6 Gambari (Hausa man): ‘Hausa’ means ‘woman’s work’.
7 ‘Power all their end’: Alexander Pope, Epistle 2, ‘To a Lady’ (1735), line 226.
8 several neologisms: see A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Neologisms in Hausa: A Sociological Approach’, Africa, vol. 33.1 (January, 1963), p. 32.
FELLOWSHIP
This essay was first published in 1969. Tony Harrison lived in Africa from 1962 to 1966. He was awarded the UNESCO fellowship in poetry in 1969. He travelled to Cuba, Brazil, Senegal and the Gambia.
1 ‘Hey, Ruso’ or ‘Hey, Tovarich, dame chicle’: ‘Hey, Russian’ or ‘Hey, comrade, give me chewing gum!’ All the prose translations in this volume are by Edith Hall, unless otherwise indicated.
2 Coca-Cola el refresco de la Amistad: ‘Coca-Cola is the drink of friendship.’
3 ‘Checo?’ ‘Sí,’ I lie: ‘Czech?’ ‘Yes,’ I lie.
4 a Wolof steward: the Wolof people are an ethnic group in western Africa.
SHANGO THE SHAKY FAIRY
This essay was first published in London Magazine, vol. 10 (April 1970), pp. 11–23.
1 Abioseh Nicol … in a poem called ‘African Easter’: published in Langston Hughes (Ed.), Poems from Black Africa (Bloomington, IA, and London: Indiana University Press, 1963), pp. 35–40.
2 Brâncuşi’s Le Phoque: Seal II, a blue marble sculpture by Constantin Brâncuşi (1943) in the Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris).
3 ‘one of the finest African sculptures extant’: William Fagg, Nigerian Images (London: Lund Humphries, 1963), no. 87. The staff is now in the Permanent Exhibition, National Museum for African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
4 the film version of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers: directed by Jack Cardiff (1960).
5 Olivier’s Hamlet castigates Ophelia: in Hamlet (1948), directed by and starring Laurence Olivier.
6 Nicolás Guillén: Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista (1902–89) was a Cuban poet, journalist, political activist and writer who became the national poet of Cuba.
7 … esta tierra mulata: ‘It is a mixed-race country, African and Spanish (St Barbara on one side, and on the other side, Shango).’
8 Schwarze Dekameron: Leo Frobenius’s Black Decameron (Der schwarze Dekameron: Belege und Aktenstücke über Liebe, Witz und Heldentum in Innerafrika) had first been published in Berlin (1910) by Vita.
9 novel of Charles Williams: Shadows of Ecstasy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), p. 40.
10 J. M. Cohen credits: Writers in the New Cuba: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 6-7, 9.
11 Jean Price-Mars: (1876–1969), a Haitian teacher, diplomat, writer and ethnographer who supported the ‘négritude’ movement.
12 Lydia Cabrera … study of the secret society Abakuá: Anaforuana: ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la sociedad secreta Abakuá (Spanish edition published in Madrid: Ediciones R, 1975).
13 of Efik origin: the Efik are an ethnic group in the west of the Republic of Cameroon and southern Nigeria.
14–1 Caballero Calderón said: Eduardo Caballero Calderón (1910–1993) was a Colombian journalist and writer.
15 Miguel Barnet … El Cimarrón: Miguel Angel Barnet Lanza’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Havana: Gente Nueva 1967) was produced from transcripts of Barnet’s interviews with Mesa Montejo (1860–1965).
16 Oscar Lewis-type job: Oscar Lewis (1914–70), an American anthropologist, whose portraits of life in the slums of Mexico and Puerto Rico were notoriously colourful.
17 Herald correspondent James O’Kelly: James O’Kelly, The Mambi-Land; or, Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba (Philadelphia: James Lippincott & Co., 1874), p. 62.
18 famous and beautiful Shango figure: Fagg, Nigerian Images.
19 Manuel Mendive’s drawing of Shango: Manuel Mendive (b. 1944) is a leading Afro-Cuban artist who has returned to Shango several times in his works.
20 Adrian Mitchell: (1932–2008), an English journalist, poet, novelist, playwright and committed pacifist.
21 the trilogy on Cuban womanhood: Lucía, directed by Humberto Solás, and written by Julio García Espinosa and Nelson Rodríguez. It was the winner of the Golden Prize and the Prix FIPRESCI at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival in 1969.
22 Jan Hus’s colour: Jan Hus (1372–1415) was a Czech priest and Christian reformer burnt at the stake for heresy. Miroslav Holub (1923–98) was a Czech poet.
23 Pai Apolinário: Father Apolinário Gomes da Mota, a notable figure in the religious life of Brazil.
THE INKWELL OF DR AGRIPPA
This essay was first published as the Introduction in Focus 4: Corgi Modern Poets, Ed. Jeremy Robson (London: Corgi Books, 1971). The title is taken from ‘The Story of the Inky Boys’, in The English Struwwelpeter, or Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures for Little Children (first published Leipzig: Friedrich Volckmar, 1848). See further Edith Hall’s Foreword to this volume, pp. 1–3.
1 ‘To feel’: the quotation is from Pablo Neruda’s essay ‘Infancia e Poesía’, ‘Childhood and Poetry’, in Robert Bly, Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 12–13.
2 a Livingstone’s Travels: David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London: J. Murray, 1857).
3 ‘sedentary toil’ … ‘difficulty is our plough’: the two quotations from W. B. Yeats are taken from his poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, published respectively in the second part of The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919, and in a letter to Margot Ruddock of early April 1936.
4 Zárate’s History of Peru: Augustin de Zárate, Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú (Anvers: M. Nucio, 1555).
5 example of Rimbaud: Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) abandoned writing poetry altogether at the age of twenty-one and went to Africa.
6 Fracastorius: Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus, a three-volume Latin hexameter poem (Verona: da Sabbio, 1530).
7 Edward Powys Mathers’s masterly … ‘And sometimes’: Black Marigolds: Being a Rendering into English of the ‘Panchasika by Chauras’ by E. Powys Mathers (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1919). On Mathers see the chapter ‘Even Now’ in this volume, p. 415ff.
8 a Nigerian version of the Lysistrata: Aikin Mata, on which see the first essay in this volume.
9 A. L. Moir … ‘an attempt to represent’: in The World Map in Hereford Cathedral (Hereford: Cathedral Press, 1955).
10 ‘There is all Africa’: in Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London: Andrew Crooke, 1643), Section 2, Chapter 15.
11 John Cleveland … ‘Correct your maps’: ‘News from Newcastle; or, Newcastle Coal-Pits’, in J. Cleaveland Revived (London: Nathaniel Brooks, 1668), p. 3.
THE MISANTHROPE
This essay is the Introduction to The Misanthrope, first published by Rex Collings Ltd (London, 1973), and reprinted in Tony Harrison: Plays Two (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
1 series of articles that André Ribaud: collected in André Ribaud, La Cour: chronique du royaume (Paris: René Julliard, 1961).
2 the anonymous translator of 1819: The Misanthrope, Translated from Molière (Boulogne: Leroy-Berger, 1819).
3–9 a typical piece of ripe Virgilian translation: James Henry, The Eneis, Books I and II. Rendered into English Blank Iambic (London: Taylor and Walton, 1845), p. 36.
4 Francis Galton … ‘a Venus among Hottentots’: The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (London: John Murray, 1853), pp. 53–4.
5 rire dans l’âme: ‘laughter in the soul’. Jean Donneau de Visé, a French journalist and playwright, in a letter about Molière reproduced in Oeuvres de Moliere, Eds M. E. Despois and P. Mesnard (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1907), vol. 5, p. 440.
6 ‘like a woman’: Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), p. 324.
7 ‘English isn’t well equipped …’: Anonymous, ‘Commentary’, Times Literary Supplement, Friday, March 16 (1973),
issue 3,706, p. 97.
8 ‘Thou loving brothers’: John Ogilby, The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (London: John Crook, 1649); Aeneid, Book 7, p. 12.
9 ‘Unanimous Brothers thou canst’: Ogilby, p. 362.
10 ‘the poem of force’ … a ‘contemporary’: the references are to the Polish writer Jan Kott’s Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), and the French writer Simone Weil’s essay ‘“The Iliad”, or The Poem of Force’, first published in French in 1940 in Les Cahiers du Sud.
11 Charles Hockett … ‘In an illiterate society’: Charles Hockett (1916–2000) was an American linguist who published many books and articles. It has not been possible to identify the source of this quotation.
12 Walter Benjamin … ‘the life of an original’: in Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by H. Arendt and translated by H. Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 80.
13 André Ribaud’s series of articles … collection by Juillard in 1961: Ribaud, La Cour.
14 ‘La Cour … du despotisme’: ‘The Court was another tactic in the politics of despotism.’ In the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Mémoires; ou, L’observateur véridique, sur le règne de Louis XIV, et sur les premières époques des règnes suivans (‘London’ (i.e. Paris: Buisson, 1788)), vol. 13, p. 71.
15 ‘Les fêtes fréquentes’: ibid., vol. 1, p. 83.
16 ‘The frequent fetes …’: translation by Bayle St John, in The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the Reign of Louis XIV and the Regency (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857).
17 ‘he was so narcissistically self-absorbed’: on de Gaulle’s narcissism see Stanley Hoffmann and Inge Hoffmann, ‘The Will to Grandeur: De Gaulle as Political Artist’, Daedalus 97 (1968) pp. 829–87.
18 Gérard de Nerval’s comment … ‘… with the sense of’: in Sylvie (1853), translated by Lucie Page (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1886), pp. 6–7.
19 Martin Turnell … ‘His mania’: in The Classical Moment: Studies in Corneille, Molière and Racine (New York: New Directions, 1946), p. 96, n. 1.
20 Erich Auerbach … ‘meaningless’: Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 166.
21 Gossman … ‘Chekhov’: Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), p. 266.
22 Lucretius’ De rerum Natura: the passage from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things reads, in the translation by Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910): ‘A black love is called “honeydark”, the foul and filthy “unadorned”, the green-eyed “Athena’s image”, the wiry and wooden “a gazelle”, the squat and dwarfish “one of the graces”, “all pure delight”, the lumpy and ungainly “a wonder”, and “full of majesty”. She stammers and cannot speak, “she has a lisp”; the dumb is “modest”; the fiery, spiteful gossip is “a burning torch”. One becomes a “slender darling”, when she can scarce live from decline; another half dead with cough is “frail”. Then the fat and full-bosomed is “Ceres” self with Bacchus at breast; the snub-nosed is “sister to Silenus, or a Satyr”; the thick-lipped is “a living kiss”.’
PALLADAS
Written in Gregynog in March 1974 and first published as the ‘Preface’ to Palladas: Poems (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1975).
1 the traditional organisation: this is the arrangement of the five-volume translation of the complete anthology, with facing Greek text, by W. R. Paton (Ed.) (London: William Heinemann, 1927–8).
2 Peter Jay’s decision … modern versions: Peter Jay (Ed.), The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams. A Selection in Modern Verse Translations (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
3 Gilbert Highet places: Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford: OUP, 1954), p. 142.
4 J. W. Mackail … ‘one of the most’: in his Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1890), p. 308. The numbering for Palladas used by Harrison (e.g. 1, 401, etc.) is, for simplicity’s sake, the traditional numbering used in individual collections of Palladas’ works, which have been excerpted and assembled from discrete sources. The history of the text of Palladas is complicated, since his poems are scattered across several books of the Greek Anthology, now supplemented by papyrus finds. There has been controversy over where poems begin and end and how texts are to be divided.
5 C. M. Bowra … ‘Palladas and Christianity’: published in Proceedings of the British Academy, 45 (1959), and reprinted in Bowra’s On Greek Margins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
6 ‘a Father of the Church’: this quotation is traditionally although perhaps apocryphally attributed to Samuel Johnson, an admirer of Palladas who translated several of his epigrams into Latin. See Barry Baldwin (Ed.), The Latin & Greek Poems of Samuel Johnson: Text, Translation, and Commentary (London: Duckworth, 1995).
7 ‘harsh thought’: J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, revised edition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), p. 330.
8 ‘divine aphasia’: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (English version, 1955), Act I.
PHAEDRA BRITANNICA
This essay was first published as the Introduction to Phaedra Britannica (London: Rex Collings Ltd, 1976) and reprinted in Tony Harrison: Plays Two (London: Faber & Faber, 2002)
1 Pradon, Phèdre et Hippolyte: Nicolas Pradon was Racine’s rival, his Phèdre et Hippolyte: tragédie (Paris: Henry Loyson, 1677) being published in the same year as the premiere of Racine’s Phèdre.
2 Feuchtwanger … ‘Adaptations’: Lion Feuchtwanger, Stücke in Versen (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1954). On his contribution to the German adaptation of Edward II, see V. D. Melngailis, Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England: Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1966).
3 Jean-Jacques Gautier … ‘la noblesse … préservée’: ‘the linear nobility, the fire and the grandeur of the original are preserved’. Gautier (1908–86) was a French writer, theatre critic and member of the Académie française.
4 ‘If we go to see’: see ‘Racine Spoken’, in On Racine, translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964).
5 ‘Je ne sais pas … mort’: ‘I do not know if it is possible to play Racine today. Perhaps on stage this theatre is three-quarters dead.’
6 ‘Phèdre n’est pas … d’acteurs’; ‘Phèdre femme doit … tragédie’: ‘Phèdre is not a concerto for a woman but a symphony for an orchestra of actors’; ‘The woman Phaedra must be newly incorporated into the tragedy Phèdre.’ Jean-Louis Barrault, in his Mise en scène de Phèdre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1946).
7 most important person in the play: in Leo Spitzer, ‘The Récit de Théramène’, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 87–134.
8 Poe’s opinion: in Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Poetic Principle’, Home Journal, 36, August 31 (1850).
9 ‘classics of our prose’: Matthew Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’, in Essays in Criticism, Second Series (London: Macmillan & Co., 1888), pp. 41–2.
10 Henri de Montherlant thought: ‘Racine langouste’, Cahiers de le compagnie Madeline Renaud-Jean-Claude Barrault, 8 (1955).
11 Jean Dutourd thought: quoted in Martin Turnell, Jean Racine: Dramatist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972), p. 4.
12 Flaubert thought: quoted in Huntington Cairns, The Limits of Art (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1948), p. 845.
13 beauté dénuée de signification: Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (nouvelle édition augmentée) (Saint Julien en Genevois: Arvensa), p. 156.
14 ‘semble préparer … à Phèdre’: ‘seems to prepare the spectator for this character-mix of vices and remorse which the poet gives to Phaedra’. L. de Boisjermain, Commentaires sur les ouevres de M. Racine, vol. 3 (Paris: Panckoucke, 1768), p. 48.
15 R. C. Knight tentatively: R. C. Knight, Racine et la Grèce (Paris: Boivin, 1950).
16 Robert Lowell’s
epithet ‘homicidal’: in Robert Lowell, Phaedra: A Verse Translation (London: Faber & Faber, 1963).
17 first English version of Seneca’s play: John Studley in Seneca his tenne tragedies, translated into Englysh (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581).
18 George MacMunn … ‘In the description’: The Underworld of India (London: Jarrolds, 1933), pp. 203–4.
19 the Yeatsian cry: from the last stanza of Yeats’s ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, first published in The Winding Stair (New York: The Fountain Press, 1929).
20 Sir Richard Burton: Richard Francis Burton (1821–90) was an English soldier, diplomat, explorer and prolific author.
21 John Ruskin … Theseus: in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, vol. 1 = The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 7 (New York: Bryan, Taylor & Co., 1894), p. 316.
22 ‘Les monstres étouffés … du Minotaur’: ‘Monsters strangled and brigands punished, / Procrustes, Cercyon, Scirron and Sinnis, / And the scattered bones of the Epidaurian giant, / And Crete smoking with the blood of the Minotaur.’
23 Sleeman’s account: Major-General Sir William Henry Sleeman (1788–1856), a soldier in British India, wrote several books on the subject, including The Thugs or Phansigars of India: Comprising a History of that Extraordinary Fraternity of Assassins (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1839) and Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India: From the Cold Season of 1836–37, down to Their Gradual Suppression (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1840).
24 ‘that exterminator’: The Works of John Ruskin, Eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: Library Edition, 1903–12), vol. 27, pp. 408–9.
25 ‘an authority on’: ‘The morall philosophie of Doni’ by Sir Thomas North, in Joseph Jacobs (Ed.), The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai (London: D. Nutt, 1888), p. xli.
26 Walter Pater … ‘figures, passably’: in Pater’s Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (London: MacMillan, 1910), p. 159.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 40