The bicentenary of his death prompts the publication of a canonical biography, a new translation of 'Don Juan', and an essay dedicated to him by Edna O'Brien. The poet and aristocrat had been living in the Greek city of Mesolongi for more than a year with a troop of soldiers that he paid for to support the independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire.

At his farewell, which today, April 19, marks the 200th anniversary, there was little epic beyond the thunder and lightning that fell outside. The most probable cause of his death was infection from one of the numerous bloodlettings that were performed on him, and for which he lost what is estimated to have been about two and a half liters of blood. There was also dehydration. Pets and guns were among his many eccentric weaknesses, as witnessed by the bear that accompanied him at Trinity College in Cambridge to avoid the prohibition on having dogs or the fauna that moved freely in the different Italian palaces where he lived. A festival of talks and readings dedicated to his eminent and wayward student is being held in Cambridge today, Friday, and tomorrow. Enriquez Byron was a personality ahead of his time. He liked to swim, he boxed, he loved Greece because it was hot, he liked to travel, crazy women, and eat. Edna O'Brien: "Everything about him was paradoxical: he was introverted and extroverted, handsome and deformed, serious and funny, wasteful and mean, and possessed of dazzling intelligence. "The burning of Byron's memoirs was an act of collective vandalism, says O'Brien in the last pages of her essay "Byron in Love's Song" (Cabaret Voltaire, 2009) The poet was a "man with a bottle of wine on a sunny terrace writing beautiful poems," says Enriquez. "Of course, he slept with her sister and mistreated one of his lovers so much that he left her half crazy and left her daughter to die in a boarding school." "He was a guy who, beyond the issues of the time, had enormous personal darkness, but that has nothing to do with a Bronte character; sometimes he looks more like Hemingway than anything else"