Byron adolescente (1803–09)’ (‘“I am a very unlucky fellow”: Masks and Images of the Adolescent Byron [1803–09]’), by Chiara Rolli, examines Byron’s ‘earliest “transcriptions of the self ”’ in ‘letters written between 1803 and 1809’, detailing Byron’s ‘moulding’ for himself, even in ‘childhood and early adolescence’, ‘varied and protean masks’ through which he could avoid ‘“unambiguous self-representation”’ and in which ‘art and life become inseparable’. The final essay in Section 1 is ‘Byron e l’identità poetica nella “Dedica” di Don Juan’ (‘Byron and Poetic Identity in the “Dedication” to Don Juan’), by Jane Stabler, translated by Rolli. Stabler examines the ways in which the dedication’s construction of Byron’s poetic identity, per se and as distinct from other contemporary poets, draws on, utilises, plays with and undermines the identities projected on to both him and other poets by reviewers and critics, subverting any ‘identification’ of Byron with any ‘specific group’ of writers, indeed any identification of Byron at all, and offering instead ‘mutability’, a ‘lack of consistency’ and a ‘protean style’ that ‘surprises’ the reader in a ‘splendidly unequivocal’ manner.

Part 2, loosely structured around the notion of...