Insights from the Tony Harrison Archive

The Tony Harrison archive in Special Collections at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, is a vast and rich resource whose surface scholarship has only scratched. Classical Reception Studies scholars can view in action some processes of Harrison’s reception of ancient texts, in translations and new works of reception alike. The chapter describes the collection and explores its significance for Reception Studies before focusing on a dominant aspect of the notebooks for Harrison’s Oresteia: the theme of ‘sex wars’. This is one of several lenses through which the poet–translator interrogates the Aeschylean text, and which he amplifies throughout his processes of reception and translation. The chapter concludes with two contrasting observations from the archives of The Labourers of Herakles: first an example of the esoterica that Harrison, the classicist, earlier incorporated in his preparatory research (but not the finished play), which might have made Labourers even more exclusive for a non-classicist audience; then one of Harrison not privileging classical, ‘Western’ culture over other traditions, but using Greek and Roman classical myths as an intervention to critique the receiving culture for its complicity in contemporary destructions of Islamic culture. The archive affords insights into all aspects of the reception processes involved (translation, adaptation, hybridization of material from classical and non-classical sources, and others), not only by containing multiple, successive drafts but also by preserving Harrison’s multiple dialogues with the same ancient text as reader, annotator, scholar, and researcher.