Reading, Writing, Groups and Selfhood

SYNOPSIS

From his experience of working with small groups on the writing of poetry and the reading of poets past and present from across the world, Graham Fawcett takes a fresh look at how processes of discovery and self-realization appear to vary between one-to-one and group encounters with the written and printed page. With examples and illustrations from a wide range of poets, including Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, W B Yeats, Robert Frost, Ivan Lalic, Homer, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Jorie Graham, Dylan Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, and Dante

Translating Poetry 

EXTRACT 

Translating Poetry is harder than it looks and easier than it doesn’t look. What on earth do I mean by that ? Well, it’s harder than it looks because we read it in the original or source language, and begin to think it in the target language, before the real work of composition begins. It’s easier than it doesn’t look, in the sense that once you’ve learned to give yourself a range of translation options for a word or phrase, over and above choosing the English word which most looks like the French or Italian or Spanish, you stop flogging the often dead horse of literal or mere mirror translation and start ranging more freely and calmly through a series of lateral thoughts, not forcing the French onto a sequence of words resembling it in English but letting English suggest how we might naturally say this ourselves.

Translation is a discipline just as writing is. It should, I believe, be lived like a mentorship, responding – as to a vocation – to any text which calls us. A text may call us in its original language, or cry out perhaps in the throes of being strangled by another translator’s heavy-handedness . . .

Broadening Vision: Poetry and Spirituality

EXTRACT

Several years ago now, a last-thing-at-night forecast issued a severe weather warning of very heavy rain for London at about three o'clock in  the morning. The impact of precise, impressive prophecy in it woke me at five minutes to three. Opening the French windows made a small proscenium. It began towards half-past with a mere increase in moisture on the incoming air, then came the odd audible drop more quickly repeated, a stir of more continuous sound like a sense of growth, and, as the gamble on rain came good, an answer to the front-stall seat in the language of this latest scene in the play of the world we spend so much time not watching. It reminded me of this poem:

My good and wonderful Lina

threw open the window for me to see

the immensity of the sky.

Resting quietly here and thinkinig

how I have given in vain and the end is approaching,

it pleases me the more, that sky, and those swallows,

those clouds. I ask nothing else, simply smoking

my pipe in silence like an old sea-dog.

Of all the telling, not to say broadening, moments in that poem, 'Sky', by the 20th century Italian poet Umberto Saba, perhaps the best is that phrase 'it pleases me the more'. The 'more' has become part of the speaker's sense of being alive from the throwing open of the window, then from the discovery of just how big the sky was and could be; and so from the resting quietly and the thinking about his life  and his approaching end, and consequently to the asking nothing else, an arrival at completeness; all of which leads to his writing of the poem, our reading it, and the shared captuire of a something more that pleases us. But we have to go to the poem in the first place, just as we have to be present at occasions like this one, in order to have the opporunity of contemplating for ourselves what the poet has felt and can convey to all of us who were not there. In other words, we need to submit to the thing. . . .

Illustrated by poems from Ezra Pound, Edward Thomas, W B Yeats, Anna Akhmatova, Wordsworth, Homer, Antonio Machado, Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, Cavafy, Derek Walcott, Ivan Lalic, W H Auden, and the lecturer

Poetry Is Communication

EXTRACT

"We may not fully grasp how a poem communicates, although usually there is no need for us to. What happens is something ineffable, like love. That it works is not in question, either:  we sense, body and soul, the effects that poetry can have on us, yet we cannot say how, only that the message has reached us and we have ‘received’ it. Indeed, so difficult is it to express, for example, how love affects us that only in a poem can the knot of its mystery be traced through, loosened, even untied . . ."

Illustrated by poems from Anna Akhmatova, W H Auden, Cavafy, Dante, Leopardi, Seamus Heaney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Apollinaire, Ungaretti, Homer, and Robert Frost

Imagination and the Classical Inheritance in Literature

EXTRACT

"We go back to the Classical World as to the Bible. The Classical World is a kind of Bible to us, a sacred book of a world. We go there, as we go to the Registry of Births, Marriages and Detahs at St Catherine's House in London, to retrieve links we have lost or never known. The bridges we cross back into antiquity were built in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. . . Without the classical inheritance, we are in a kind of stasis, not mindful of key origins. We cannot pretend that our origins do not exist, unless the flower can be accepted without reference to the root. . . "

(with special reference to Greek and Roman theatre, Virgil, Dante, Thomas Hobbes, Milton, Ted Hughes, James Joyce, C G Jung, and Hermann Broch)

The Book You Always Meant To Read

a cycle of fifteen lectures covering the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy

EXTRACT

We embark on a poet’s journey of a lifetime in what must rank as the most intense, and the most unbelievably credible diary ever written; 14,223 lines of it, ostensibly describing the events of seven days, but which probably took the poet at least ten years to write.

What “happens” to him through these days has such a breathtaking velocity and moment and mass and range and compass and seamless continuity, that it has been like a ground bass, a continuo of meaning, for me ever since I first read it. I thought of it yet again only the Saturday before last as I saw a time-clock on the television screen measuring, there and then at the time, the hours, minutes, seconds and tenths of a second that followed the sight of the first plane flying into the first tower of the World Trade Center, and counted the breaths in that gathering picture of apocalypse; and then, changing channels, was no less poignantly shocked into another connection when faced with the stark contrast struck by live pictures from Mantua of Verdi’s jesting Rigoletto going to hell in a handcart, in real time.

Graham Fawcett has lectured or led workshops at:

• the Aldeburgh Festival (Britten the Illuminator - Benjamin Britten's settings of poetry);
• the Edward the Confessor Millennial Festival, Islip 2005 (From Beowulf to Bayeux);
• the British Centre for Literary Translation;
• the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick;
• the Postgraduate Interpreting and Translation Department of European Studies & Modern Languages at the University of Bath;
• the School of English in the Department of Communication and Philosophy at the University of Cardiff;
• the Dulwich Festival;
• the Peterborough Festival;
• the Benissa campus of the University of Alicante; and
• the Feltre campus of the University of Milan;
• the Guild of Psychotherapists in London;
• Middlesex University;
• Westmont College, Santa Barbara (in London and Venice);

and for:

• the Contemporary Poets Tour;
• the Institute of Linguists in Cambridge;
• Metroland (Amersham);
• the Russell-Cotes Museum and Art Gallery (Bournemouth);
• the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society (Tunbridge Wells);
• the Children's Bookshow;
• the Guild of Pastoral Psychology (London);
• the Blackheath Poetry Society;
• Indian King Arts Centre (Camelford);
• Pitshanger Poets (Ealing);
• Ripley Arts Centre (Bromley);
• NADFAS;
• the National Art Fund; and
• Art House Holidays, Malaga