Proms Plus Literary - Tony Harrison
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2014
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The poet and playwright Tony Harrison talks to Matthew Sweet about his passionate commitment to the classics, poetic language and political writing over the last fifty years. This programme, presented by Matthew Sweet, was recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music as part of the BBC Proms. To find out further information about the events which are free to attended go to bbc.co.uk/proms
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:46.5 | Hello, Tony Harrison is one of our most significant modern poets, and one of our most significant ancient ones, too. |
| 0:53.2 | Let me offer up two pieces of archaeological evidence. His verse play, The Trackers of Oxirinkus, |
| 0:56.9 | developed from the broken pieces of a work by Sophocles. |
| 1:05.0 | His version of the Oristaya, his play based on a fragment of a work by Freinicus, one of the earliest Greek tragedians. |
| 1:10.7 | And yet, in Harrison's work, the distinction between the ancient and modern tends to collapse. His version of Aristophanes |
| 1:12.5 | Lissistrata transferred its events to the camp at Greenham Common. His play, The Laborers of Heracles, |
| 1:19.5 | draws out themes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was performed at Delphi in 1995, |
| 1:25.8 | and the day after, its author headed off to Bosnia to write a series of verse reports on the war. |
| 1:31.9 | It's this common ground between the ancient world and our world that we're going to explore tonight. |
| 1:37.3 | But I can promise you a proper performance, too. |
| 1:40.1 | Tony Harrison is here and primed to give us one of the great speeches from the trackers of Oxirinkas. |
| 1:46.7 | So you'll be able to feel him transforming into a satire here this evening. |
| 1:52.3 | Tony, how ancient does the ancient world feel to you? |
| 1:57.1 | It feels both ancient and incredibly recent because I read it with the experience I've had in life and history. |
| 2:10.8 | And sometimes I can puzzle over the ancient Greek and the force of it hits me as though it were written yesterday. |
| 2:21.6 | So in what circumstances does that proximity strike you the strongest? |
| 2:27.3 | I don't know. I came to – I mean, I studied Greek at grammar school, |
| 2:33.0 | but I came to it. |
| 2:34.9 | I had an experience that I accounted for in a poem |
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