The Only Tone for Terror: Tony Harrison and the Gorgon’s Gaze

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?

Tony Harrison’s Polygonal Ode to Delphi

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.

Tony Harrison and the Guardian

In 1991 Tony Harrison was commissioned by Alan Rusbridger, then editor of the Guardian, to write two poems on the Gulf War. The result was ‘Initial Illumination’ and ‘’A Cold Coming’. in 1995, the newspaper sent Harrison to Bosnia to send poems based on his eye-witnessing of the war, resulting in The Cycles of Donji Vakuf. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq produced two new war poems: Iraquatrains and Baghdad Lullaby. Armitstead, herself a Guardian journalist, sets these important poems in their historical and cultural contexts, and argues that the relationship between poet and paper was unique and unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future..

A Poet behind the Camera

In this chapter Peter Symes explores Tony Harrison’s film-poems, describing how over the last four decades the poet has constantly experimented and learned from discovery, hard graft, trial and error. Taking three detailed examples, he outlines how Harrison has developed the form, and how the use of verse can intensify and illuminate the visual in ways not possible with prose. Harrison prefaced his major feature film, Prometheus, with Pasolini’s words: ‘to make films is to be a poet’. He has managed to invert that. He is a poet who makes film

Lost in the Original: Tony Harrison as a Classicist Poet

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.

Afterword

Forgive me, Tony, if I celebrate Your birthday in a form you’ve made your own And in the same metre try to imitate What is your literary flesh and bone. I know that imitation’s flattery’s mate — Priestly genuflections and flunkeys’ bows Are society’s icing, which of course you hate:...

Wine and Poetry: Translating Tony Harrison in Italy

Tony Harrison has always had a deep connection with Italy and Italian poets, above all Naples and Leopardi. The article tries to show that Harrison’s sentence ‘it’s all poetry to me, whether it is for the printed page, or for reading aloud, or for the theatre, or the opera house, or concert hall, or even for television’ can be read as ‘it’s all translation to me’. The main idea is that translation works as the volcanic wine, Falanghina, disaster-nourished’, which transforms the lava of Vesuvius into a tasteful wine as described in Harrison's poem Piazza Sannazzaro. The process of translating from Latin and Greek or from other modern languages seems to equate, for Harrison, with the general process of creation either in a positive or in a negative sense. Translating, like poetry, is at the same time impossible and necessary, cannibalisation/Calibanisation of the original text (the case of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus) and negotiation with the ruina of ‘the fleeting life’ represented by the Volcano, in order to find a new-ancient voice, the half-pissed poet-translator’s voice, that always sounds political, contains a public, even hectoring relevance (the case, among many others, of The Krieg Anthology).

The Translation and Reception of Tony Harrison’s Poetry in France

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.

Verbal and Visual Witnessing: Tony Harrison’s Euripides

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.

Tony Harrison: Nigeria, Masque and Masks

Rachel Bower pays unprecedented attention to Aikin Mata, the version of Aristophanes’ bawdy comedy Lysistrata that Harrison wrote and produced with the Irish poet, James Simmons, when they were teaching at Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria in 1965. She argues that this encounter with indigenous African performance idioms has had a lasting influence on his later creative practice as well as the emergence of intercultural approaches in world theatre more widely.