Julián y Máddalo: Una conversación

Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the great English poets of the Romantic era, spent the last four years of his life leading a peripatetic existence in Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley, who became famous in her own right as the author of the gothic terror novel Frankenstein, written when the couple had spent the summer of 1816 in a villa on Lake Geneva, in the company of that other great English Romantic poet, Lord Byron. Shelley and Byron, though fundamentally different in temperament and outlook, shared a passion for poetry and politics, and became friends. After visiting Byron in Venice in the summer of 1818, Shelley wrote Julian and Maddalo, an imagined conversation between the two poets in which he sought to think his way through the very real differences in their approach to life and society. The poem shows the full range of Shelley’s linguistic and imaginative gifts. It remained unpublished in his lifetime.

This translation by Luis Castellví (Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the University of Manchester), with an introduction by Prue Shaw (Emeritus Reader in Italian Studies, University College London), honours both poets: 2024 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Byron’s death on April 19th, and the first publication of Julian and Maddalo in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, a volume curated by his widow Mary Shelley, which appeared later that year.