Léo Somers (°1929)

Retired professor of English Literature and Literary Theory

Prof. Leo H. Somers was born in Antwerp on 22 July 1929. After completing his secondary education (Latin-Greek) at the Lode Craeybeckx Atheneum in Deurne, he went to the Catholic University of Leuven to pursue his studies. He registered as a student in Chemistry (!) to discover after barely two months that his true vocation lay elsewhere ... in Germanic Philology, where he could study the chemistry of the human mind and heart, the periodic tables of linguistic morphologies and literary genres, and the wonderful alchemy that poetry performs on language. Leo Somers clearly had the Midas touch. He was awarded scholarships to further his philological training at prestigious institutions such as the Freie Universität Berlin and Yale University, where he formed lasting friendships with other future academics, and furthermore at an American sister university of the Facultés, the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross at Worcester, Massachusetts.

His teaching career started in Brussels in the 1950s, first at the Sint-Thomas Normaalschool and then at the Marie Haps translators’ institute. In the 1960s Prof. Somers also made educational programmes for Flemish radio and the fledgling Flemish television. But his true career as a teacher started in 1960-1961, when the academic head-hunters of the day got him the job that was to become his lifelong passion: teaching English literature at the Facultés in Namur. Until Prof. Hantson joined him in 1968, his teaching load included English language and linguistics as well as literature, and initially he also helped out Prof. Martien De Jong with his Dutch grammar exercises.

Any favourite authors? There were many, but the list would certainly include William Shakespeare, Lord Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, and most of all perhaps James Joyce. Furthermore, Prof. Somers enjoyed organising extracurricular events such as poetry readings, public lectures, exhibitions, theatre performances and student trips to Britain (Canterbury, Edinburgh...). The extraordinary range of Prof. Somers’ linguistic skills and erudition has much to do with his truly passionate interest in languages, literatures and cultures, which also led him to visit libraries, museums and famous sites all over the world, ranging from Cuba to China and from Canada to Australia. Turkey became one of his preferred Easter destinations to the point that he even started learning the language, thus keeping his mind from early sclerosis and stimulating ethnic integration!

A stroke during the Easter break in 1989 forced Prof. Somers into early retirement and left him with reduced mobility. However, with his mental health and brainpower as strong as ever, he managed to continue to lead an intellectual’s very active life – happily surrounded by books, friends, family and visitors. Prof. Somers passed away on 13 April 2011, aged 81, half a year before the celebration of the 50 years of the Department that he helped to found and to which he gave his best energies.