20 ‘industrial genocide’: Nick Danziger, Danziger’s Britain: A Journey to the Edge (London: Harper Collins, 1996).
21 ‘No doubt it has’: La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallinard, 1948); English translation by Alan C. M. Ross as The Psychoanalysis of Fire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 55–6.
22 ‘Fire enabled them’: Dennis Donoghue, Thieves of Fire (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 61.
23 ‘The atom smashers’: Robert S. De Ropp, The New Prometheans: Creative and Destructive Forces in Modern Science (London: Cape, 1972), p. 1.
24 ‘In light-based media’: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 220–1.
25 ‘… The main device’: Josef Svoboda, quoted in Jarka Burian, The Scenography of Josef Svoboda (Middletown, CT, and Scranton, PA: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 106 (with figs 108–11 on p. 107).
26 ‘Poetry can also’: Harrison’s note here reads, ‘Auden’s lecture in 1936 to the North London Film Society is included in the form of an authorised report as an appendix in Edward Mendelson’s edition of Auden’s Plays and Other Dramatic Writings (Faber & Faber, 1989).’
27 ‘Milton’s imagery of’: Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (rev. edn) (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978), p. 380.
28 ‘There is a cinema … have to be developed’: Victor Shklovsky, quoted in Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry (London: Faber, 1989), p. 10.
29 ‘I find poetic’: Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 18.
30 emergent ‘prosody’: Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, in Bill Nichols (Ed.), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Movies and Methods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 542–58.
31 ‘free indirect subjective’: ibid.
32 Rostand’s Cyrano with Gérard Depardieu: the film version, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau (1990), of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac.
33 ‘Feeling the rhythmicity’: Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 120.
34 the photograph of the Iraqi soldier: the photo was by Ken Jarecke (1991). It was first published in the Observer on 10 March 1991.
THE TEARS AND THE TRUMPETS
A presidential address given to the Virgil Society on 3 June 2000; published in Proceedings of the Virgil Society, 24 (2001).
1 D. W. Blandford: in Pentekontaetia: The Virgil Society, 1943–1993 (London: The Virgil Society, 1993), p. 58.
2 ‘And thus we see’: Franz Werfel’s statement in the Introduction to Die Troerinnen des Euripides (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1915), p. 9; translated by Peter Jungk in A Life Torn by History (London: Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 36.
3 ‘delicium est asinus’: the Copa (‘Female Tavern-Keeper’) is a short Latin poem of unknown authorship which used to be attributed to Virgil.
4 P. J. Enk: ‘Appendix Vergiliana’, in M. Cary (Ed.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Rostand’s Press, 1953), p. 73.
5 pone merum … ‘venio’: Copa, lines 87–8. ‘Get the wine and the dice, and to hell with anyone who cares about tomorrow. Death demands your ear, and says, “Live today: I’m coming!”’
6 the simile in the Georgics: Virgil, Georgics 4. 511–16: ‘Just as when a nightingale, in the shade of a poplar tree, laments the loss of her chicks, whom a harsh ploughman has spotted and ripped, unfledged, from their nest: she weeps the whole night through, and sitting on a branch breaks out afresh into her song of misery, and fills all the surrounding land with her sad cries: so Orpheus could be touched by no love nor wedding-song.’
7 ‘either with the clash’: Introduction to Ivan Mazarov (Ed.), Ancient Gold: The Wealth of the Thracians: Treasures from the Republic of Bulgaria (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).
8 ‘There is …’: Emmet Robbins, ‘Famous Orpheus’, in John Warden (Ed.), Orpheus: Metamorphosis of a Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 18.
9 as Mackail translates it: J. W. Mackail, The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil (London: Rivingtons, 1889).
10 Caecilius Epirota: a poet and grammarian who was teaching Virgil’s poetry by the 20s BC.
11 Parcere subiectis: Harrison’s note here reads, ‘The monument has the now discredited reading pacis, not paci.’
12 ‘Superbi were simply’: Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 327.
13 ‘… a favourite’: Robert Graves, ‘The Virgil Cult’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 38 (1962), pp. 13–37.
14 ‘Five years from now’: Benito Mussolini, in a speech made at the installation of the first fascist ‘Governor of Rome’, in the Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii in the Campidoglio: Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi (Milan, 1926), vol. 5, p. 244.
15 ‘mission to civilise’: see Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (New York: Longman, 1976), p. 59.
16 Res Gestae: lines 13–15 of the inscription on the Monumentum Ancyranum, ‘Monument of Ankara’, which is the most intact surviving version of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (‘Deeds of the Divine Augustus’).
17 ‘pass again to triumph’: R. D. Williams, ‘The Sixth Book of the “Aeneid”, Greece & Rome, Second Series, vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1964), p. 60.
18 ‘Most of the people’: J. G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Cambridge: CUP, 1898), p. 351.
19 ‘The city of Elis …’: ibid., p. 634.
20 Dio Chrysostom … as Mahaffy puts it: Dio Chrysostom, Orations 31.121–2; John Pentland Mahaffy, The Silver Age of the Greek World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 320.
21 a play I staged: Marcus Aurelius: The Kaisers of Carnuntum (1995).
22 as Gavin Douglas has it: the Scotsman Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid was first published in 1513.
23 as Ruaeus paraphrases: Ruaeus is the Latinised form of the name of Charles de la Rue, author of an influential edition of the Aeneid published in France in 1675.
24 ‘only rank bad Latin’: in Nicholas Horsfall (Ed.), A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 107, n. 39.
25 Harry Eyres: in an article headed ‘Harry Eyres names a writer whose verse can be read as an elegy for the pain of Kosovo’, Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1999.
THE FANATIC PILLAGER
Introduction to Tony Harrison’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Prince’s Play, published in Tony Harrison: Plays Two (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
1 ‘Victor Hugo’s Le Roi’: George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, p. 165.
2 ‘worthy of Shakespeare’: Verdi, in a letter of 8 May 1850 to Francesco Piave.
3 Hugo records what Ligier said: ‘Ligier told me yesterday at the rehearsal that I was reconstructing the French theatre.’ Letter of 22 October 1832 to Mlle Louise Bertin, in Victor Hugo: Correspondance 1814–1868, édition augmentée (Saint Julien en Genevois: Arvensa, 2014), p. 257.
4 ‘As the ingenious’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), Chapter 18, p. 69.
5 ‘The example of Shakespeare’: in C. C. Abbott (Ed.), The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (London: OUP, 1955), p. 218.
6 ‘drumming decasillabon’: Thomas Nashe, ‘To the Gentlemen of both Universities’, Preface to Robert Greene, Menaphon (London: Sampson Clarke, 1589).
7 ‘here and there’: G. Gilfillan (Ed.), The Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (London: James Nisbet, 1855).
8 ‘Diversity distinguishes’: John Dennis, The Genius and Writings of Shakespeare (London: Bernard Lintott, 1712), p. 3. Emphasis added.
9 ‘Every passion’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), Chapter 18, p. 67.
10 The Changeling: by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (1622), Act I, scene i.
11 ‘Ha! my brother’s murderer?’: The Changeling, Act V, scene iii.
12 his editor Tottel: Sir T
homas Wyatt’s poem exists in two versions, one corrected in his own hand in a manuscript in the British Library (Egerton MS 2711) and the other as printed after Wyatt’s death in Richard Tottel’s collection Songes and Sonettes, often called Tottel’s Miscellany, in 1557.
13 ‘As far as the bulk’: Coburn Freer, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 1–2.
14 the rare perceptive critic: W. D. Howarth, Molière: A Playwright and His Audience (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), p. 235.
15 ‘Molière est dramatique’: Victor Hugo, Cromwell: Drame (Paris: M. de Norvins, 1828), p. lv.
16 ‘the most beautiful’: in the Deutsche Mercur, translated by George Henry Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe (London: David Nutt, 1855), p. 140.
17 ‘une imitation détestable de’: Frederick the Great, quoted in Alexander Baumgartner, Goethes Jugend: Eine Kulturstudie (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1879), p. 209.
18 ‘At their most Shakespearean’: Michael Hamburger (1926–2007) was a prolific writer, translator and poet. It has not been possible to identify the source of this quotation.
19 ‘Il nous semble …’: ‘It seems to me that this verse would also be as beautiful as prose.’ Victor Hugo, Cromwell: Drame, p. xlvi.
20 a wonderfully combatant manifesto poem … ‘black dogs of prose’: from ‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation’, ‘Reply to an Act of Accusation’, translated by Stephen Monte in Selected Poetry. Victor Hugo (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), pp. 109–15.
21 ‘Le bandeau!’: ‘The Truth of Masks’, in Oscar Wilde, Intentions (London: Methuen & Co., 1913), p. 233.
22 the scholar M. Descotes: Maurice Descotes, Le drame romantique et ses grands créateurs: 1827–1839 (Paris: PUF, 1955), p. 217.
23 ‘The stage is for’: Henrik Ibsen, letter to Lucie Wolf, May 1883, quoted by Harley Granville Barker in On Dramatic Method (New York: Hill & Wang, 1956), p. 170.
24 Ibsen told C. H. Herford: Herford quoted in Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (London: Hart-Davis, 1971), pp. 783–4.
25 ‘would have been a’: Meyer, ibid., p. 783.
26 ‘most grotesque’: Francesco Lucca, a publisher of Italian music. For his and other outraged responses to Hugo’s play, see C. W. Gordon, From Hugo’s ‘Hernani’ and ‘Le Roi s’amuse’ to Verdi’s ‘Ernani’ and ‘Rigoletto’ (Vancouver: UBC, 1977), pp. 35–53.
27 ‘La révolution dramatique … Romantisme’: ‘The dramatic revolution was defeated the day before yesterday at the Comédie-Française, it is in full rout: it is the Waterloo of Romanticism’ (review in La Quotidienne, 25 November 1832).
28 The actor Got: in Journal de Edmond Got: sociétaire de la Comédie-Française, 1822–1901, Ed. Médéric Got with a preface by Henri Lavedan (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1910).
29 ‘Le grand poète … tableau jacobin’: ‘The great poet offers the people, the wretched people, a Jacobin tableau.’
30 ‘it was the duty of ’: see Samuel Edwards, Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), p. 184.
31 ‘of these days’: Queen Victoria, in a letter of 21 February 1870, quoted in Philip Magnus, King Edward VII (London: J. Murray, 1964), p. 143.
32 ‘a dreadful play’: Queen Victoria’s entry in her journal for Tuesday 8 May 1860 (vol. 49, p. 121).
EGIL AND EAGLE-BARK
Introduction to The Oresteia, in Tony Harrison: Plays Four (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
1 ‘Marlowe’: Harley Granville Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet (London: Nick Hern Books, 1993), p. 31.
2 ‘An actor cannot’: Peter Hall, Diaries (London: Hamish Hamilton 1983), p. 247.
3 ‘in terrific form … I started the Oresteia’: ibid., pp, 242, 418.
4 ‘from sunlight to’: Harley Granville Barker, ‘On Translating Greek Tragedy’, in J. A. K Thomson and A. J. Toynbee (Eds), Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), p. 240.
5 ‘I long to’: Peter Hall, Diaries, p. 165.
6 ‘vowelled Greek’: John Keats, Lamia, lines 199–201.
7 but Robert Browning: The Agamemnon of Æschylus, Transcribed by Robert Browning (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1877), p. x.
8 ‘overstocked with consonants’: Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Saturday 19 January 1751, p. 199.
9 ‘our English’: Henry Lawes, Select Musicall Ayres and Dialogues (London: John Playford, 1652), Preface.
10 Aristotle thought: On the Soul 2.8.
11 ‘Consonants are’: Osip Mandelstam, ‘Some Notes on Poetry’, in Jane Gary Harris (Ed.), The Collected Critical Prose and Letters (London: Collins Harvill, 1991), p. 166.
12 ‘aural density’: George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford, London and New York: OUP, 1975), p. 314.
13 ‘He picks you out’: Carlyle, in B. A. Litzinger and D. Smalley (Eds), Browning: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1970), p. 432.
14 ‘perverse tour de force’: F. G. Kenyon (Ed.), The Works of Robert Browning (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1912), vol. 8, p. xi.
15 ‘Browning’s theory’: John Aldington Symonds, in Paul Selver, The Art of Translating Poetry (London: Baker, 1966), p. 26.
16 ‘Browning’s translation’: Reuben A. Brower, ‘Seven Agamemnons’, in On Translation (Oxford: OUP, 1966).
17 ‘the unwritten every-other-line’: Robert Browning, in a letter to James Thomas Fields of 4 February 1856, quoted in Ian Jack, ‘Browning on Sordello and Men and Women: Unpublished Letters to James C. Fields’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 45 (1982), p. 196.
18 A contemporary reviewer: in The London Quarterly for April 1878, p. 234.
19 ‘to interpret’: Edward Berdoe, The Browning Cyclopaedia (New York: Atlantic Publishers, 1892), p. 10.
20 What G. K. Chesterton called: in his Robert Browning (London: Macmillan, 1906), Chapter 6.
21 ‘Metre …’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), Chapter 18, p. 66.
22 ‘All were totally unspeakable’: Peter Hall, Diaries, p. 419.
23 Dionysius of Halicarnassus: in On Demosthenes, Chapter 39.
24 ‘megalithic’: John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932).
25 in a letter written in 1876: Robert Browning, letter to his publisher, George Smith, 22 December 1876, in Roma A. King (Ed.), The Complete Works of Robert Browning (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969), vol. 14, p. 267.
26 ‘No Attic dramatist’: Bernard Knox, ‘Chez Atreus’, a review of Andrei Serban’s production of Agamemnon in New York, New York Review of Books, 14 July 1977.
27 Stanford: W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in His Style (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1942), p. 140, n. 3.
28 ‘Hearken my chant’: both poems were first published in Francis Thompson’s Poems (London: E. Mathews and J. Lane, 1893).
29 ‘Wiry and white-fiery’: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1918), in W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (Eds), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edn (London: OUP, 1967), p. 55.
30 ‘Does this not read’: D. S. Carne-Ross, Classics and Translation: Essays, Kenneth Hayes (Ed.) (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010), p. 173.
31 ‘Sith I loved’: The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 204.
32 ‘The sour scythe …’: ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1918), ibid., p. 55.
33 ‘O then weary …’: from ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, ibid., p. 93.
34 ‘Where, selfwrung …’: The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 98.
35 could himself write a Greek verse: ibid., p. 226.
36 ‘Tell me where is Fancy bred’: translated into ancient Greek in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 225.
37 ‘Thus if for’: Louis MacNeice, in a review of Murray’s translation of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in The Spectator, 10 May 1935.
38 ‘slices from the banquet of Homer’: this was Aeschylus’ own descri
ption of his works, according to Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 8.347e.
39 W. P. Ker: Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 7, 10.
40 C. D. Locock … Esaias Tegnér: C. D. Locock, Thirty-Two Passages from the Iliad, in English Rhymed Verse (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922); Thirty-Two Passages from the Odyssey, in English Rhymed Verse (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923); Fritiof’s Saga by E. Tegnér, Translated in the Original Metres (London: Allen & Unwin, 1924).
41 ‘kenning’: W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in His Style, pp. 61–6, and Greek Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), pp. 132–6.
42 That great compendium … ‘Aeschylus himself’: G. Vigfússon and F. Y. Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale. The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), vol. 2, p. 447.
43 ‘The Greek language permitted’: W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in his Style: A Study in Language and Personality (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1942), p. 61.
44 ‘so grotesque’: W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in His Style, p. 61.
45 Sir John Cheke … version of the gospels: James Goodwin (Ed.), The Gospel according to Saint Matthew and part of the first chapter of The Gospel according to Saint Mark, translated into English from the Greek, with original notes, by Sir John Cheke, Knight (London: Pickering, 1854).
46 a letter to Robert Bridges: letter of 26 November 1882, in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges.
47 ‘continual emphasis’: R. P. Winnington Ingram, ‘Clytemnestra and the Vote of Athena’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 68 (1948), p. 132.
48 ‘the clash’: Hugh Lloyd-Jones in his translation Aeschylus: Oresteia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), p. 23.
49 ‘Oreste est le personage … maternelle’: ‘Orestes is the symbolic character who must trample under foot all the customs of the maternal family.’
50 Bachofen’s Mutterrecht: Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (Stuttgart: Verlag von Krais und Hoffmann, 1861). Translated in Ralph Manheim, Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).
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