Byron’s Foreign Books: Reading in Translation and in the Original

This chapter addresses Byron’s collection of foreign books – in the original or in translation – as contained in the three sales catalogues of his libraries (1813, 1816, 1827), as well as attending to the foreign works with which, as his letters and diaries indicate, he could be indirectly familiar. In doing so, it explores and stakes out a field that has not yet been widely examined in Byron scholarship. It reconstructs the breadth of his interests in foreign works, and identifies significant thematic clusters. Moreover, the chapter examines which authors Byron read in the original and which he read in translation, and compares these findings with his remarks on those authors in his letters. These become especially significant and revealing when Byron engages critically or polemically with foreign writers and intellectuals, as in the ideologically and politically loaded criticism of the Schlegel brothers scattered in his letters and diaries of 1821. In addition, the chapter looks at the foreign-language periodicals through which he obtained knowledge of foreign literatures, a fact that stresses further how international periodical publications contributed to creating a European space of literary contacts and exchanges. With this multifaceted approach, the chapter offers new insights into how Byron’s ‘conversations’ with foreign books in translation or in the original were central to his cosmopolitan and cross-cultural identity as an intellectual. In the process, it demonstrates that these readerly experiences were crucial to his conception of present-day Europe both as a cultural continuum and as a combination of divergent literary-cultural dimensions immersed in, and conditioned by, a conflicted historical-political context.