To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.I changed the title of Philoctetes or Philoctetes because I wasnt quite sure how you pronounced it among other things but mainly because it was being toured in Ireland, to certainly non-classical people, it was being brought into all kinds of parish halls and arts centres and, as my mother would call them, the common five-eighths were coming in to see it.As well as being a Nobel Prize winner he was a Laureate for Literature in 1995 Seamus Heaney also has an Honorary Degree from the Open University.She started off by asking him what first attracted him to working with classical texts.
Ovid Metamorphoses Mary Innes Merge Upgrade Your BrowserThen, in my own particular case, I guess the Latin language had hieratic foundational quality because I grew up as a Catholic in the age of the Latin mass, so Latin was a kind of a ratified sacred tongue in that way. As the older I got, basically, it was a matter, I suppose, of self-improvement, because the classics, Latin and Greek literature is so deeply laid in subsequent western culture and literature. Unfortunately, I dont know Greek but Ive read Homer in translation, on and off, and eventually read the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles mostly, and Virgil in Latin because I was very fond of Virgil as a student. But I think, the thing about the classics is that they can be travestied, if you like and mocked but they cant be outstripped or diminished or dodged. If its war, you cant get more savage rendering of it than you have in Homer. ![]() I once said that the classics are like the longitude and latitude of consciousness in the West, they establish the first lines of thought and feelings. Were you attracted by the way in which Homer and the tragedians deal with certain themes or was it that you were drawn to them via a sort of intervening poetic tradition, as it were, you know, classicised Anglophone tradition. And, in fact, I didnt come to Homer until probably in my late twenties. And then, even more so, in my forties, I met a translator called Robert Fitzgerald who had done Homer. I always had a sense of Virgil because Id studied him because I knew him in translation better. But I think its the, with Homer, it is the actual head-on first-worldness, this is the, I mean, everybody says it, its the, who was the German critic called him nave as opposed to sentimental, youre encountering the world for the first time And, its that complete at-homeness in the domestic worlds of the Odyssey and the extraordinary, not inflated, just elevation of the Iliad and the warrior culture there. So you have war, I mean, as Virgil says later on, arms and the man in Homer, its more savage really than anything you get out of the trenches in the First World War, its as fierce as documentary, its almost as fierce as contemporary violent movies, you know, so, theres something unremitting and shocking in the Homeric Iliad war material and theres something kind of deeply heart-breakingly familiar in the Odyssey, when the old dog recognises Odysseus when he comes back and so on and so forth. They were intensified and made romantic and extreme from about 1968 to 1996 but anyone who grew up in the north of Ireland from their moment of consciousness was aware of, if you like, a public dimension to their lives, they were bonded into a group, one side or the other side. And they were also living in the, you know, a personal, private intimate, the theatre of your own conscience and consciousness. So, the demand for solidarity was there from the start with your group, and if you were growing into some kind of authentic individual life, the imperative for solitude or self-respect or integrity or self-definition was there also. So there was always that little, sometimes quite often, an ill-fit between the group line, the party line if you like, and the personal condition. And that is precisely what drew me to, certainly to the Philoctetes, where the hero, or hes not so much the hero, hes the young fellow, Neoptolemus is caught between the demands of loyalty and solidarity, he is a soldier on the Greek expedition and so he has to help the cause but in order to help the cause, he has to do something which infringes his own sense of truth and justice and self-respect, he has to tell a lie to this wounded man. So its that friction between the demands of the group and the demands of the individual integrity. ![]() Antigone was done so often, it has become more a set of issues than an actual play. And, to tell you the truth thats one of the reasons I changed the title.
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