Graham Fawcett

writer, teacher, translator and broadcaster

e-mail: grahamkfawcett@gmail.com

telephone: 020 7405 3997

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Lectures
by Graham Fawcett

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 and 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 and the Peterborough Festival, 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 University of Milan, the Blackheath Poetry Society, Indian King Arts Centre (Camelford), Pitshanger Poets (Ealing), and Ripley Arts Centre (Bromley).

LECTURES INCLUDE:

Translating Poetry

Translating Prose

Poetry Workshops – how they can help

Poetry and Spirituality

The Communicativeness of Poetry

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

London and The Poet

lectures on ANY of the following: Mallarmé, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, W B Yeats and the Rhymers' Club, Keats, the Brownings, Coleridge, T S Eliot, Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound.

England and the Poet

lectures on ANY of the following: Blake in Sussex; Hardy in Dorset; Clare in Helpston; Crabbe, Fitzgerald and Tennyson in Woodbridge; and Coleridge and Wordsworth in and around Nether Stowey, Somerset.

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

The Poet's Journey through Time - the last thousand years
(discusses Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, The Song of Roland, The Song of the Nibelungs, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Dante and Coleridge)

Philosophies of Love - Mahabharata, the Troubadours, Dante's Purgatorio

Dante Alighieri

What Dante Means Now

How T S Eliot Began

Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes and the Possibility of a Jungian Perspective

The Delight Of This Spain Now Astir - Spanish poetry from the Arab Andalusians to the present day

Clarity and Labyrinth - the challenges of good writing

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

From The Song To The Symphony – an audio-illustrated exploration of the great variety of ways in which poetry or poetic texts have been used by composers from Berlioz to Benjamin. Our discoveries within the original poem, the music, or both may also create a starting-point for your own writing.

Lectures on other individual poets (any of those featured in course details)

Talks available to music groups

The Bach family

Luciano Berio

Irving Berlin

Lili Boulanger

Bruch

Marc-Antoine Charpentier

Cherubini and Spontini

Dallapiccola

Duruflé

Giordano

Gounod

Honegger

Korngold

Lalo

Mascagni

Satie

Salvatore Sciarrino

Weber

Hugo Wolf

Forzano the librettist

The Tosca File

Life Before Carmen – how the opera came to be

The Rush for Pelléas – how Sibelius, Fauré and Schoenberg converged on the story of Pelléas et Mélisande

The Unholy Office - Music and the Inquisition

Softest Music To Attending Ears- Romeo and Juliet in the concert-hall and the opera-house

Picture Postcards, Hanging Gardens and God - Schoenberg, Webern and Berg and their settings of poetry.

Lectures, seminars and workshops offered to universities

REMIXING THE VOICE

Graham Fawcett finds different strands of his working life – writing radio programmes, teaching both translation and poetry and translating Dante – coming together in this lecture/seminar. In Remixing The Voice, he will argue that there is something excitingly comparable between the growth of a poet’s voice and the translator’s making of a target language voice in which to sing the sound and sense of a source language poem. He will concentrate in particular on the formation and legacy of the voice of Early Japanese Women Poets, the medieval Italian poet Petrarch, and the 20th century Czech poet Miroslav Holub. Handouts will be provided containing the poems to be explored in detail.

SOMETHING LIKE THE ORIGINAL– Is Translation Ever More Than Second Best ?

A lecture/workshop illustrated by close reading of texts either out of or into English, which will also identify social, cultural, historical and other contextual clues to meaning and therefore transfer 

(a)  out of English into other languages, to include a translation-back exercise (a translation text from French into English back into French); and 

(b)  into English, with 100% vocabulary support on word-sheets so as to include those without French or Italian. 

TRANSLATING THE POEM AS AN AID TO CREATIVE WRITING

A lecture and workshop examining the translating of poetry into English and the principles involved. Poems from French, Italian, German, Swedish and/or Chinese will be read closely (word-sheets provided giving 100% vocabulary support in cases where it’s thought desirable to include those with no previous knowledge of the language(s) concerned) and decisions will be taken as to the preserving of idiom, metaphor, pun, syllable-count, rhyme and rhythm. Background will be given to provide context for poems by poets to be selected from Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Mallarmé; Saba, Leopardi, Dante; Hölderlin; Edith Södergran; and Tao Qian.

My thesis is that teaching the translation of poetry is also a way of helping students, most of whom have little or no knowledge of foreign languages, to develop their poetry writing skills.

Giving students the translation experience has the immediate effect of letting them relax about the aspect of poetry writing which usually exercises them most * what to write about - and concentrate solely on creatively imitating such features as form and figures of meaning and sound with which they have been provided already by the original poem. Like pastiche or parody, or writing variations on a theme, or even weightlessness in swimming for muscle improvement, students have found the leg-up of the original enormously liberating not only for prosody but also for vocabulary, and thence for invention  

TRANSLATING PROSE

A lecture and workshops examining the translating of fiction and non-fiction into English and the principles involved. Extracts from French, Italian and Spanish will be read closely (word-sheets provided giving 100% vocabulary support in cases where it’s thought desirable to include those with no previous knowledge of the language(s) concerned) and decisions will be taken as to the preserving of idiom, metaphor, pun and other features of the original. Background will be given to provide context for prose extracts to be selected from the Spanish of Nuria Amat, the Italian of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini and a newspaper article on new flood-defence technology in Venice, and the French of Marcel Proust (including a chance to compare three different published translations into English).  

My thesis is that teaching the translation of prose can also be a way of helping students who have little or no knowledge of foreign languages to develop their fiction and non-fiction prose writing skills.  

POETRY IS WHAT GETS FOUND IN TRANSLATION 

Arguing against the American poet Robert Frost’s assertion that poetry is what gets lost in translation, Graham Fawcett explores the particular difficulties of translating poetry, demonstrates how the translator can face up to the challenges of form, figures of meaning and sound, idiom and cultural difference, and argues that poetry’s very survival in the new world order will depend on translation (lecture/seminar). 

INHERITANCES

Seamus Heaney has said that ‘craft is what you learn from other poets’, while Elizabeth Bishop was drawn to ‘the purity of language’ in the poetry of George Herbert. In the 1930s everybody wanted to sound like W H Auden but how did Auden come by that sound ? And since Gerard Manley Hopkins seems to sound like nobody else, does that mean he developed his voice from scratch ? This lecture, seminar or workshop looks at how poets inherit strands, figures and features of previous voices, ages and places, explores the work of a range of poets and traces their voices from before, during, and after their writing lives. Poets could include Wordsworth, Herbert, Hopkins, Auden and Walcott or look at poets in translation

HOW DO WE KNOW TRANSLATORS OF POEMS ARE ANY GOOD ?

Assessments of the translating careers of poets who have also published as translators from one or more languages and comparisons of their translation work with their own poetry. The list could include Ezra Pound, Edwin Morgan, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Marianne Moore and/or others

An example would be an assessment of Edwin Morgan’s performances as a translator from the Italian (Montale), the Hungarian (Weöres, Juhasz and Attila Joszef), the Old English (Beowulf) and the French (Racine’s Phèdre and Cyrano de Bergerac).

Close reading of the original with 100% vocabulary support and comparative evaluation of other published versions would not only enable students to experience the process that Morgan had to go through line-by-line but also offer opportunities for comparison with the work of his near- and not-so-near- contemporaries Ted Hughes (Racine and from the Hungarian), Anthony Burgess (Cyrano) and Seamus Heaney (Beowulf).

My usual fee is £275 for a morning, afternoon, or evening session, £350 for two consecutive sessions.