51 ‘the world historical’: Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (Hottingen-Zürich, 1884), of which the first English-language edition was published by Charles H. Kerr & Co. (Chicago, 1902).
52 ‘an advance in’: James Strachey’s translation of Moses and Monotheism (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1964), pp. 113–14.
53 ‘The notion’: G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, translated by F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 214–15.
54‘… by nature’: De Generatione Animalium 1.20.729a and 738b, translated by A. L Peck in Aristotle: Generation of Animals (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 366, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942) and Politics 1.1254b 5–15.
55 ‘In nature’s plan’: Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), p. 329.
56 ‘a puppet’: Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), ‘Introduction’.
57 ‘This is what’: Nancy Bogen, Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (New York: Twickenham Press, 1980), p. 145.
58 ‘the personification’: Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Family (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 137.
SQUARE ROUNDS
Tony Harrison: Plays Five (London: Faber & Faber, 2004).
1 ‘Their delicatessen’: Hudson Maxim, Defenseless America (New York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1915), pp. 82–3.
2 ‘Modern verse’: Hudson Maxim, The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1910), p. 66.
3 ‘poetry and gunpowder’: Hudson Maxim, Reminiscences and Comments by Clifton Johnson (London: William Heinemann, 1924), pp. 299, 302.
4 ‘It is perfectly safe’: Hudson Maxim, ‘The Poet’s Uplift’, in Dynamite Stories and Some Interesting Facts about Explosives (New York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1916), p. 37.
5 ‘Not having been able’: Alfred Nobel, in Edelgard Biedermann (Ed.), Chère baronne et amie, cher monsieur et ami: der Briefwechsel zwischen Alfred Nobel und Bertha von Suttner (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2001), p. 175.
6 ‘the only American’: Hiram Maxim, My Life (London: Methuen, 1915), p. 242.
7 James Puckle: see the pamphlet, held in the British Library, by Owen Standidge Puckle, James Puckle, N.P.: His Books and His Gun (1974).
8 two women doctors: Agnes Livingstone-Learmouth and Barbara Martin Cunningham.
9 ‘The piercing pain’: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 203.
10 The Producers: written and directed by Mel Brooks (1967). Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden is the name of a fictional musical and its title song within the movie.
11 ‘In the First World War’: William Moore, Gas Attack! (London: Leo Cooper, 1987), p. 238.
12 ‘the chlorine’: Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), pp. xi–xii.
13 ‘Under the Clock’: first published in London Review of Books, 17 April 2003.
WEEPING FOR HECUBA
Introduction to Hecuba of Euripides, translated by Tony Harrison (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
1 Plutarch tells his story: in his Life of Pelopidas ch. 29.3–6. For the relevance to Hamlet’s reference to Hecuba in Shakespeare, cited in Harrison’s epigraph here, see E. Hall, ‘Trojan Suffering, Tragic Gods, and Transhistorical Metaphysics’, in Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone (Eds), Tragedy in Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 16–33.
2 ‘Tragedy and hapless Hecuba’: Franz Werfel, Die Troerinnen des Euripides (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1915), p. 11.
3 ‘All the misery’: in Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, ‘The Theatre and Gilbert Murray’, in Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee (Eds), Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, with Contributions by his Friends (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 163, n. 1.
EVEN NOW
Preface to Edward Powys Mathers, Black Marigolds with Coloured Stars (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004).
1 a collection of his best crossword puzzles: in J. M. Campbell (Ed.), Torquemada-Powys Mathers. 112 Best Crossword Puzzles. With a Portrait and Three Biographical Notes (by R. C. Mathers, John Dickson Carr and E. Ellen Ashwin) (London: Pushkin Press, 1942).
2 Cecil French: see his With the Years (London: Richards Press, 1927).
3 ‘my rendering was’: Edward Powys Mathers, prefatory note in Black Marigolds: Being a Rendering into English of the ‘Panchasika of Chauras’ (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1919).
4 ‘a melodious and ingenious’: The Chaurapanchâsika, Translated & Illustrated by Sir Edwin Arnold (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1896), ‘Preface’, folio 3.
5 ‘each beginning with’: Arthur Anthony Macdonell, A History of Sanskrit Literature (London: Heinemann, 1900), p. 339.
6 Charles Tomlinson … Hugh Kenner: Charles Tomlinson, Oxford Book of Verse in Translation (Oxford: OUP, 1980), pp. 30–1; Hugh Kenner, ‘The Invention of China’, Spectrum 9.1 (spring 1967), pp. 30–1.
7 ‘He might have’: Edward Powys Mathers, Anthology of Eastern Love (London: John Rodker), vol. 11 (1929), pp. 113–38, and vol. 12 (1930), pp. 120–2.
8 ‘takes his veneration’: Anthology of Eastern Love, vol. 12, p. 99.
9 an essay on Arabic prose and verse: Anthology of Eastern Love, vol. 12, pp. 97–107.
10 ‘the squibs’ of Red Wise: Edward Powys Mathers’s Red Wise (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1925) is a collection of nineteen short prose pieces featuring or attributed to Abu Nowas. Mathers called them ‘squibs’ in a ‘Note’ appended to the stories, following p. 98. Chapter 5 is entitled ‘Thanks for Wine’; Chapter 18, ‘Hashish Instances’, describes eating hashish.
11 ‘If He made all beauty’: Mathers, Red Wise, Chapter 9, ‘Tavern Scores’, pp. 47–8.
12 one of the real ‘discoveries’ … ‘in Paris’: Mathers, Anthology of Eastern Love, vol. 11, pp. 18–21, with vol. 12, pp. 154–5.
13 E. Allen Ashwin … His wife Rosamond: in J. M. Campbell (Ed.), Torquemada-Powys Mathers, pp. 31–2 and 24–5.
14 ‘I have not forgotten’: Mathers, Red Wise, ‘Note’ appended to the stories following p. 98.
15 ‘in no way compensated’: in J. M. Campbell (Ed.), Torquemada-Powys Mathers, p. 25.
16 the Chinese American Julius Wing: Mathers, Anthology of Eastern Love, vol. 12 (1930), p. 122.
FLICKS AND THIS FLEETING LIFE
Introduction to Collected Film Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
1 Bambi … Snow White … White Heat: Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh.
2 The Hollywood Hall of Shame: by Harry and Michael Medved (London: Angus Robertson, 1984).
3 Lawrence of Arabia … Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear’: Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr Zhivago (1965) were both directed by David Lean; Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971) by Grigori Kozintsev.
4 ‘Mirror is the most’: Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 66.
5 ‘The film affected’ … ‘On earth there is’: Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pp. 130–1.
6 ‘At certain periods’: Joseph Brodsky, ‘Introduction’, in Anna Akhmatova: Poems, translated by L. Coffin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1983), p. xxx.
7 we developed an understanding: Peter Symes goes into the details of these discoveries in his generous introduction to Harrison’s Collected Film Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
8 ‘Hello, why he’s blue’: Maurice Maeterlinck, The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts (1908), Act VI, scene ii, translated by Alexander Teixeira De Mattos (London: Methuen, 1909).
9 ‘Prosody’: Joseph Brodsky: ‘Introduction’, in Anna Akhmatova: P
oems, p. xxviii.
THE INKY DIGIT OF DEFIANCE
PEN Pinter Prize lecture, 2009, privately printed for Faber & Faber.
1 ‘Blowing Up the Media’: in Index on Censorship 5 (1992), pp. 2–3.
2 ‘Inside me contend’: John Willett and Ralph Manheim (Eds), with the co-operation of Erich Fried, Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 (translator unspecified) (revised edn, London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 331.
3 ‘To Posterity’: the full poem appears in another English translation as ‘To Those Born Later’ in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, pp. 318–20.
4 rare pieces of prose: ‘Shango the Shaky Fairy’, in this volume, p. 53ff.
5 Yiannis Ritsos: the English translation by Ritsos’s devoted editor printed here is an otherwise unpublished partial translation of the poem ‘Γαλάζιο Ποίημα. Στον Γκέο Μίλεϕ’ (Light-Blue Poem. For Geo Milev), written on 27 June 1958 in Sofia. It was first published in Ritsos’s collection ‘Ανθρωπου και τοπία’, Humans and Landscapes (1958), and is reprinted in vol. 5 of Ritsos’s Collected Works (Athens: Kedros, 1987), pp. 369–70. Many thanks to John Kittmer.
6 is regarded by Shelley: Richard Garnett (Ed.), Select letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with an introduction by Richard Garnett (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), letter 7 (to Thomas Jefferson Hogg), pp. 15–16.
7 Pharsalia … Martial: Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia: or the civill warres of Rome (London: John Norton and Augustine Mathewes, 1626); Selected Epigrams of Martial. Englished by Thomas May (London: T. Walkley, 1629).
8 ‘English literary culture’: David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), p. 432.
9 ‘I met Murder’: these two lines from Shelley are from the second stanza of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (1819).
10 Dean Herbert Ryle: in The Tablet, 26 July 1924, p. 4.
11 ‘Royalist in politics’: T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyn, 1929), p. ix.
12 ‘the Senior Churchwarden’: Robert Graves, ‘The Virgil Cult’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, 38.1 (winter 1962), p. 13.
13 ‘Thou gott’st Augustus loue’: Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia, dedication facing the frontispiece.
14 ‘Why Virgil’s poems’: Robert Graves, ‘The Virgil Cult’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, 38.1, p. 35.
15 ‘Don’t hold me back’: Primo Levi, ‘Pliny’, translated by Ruth Feldman with Brian Swann, in Collected Poems (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 33.
THE LABEL TRAIL TO STRASBOURG
European Prize for Literature acceptance speech, 2010.
1 ‘Le coeur bat l’iambe’: Jean-Louis Barrault, Le phénomène théâtral (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 19.
2 ‘One glass and no refill’: the poem is a fragment of Amphis’ comedy Gynaecocracy (‘Women in Power’), composed in the fourth century BC. The Greek text reads:
πίνε, παῖζε· θνητὸς ὁ βίος, ὀλίγος οὑπὶ γῆι χρόνος· ἀθάνατος ὁ θάνατός ἐστιν, ἂν ἅπαξ τις ἀποθάνηι
THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2015
Acceptance speech given at the British Library, 26 February 2015.
1 ‘sounded like fifteen Arthur Scargills’: quoted in ‘A Bleeding Poet’, an anonymous editorial in The Economist, issue 7795, 23 January 1993, p. 95.
About the Author
Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937. His volumes of poetry include The Loiners (winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Continuous, v. (broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, winning the Royal Television Society Award), The Gaze of the Gorgon (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry), and Laureate’s Block. Recognised as Britain’s leading theatre and film poet, Tony Harrison has written extensively for the National Theatre, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the BBC, Channel 4, the RSC, and for unique ancient spaces in Greece, Austria and Japan. His films include Black Daisies for the Bride, which won the Prix Italia in 1994, The Shadow of Hiroshima, Prometheus and Crossings. Five volumes of plays and his Collected Film Poetry are published by Faber and his Collected Poems by Penguin. His play Fram premiered at the National Theatre in 2008. Tony Harrison was awarded the inaugural PEN/Pinter Prize in 2009, the European Prize for Literature 2010, the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2015, and the Premio Feronia 2016 in Rome, in special recognition of a foreign author.
By the Same Author
Poetry
THE LOINERS
PALLADAS: POEMS
FROM THE SCHOOL OF ELOQUENCE
CONTINUOUS
V.
SELECTED POEMS
A COLD COMING
PERMANENTLY BARD
LAUREATE’S BLOCK
UNDER THE CLOCK
COLLECTED POEMS
Plays
TONY HARRISON: PLAYS ONE
(The Mysteries)
TONY HARRISON: PLAYS TWO
(The Misanthrope, Phaedra Britannica, The Prince’s Play)
TONY HARRISON: PLAYS THREE
(Poetry or Bust, The Kaisers of Carnuntum, The Labourers of Herakles)
TONY HARRISON: PLAYS FOUR
(The Oresteia, The Common Chorus Parts I and II)
TONY HARRISON: PLAYS FIVE
(The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, Square Rounds)
HECUBA
FRAM
COLLECTED FILM POETRY
(Arctic Paradise, The Big H, Loving Memory,
The Blasphemers’ Banquet, The Gaze of the Gorgon,
Black Daisies for the Bride, A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan,
The Shadow of Hiroshima, Prometheus,
Metamorpheus, Crossings)
Copyright
First published the UK in 2017
First published in the USA in 2017
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Tony Harrison, 2017
Foreword © Edith Hall, 2017
Cover design by Faber
The right of Tony Harrison to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32504–7
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 43