Translating The Poem

Giving those who write poetry the experience of translating it has the immediate effect of letting you relax about the aspect of poetry writing which usually exercises you most – what to write about - and concentrate solely on creatively imitating those features - such as form and figures of meaning and sound - which the original poem is already providing you with.

Among poets who have attended this course in previous years is Peter Daniels, who went on to win the Arvon Prize in 2008. I say 'went on' because he believes the two are linked, and said so in an interview after winning the prize:

        

PETER DANIELS "In 2003 I finished a creative writing MA at Sheffield Hallam, which I enjoyed, but it seemed to get me into more of a corner than when I started it, or really just a different corner. I also started a demanding job at that time, which I'm not doing now but it did displace the poems. I've mentioned the Michael Longley minimalist influence, which isn't the whole story, but I have been taking up photography much more. In the last year I've been going to Graham Fawcett's translation workshop at the Poetry School, and that's been very stimulating. It teaches you a lot about language, translating a poem - and someone's already had the ideas, so you don't have to bother about being original" He added: " the last bit is maybe putting it a bit negatively, but the teaching about language is pretty important".

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.

There are regular opportunities each week for in-class translation and optional reading out and feedback and the groups are always supportively focused in their comments. Those of you who have attended a previous version of this course and those of you who will be taking part for the first time will find yourselves on an equal footing, as all of the poems for translation are new to the course this time.

Thursdays (weekly) 18th February to 18th March 2010                                645pm-845pm

8 places already taken, 6 still available for booking

LONDON
THE POETRY SCHOOL                                       

83 Lambeth Walk, London SE11 6DX

READING THE EAST – ‘Look On Their Works!’

An introduction to Eastern Bloc poems and poets 

THE 5-WEEK EXTENSION TO THE COURSE 

What did it mean to be born, to live, to work and to write behind the Iron Curtain ? 

Graham Fawcett introduces you to the poets and poems of the Eastern Bloc.                               

A five-week fully illustrated reading course with generous handouts  

To enrol, go to www.poetryschool.com or telephone 0207 582 1679 

A ten-week reading course from Wednesday 21st April to Wednesday 23rd June 2010 inclusive, The Poetry School, 83 Lambeth Walk, London SE11 6DX, 645pm-845pm

The newly discovered portrait of William Shakespeare.

 (Credit: Image courtesy of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)

This recently discovered portrait of William Shakespeare - the existence of which was only announced to the world in March of this year - is believed to be the only one painted in his lifetime. Our imagination’s batteries are unprecedentally recharged as we finally look into his face for the first time and feel compelled to ask ourselves afresh so many things about him. Here's one: to what extent did the author of the Sonnets feel he was writing poems in his plays as though momentarily staging a poetry recital of set pieces to hold an audience’s breath in mid-drama ?

Over ten weeks, Reading Shakespeare's Poetry will attempt to answer this very question. To do so, we will explore many of the Sonnets, the longer poems ‘Venus and Adonis’, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ and ‘Verses in Love’s Martyr’, and run across the poetry Shakespeare writes at key moments in the lyrical plays, the tragedies and the late Romances. 

• Activities in class: reading and discussion
• By the end of the course, participants will be likely to have learned what distinguishes Shakespeare poet from Shakespeare dramatist, how the sonnets work, what relation there is between the longer poems and the plays, and where in particular the plays become poetry
• Handouts provided weekly. No need to prepare or bring anything.

open to all

Thoughts about Shakespeare the poet

The other morning, when I dropped in on a friend of mine who runs a bookshop, I found him glad of the chance to share with me the feeling of being a bit exercised about a programme on Radio 4 which had managed to find three panellists for a discussion on lust all three of whom had something positive to say about it.

He told me some of the things the three had said, and it seemed they had been confusing lust with desire. We had no trouble on the positive aspects of desire, but lust ? Why, lust – well . . . We sat there feeling that we couldn’t easily say what lust was. It helped to try to say what it wasn’t, and we came to the conclusion that the blessing of desire, in fact the blessing on desire, was completion, satiety; whereas the curse of lust was that it could involve neither, because there was simply no end to it.

Somehow the idea of ‘no end’ hovered in the air and even became pleasurable, the way pleasure comes from a sudden endlessness in poetry – as one line runs on into the next without a pause, not even a comma’s breath. That feeling must then have bonded with the unspeakability of what lust might be, because into my head came the lovely (in poetic terms) but otherwise chilling enjambement in the lines

            “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

            is lust in action”.

So that morning I went home to my Shakespeare sonnets and there it was, number 129, and I thought, re-reading it, how every time one needs a phrase from a poem to resolve a moment of speechlessness, the poem is rendered brand new in the return to it.

I had been thinking of endings anyway that morning: the unstopped line; the stopped line; the final couplet that looks back over its shoulders at everything that has gone before and then encapsulates it; and, intensely in the sonnet, the marriage of form and content which here accompanies Shakespeare in his desire to delay the mention of lust twice in the first two lines, just as lust itself is lived as a delay, ungratified, thwarted as though by the unrelieved semi-colons of life’s reply to it; and then the peppering of the sonnet with reversals, the longing for an end thrown back upon itself in an imitation of lust – what I like to call ‘sensopoeia’, where the words mimic the sense and not the sound – because perversity is the reverse of what it might have wanted to be, is forever in reverse.

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
 

This is the beauty of the sonnet, indeed of literature: it can command a whole armoury of time and space; it can help us to experience an ending and so complete our grasp of something, no matter how unconducive to endings that something may be in our experience, no matter how, in itself, ungraspable. 

Poets on Shakespeare's poetry

(in progress)

By the time that the 19-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins went up to Oxford to study Classics, he was already writing poetry. Hopkins in Oxford Day will cross the thresholds of his creatively vibrant and spiritually fast-moving years in specially arranged visits first to Balliol College, and then to the Oxford Oratory (Catholic Church of St Aloysius); see his manuscripts at Campion Hall; re-visit his life-changing meetings with Walter Pater, Robert Bridges and John Henry Newman; and explore how they, alongside the Greek poets, Langland, Milton, Herbert, the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson helped him to tune and speak the extraordinary poetic voice to which the ultimate homage of imitation and even mimicry continues to be paid.

   HOPKINS IN OXFORD DAY DRAFT TIMETABLE

1015  Meet outside the front entrance to Balliol College,

          Broad Street, Oxford

1030 -1130  Tour of the college (with specific reference

          to Hopkins’s time there, 1863-1867) with Dr Penelope

          Bulloch and GF – Hopkins 1 with GF

1130–1230  Exploration and close reading, in Balliol

          College, of some of Hopkins’s writing during that

           period. Hopkins 2 with GF.

1230   Leave Balliol College for short walk to Campion Hall.

1245-1345 Tour of Campion Hall led by the Hall’s Hopkins

          Archivist Father Philip Endean, who will guide us in a

          recreation of Hopkins’s time here in the late 1870s and  

          provide access to the Hall’s notable Hopkins manuscript

          collection. Hopkins 3 with GF.

1345–1500 Lunch in Oxford

1500  Meet outside the Eagle and Child pub, 49 Saint Giles,

          Oxford

for the short walk to St Aloysius Oratory.

1515-1615 At St Aloysius Oratory,  Father Daniel Seward will

          enable us to get a sense of Hopkins’s life and work

          during his curacy there in 1878-1879. .Hopkins 4 with GF.

1615  End of Hopkins in Oxford Day.

The church is situated between the Kings Road and the River Thames and between Battersea and Albert bridges.   

South Kensington (0.7 miles), Gloucester Road (0.9 miles), Sloane Square (0.9 miles) (District and Circle Lines)

Booking opens Monday 22nd February – call the Poetry School on 0207 582 1679    

              JOHN KEATS DAY                  

It is quite possible that thanks to Jane Campion and her 2009 film Bright Star, more people in Britain than ever before now know that John Keats fell in love with the young woman next door and also where that door was – one of two doors to Wentworth Place, now Keats House, in Hampstead.

Keats Day will devote the morning - at the beautifully renovated and recently reopened house - to recreating Keats’s life there between December 1818 and Spring 1820, illustrating those months with the poems (and letters) he wrote, including the Odes To a Grecian Urn and To a Nightingale; and, after a bring-your-own picnic lunch on Keats House lawn, to a walk through the still almost country lanes of Hampstead to retrace Keats’s own footsteps and those of Fanny Brawne, Byron, Coleridge, Cowper, the Lambs, Leigh Hunt, Shelley and Wordsworth with appearances by Constable, Crabbe, Hopkins, Lawrence and Tagore along the way.

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not
Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance.
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable chain

And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet - may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved

And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. . .  

         The opening lines of Canto I of The Fall of Hyperion

        KEATS DAY DRAFT TIMETABLE

                       (Bring a picnic)

1015–1025  Meet at the gate outside Keats House, Keats Grove, Hampstead.

1025  Enter gate together.

1030-1055  Keats 1 with GF in the Chester Room.

1055-1130  Exploring Keats House – the story of each room. Keats 2 with GF

1130-1225 Context for and close reading of poems Keats wrote while here. Keats 3 with GF

1230-1330 Picnic lunch on the Keats House lawn.

1330-1530  Keats 4 with GF  Keats, The Romanics and Identity walk in the neighbouring lanes and green spaces, featuring Fanny Brawne, Byron, Coleridge, Cowper, the Lambs, Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Wordsworth - with Crabbe Constable, Hopkins, DH Lawrence and Tagore.

1530  Return to Keats House for tea. Keats 5 with GF

1615  End of Keats Day.