Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0004
J. Balmer
How does a classical education benefit a contemporary poet and how might it impede their creative development? Tony Harrison’s engagement with classical literature is wide-ranging and diverse. He has translated many classical texts, both Greek and Latin, from Sophocles through Palladas to Martial. In addition, his own poetry is steeped in classical reference and reception, always ironically underscoring the paradox of a working-class scholar’s alienation from both the classical academy and his own class and family. Yet, as Josephine Balmer argues, these ‘divided voices’ are precisely what inform and elevate Harrison’s exceptional art as a classical translator, a form which thrives on ambiguity and slippage. Furthermore, his unparalleled skill in reversioning and reinterpretating canonical texts has led, in turn, to the maturity and confidence of his later collections, such as Laureate’s Block (2000) and Under the Clock (2005), bridging the gaps of time, class and memory. If Harrison’s dramatic works, such as The Trackers of Oxyrynchus, reveal how easily literary culture might be destroyed, then his poetry celebrates how, among the loss, there will always be gain.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0006
Sandie Byrne
This chapter looks at Tony Harrison's self-appointed role as Bard and considers the significance of this in relation to Ancient and Classical Greek ideas about poetry and poets, particularly the public function of poetry and the relationship between poetry and memory.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0013
C. Marshall
Cécile Marshall, whose doctoral thesis analysed Harrison’s poems, films and plays (Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux 3, Bordeaux, France), went on to translate some of these works into French. In this article, she concentrates on the more creative side of her engagement with Harrison’s poetry, her activity as Harrison’s French translator. Providing a few samples from her French translations, she describes the processes at work in translating rhymed verse into French, acknowledging difficulties, doubts and discoveries, and analyses the specificities of rhythm and meter in Harrison’s poetry that must flow, even if differently, from one language into another. She also traces the different French translations, from Quebec to Belgium and France from the late 1990s onwards which show the appeal of Harrison’s poems, as well as the difficulty of making this prolific poet accessible in translation. Cécile Marshall comments on her own contributions as a translator of Harrison into French for different occasions: poetry readings and screenings in Paris or Nantes; publications in monolingual or bilingual editions. She also underscores the vital help and encouragement she received from Harrison who was always attentive to the music of the French versions of his own poetry, a collaboration that owed the poet and his translator to be honoured with the Strasbourg European Prize for Literature in 2010.
cameciile Marshall的博士论文分析了哈里森的诗歌、电影和戏剧(universit Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux 3, Bordeaux, France)，他继续将其中的一些作品翻译成法语。在这篇文章中，她专注于她对哈里森诗歌更有创造性的一面，她作为哈里森的法语翻译的活动。她提供了一些法语翻译的样本，描述了将押韵诗翻译成法语的过程，承认困难、怀疑和发现，并分析了哈里森诗歌中节奏和韵律的特殊性，即使不同，也必须从一种语言流动到另一种语言。她还追溯了不同的法语译本，从魁北克到比利时和法国，从20世纪90年代末开始，这显示了哈里森诗歌的吸引力，以及将这位多产的诗人翻译成通俗易懂的困难。cameciile Marshall评论了她自己在不同场合将哈里森翻译成法语的贡献:在巴黎或南特的诗歌朗诵和放映;单语或双语版本的出版物。她还强调了她从哈里森那里得到的重要帮助和鼓励，哈里森总是关注自己诗歌的法语版本的音乐，这种合作使这位诗人和他的翻译获得了2010年斯特拉斯堡欧洲文学奖。
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0002
S. Armitage
In a personal and anecdotal chapter, Simon Armitage reflects on a number of encounters with the poetry of Tony Harrison and with Harrison himself. Armitage locates in Harrison's approach to writing a poetry that is "communicative, clear, local, but at the same time crafted, literary, and universal", a poetry at odds with and in defiance of the prevailing post-modern aesthetic of difficulty and obscurity. He celebrates Harrison's poetic autonomy which he associates with the poet's life outside academia, allowing Harrison see himself as a 'poet of the people', despite his scholarly intelligence and his life-long immersion in classical literature.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0007
O. Taplin
This chapter sets out to map the leading themes and motifs in Tony Harrison’s recent long poem, Polygons (2015). It particularly traces the poets alluded to, and the places around Delphi which recur in vivid evocation. These are woven together to create a highly personal response to a locality that has meant a great deal to the poet, incorporating his work there, which included Trackers; his close collaborations with Jocelyn Herbert; the loving companionship of Sian Thomas; Mount Parnassus, especially Melpomene the Muse of tragedy; the addictive and restorative qualities of the waters of Castalia. The news of the death of Seamus Heaney, which reached him at Delphi in 2013 leads him to elegiac thoughts on his own survival and mortality. The overarching claim is that this poem has many of the characteristics of Tony Harrison’s most creative Poetry.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0011
E. Hall
This chapter explores the theme of witnessing in Harrison’s later theatre works, especially the contrast between photographic and poetic records and accounts of trauma. It argues that Harrison’s choice of ancient plays to adapt and translate (Hippolytus, Medea, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Tauris, Trojan Women), and the central topics discussed in his original play FRAM, are closely related to his experience of the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, especially to his messenger speeches, and above all to the messenger speech in his HERACLES. It also discusses his engagement with the figure of Gilbert Murray, whose pro-suffragette translations of Euripides were directed in Edwardian London by Harley Granville Barker, and who appears in FRAM, and describes the genesis of Harrison’s IPHIGENIA IN CRIMEA, in which Hall was closely involved.
本章探讨了哈里森后期戏剧作品中见证的主题，特别是摄影和诗歌记录之间的对比以及对创伤的描述。本文认为，哈里森选择改编和翻译古代戏剧(希波吕忒斯、美狄亚、赫库巴、《金牛座的伊菲革涅亚》、《特洛伊女人》)，以及他在原剧《FRAM》中讨论的中心主题，与他对古希腊悲剧作家欧里庇得斯的体验密切相关，尤其是他的信使演讲，尤其是他的《赫拉克勒斯》中的信使演讲。它还讨论了他与吉尔伯特·默里(Gilbert Murray)人物的交往，后者支持妇女参政权的欧里庇德斯译本在爱德华七世时代的伦敦由哈利·格兰维尔·巴克(Harley Granville Barker)执导，并出现在FRAM中，并描述了哈里森在克里米亚的伊菲革涅亚(IPHIGENIA in CRIMEA)的起源，霍尔密切参与其中。
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0003
L. Hall
A personal memoir of how Tony Harrison influenced both my work personally and my generation of playwrights in general. From a meeting in Newcastle Upon Tyne when I was a teenager to his guidance as a beacon for an engaged theatre that dealt with power and class I trace his journey which like mine was from a strong Northern working class community to the main stages of the National Theatre. His example of integrating the traditions of Popular Theatre with the Classical, the tribulations of being a working-class scholar and the ambitions of his formal and thematic concerns have been exemplary not only to me but to my generation of theatre makers.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0009
H. Marshall
While Tony Harrison’s career as a poet was perhaps inevitable by the early 1970s with the publication of his award winning volume The Loiners (1970), this chapter argues that it was not a given that a significant portion of Harrison’s poetic output would be for the stage, nor that the British Theatre would readily welcome a contemporary poet writing verse plays. I argue that Harrison’s career in the theatre was fostered by his early commissions from the National Theatre and the collaborators he worked with in those early years, especially director John Dexter. Their work together on Harrison’s translations/adaptations of two seventeenth-century French plays—Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666) and Racine’s Phèdre (1677), staged as The Misanthrope (1973) and Phaedra Britannica (1975)—allowed Harrison to bring to bear on his theatrical translations for the modern stage the ideas that he had been exploring in his doctoral thesis on Vergil and translation. Moreover, the close involvement of Harrison from commission to production served to reinforce his belief that writing for the stage and the page are very different things, with theatrical texts needing to facilitate a three dimensional performance. This would shape the nature of Harrison’s dramatic verse for decades to come. The success of The Misanthrope, which critics praised for the brilliance of its translation, was essential in establishing the claim of contemporary poets to a place on the modern British stage.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0017
Henry Stead
This chapter introduces the reader to Tony Harrison’s audiovisual poetry, composed for and broadcast on British television through the late 1980s and 1990s. Harrison has to date made twelve full documentary film-poems, and one film-poem feature, entitled Prometheus (1998). They all brim with the darker side of European history, current affairs and class politics, and explore what limits of what poetry might do, and how it might do it, in the televisual age. The chapter sets Harrison’s film poetry in its cultural context by paying attention to the poet’s major influences in the experimental medium (John Grierson’s GPO film unit and early Soviet filmmaking), before homing in on his 1992 film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a species of social psychotherapy. The act of gazing at the Medusa-like and thus usually petrifying image of twentieth-century atrocity is offered here not as a ‘dope’ to mankind, but a stimulant towards its cure. The film-poem draws explicitly on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Dionysiac art’ and Simone Weil’s pacifist notion of ‘force’, and Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and the holocaust. Harrison’s hugely ambitious and uniquely accessible film-poems are currently publically unavailable. Are they the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of contemporary film and video poetry?
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Pub Date : 2019-01-03DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266519.003.0012
Christine Regan
In v. ‘Tony Harrison’ explains his essential identity as an unlikely union of high cultural poet and dispossessed vandal, an idiosyncratic loner who finds his ghostly twin in a nineteenth-century French poet, Rimbaud. To understand the significance of Harrison’s claim that he is as one in spirit with Rimbaud, it is important to remember that the literary and political rebel was a poet of the Paris Commune, and v. is responsive to the literary and republican history Rimbaud lived in. In v. Harrison’s signature poetics of occupation engages with Parisian’s aesthetic and political occupation of their city in 1871 and 'artisanal' political poetry. As poet-mythologers, Harrison and Rimbaud champion traditions of resistance to the state and capital, illuminating the shared hopes uniting different struggles. The significance of the 1984 miners’ strike, Thatcher, Marx and Morris for Harrison’s state of the nation poem, and for the political sonnets, is discussed too. v. suggests alternative social models to Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution and late capitalism in England, and suggests the wish for fundamental change. The past is full of paths not taken, and v. suggests visiting Paris 1871, with Rimbaud as ‘the first poet of a civilization that has not yet appeared’, to illuminate utopian possibilities about transforming the world and ‘changer la vie’.
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