 | Professor Michael Silk
Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature, King's College London (H1) Ancient Greek poetry and drama; the classical tradition, especially in English poetry and German thought; Nietzsche; poetics and poetic language; theories of literature
My current title is Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature, and as a classicist (which I have been for my whole academic career) I have always centred my efforts on exploring the relations between ancient literature and literature as a whole. My first serious publication (in 1971/2) was an exercise in comparative literature: a meditation on the affinities between one Roman poet (Virgil) and two English poets (Keats and T. S. Eliot). My current project is a collaborative study of the classical tradition (in 'art, literature, thought') which, on the literary side, attempts a mapping of Western literature, from the Middle Ages to our own generation, in terms of its relation to the ancient world. A fair bit of my work has been in the area of drama, and I spent many stressful but happy years overseeing the King's Greek Play (an anuual production, and always in Greek). The point as I saw it was to communicate with today's audience (there being no other kind to communicate with). I usually designed the music, which, for comedies in particular, was often jazz-based: jazz is one of my deepest loves, and I play the trumpet (with modest ability) myself. During one grandly exuberant production of an Aristophanic comedy (in 1981), I recall the feeling of triumph, after one matinée performance, when I heard a group of schoolgirls on the tube singing songs from the show. A few minutes into another matinée in that same run, a schoolmaster (as we guessed) walked out of the theatre clutching his Greek text and muttering, ' came to see Aristophanes, not this jazzed-up rubbish.' The philosopher Kierkegaard, honorary father of existentialism, once said: 'It is not worth while remembering a past that cannot become a present.' Wonderful motto. It is a great honour to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in my own case I also feel it as a kind of vindication of the boundary-crossing and open-endedness which I have always embraced and which, when my academic career began, was certainly a rarity in classical studies. I am glad to say that it is much less of a rarity now. |
