The Inaudibility of the Translator – originally submitted to the BFI Women in Film Reporting Competition.

Aren’t you a lucky bunch! This is an article I wrote for a reporting competition run by the BFI. Unfortunately, it didn’t cut the mustard (boo) because it’s an ‘essay’ rather than a piece of investigative journalism. Never mind. I’ll know for next time. Anyway, I put quite a lot of thought in to it so I figured I’d rather put it somewhere than let it go to waste.. so here it is, for your delectation and delight.

(Here we go)

There’s no doubt amongst critics, audiences and creators that film is art; a celluloid tapestry of complex interwoven threads. There’s no less doubt that film is also invariably a commercial product, and a covetable one at that. To the varying chagrin of some, worth is measured not only by artistic merit but also by revenue.

Given that films are often produced to be successful on a global scale, they must be relevant – or at least available – to a global audience. Just as a book or poetry collection would be translated were it to venture beyond its home borders, the same is true of films.

However, just as literature has been subjected to a maelstrom of debate about what constitutes a ‘good translation’, it seems only fair to ask if cinema has been spared this, and why, and whether this is justified.

Considerable scholarship has been produced in about the last 40 years when it comes to translated literature. Translation theory argues, these days – though not all critics agree – that translation is ‘generative’ – it creates an entirely new work, in and of itself – and that the process of translation ought to make the translator ‘visible’. The author of the translation should be just as eligible for stylistic accolades as the author of the source text. The rest of the world is only slowly getting to grips with this.

When a film script is translated, what is it the translator must keep? What can they lose? How do they balance a fixed visual setting with a fluid linguistic one? Are some films written with subtitles in mind, or do they jar uncomfortably with the viewing experience?

Consider the two versions of the adaptation to film of Stieg Larsson’s crime thriller, known in English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, released in 2009 and 2011 respectively.

Some were mightily dismayed by Hollywood obtaining the film rights for what they considered an already excellently-made movie. The original won awards and praise on a global scale for its Swedish-with-subtitles presentation of the book. Why oh why, then, did it need remaking? There’s a short (and cynical) answer here: Hollywood wanted a film that they owned and they wanted it to appeal to a big audience. That meant a) casting Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomqvist and b) producing it in English. Subtitles, clearly, do not cut the mustard.

Subtitles create a certain atmosphere to a film that it isn’t easy to disregard. That said, they can be an incredibly effective and clever manipulation of generic conventions. The 2010 Norwegian film Trollhunter, shot in a documentary style, is prefaced at the start with a screen declaring the footage to have been anonymously sent to the Norwegian authorities. The subtitling of the film adds to the sensation that the material may be incendiary; that it is important that every word is caught and understood for reasons of national and possibly international security. Documentaries frequently subtitle speech uttered too low to be easily heard, even if spoken in the language intended for transmission. Subtitles make sense; they don’t just render this film intelligible, they add another level to it.

So in this context, dubbing the film into English seems somewhat unnecessary. Why would three English-speaking, Norwegian college students be tracking trolls in Norway and submitting their material to Norwegian authorities?

One may similarly ask why a Swedish journalist would suddenly find himself investigating a case where everyone involved, including the people who aren’t supposed to be, speaks English.

Asking these questions can help us understand what exactly translating a film does. What we want from film is an integration of the audible and visual experiences, so closely interwoven that they speak to a level beyond what can be conveyed simply by ‘language’.

If you can create a world on film which is realistic, it doesn’t matter, in the end, what language the characters speak. Nobody really quibbles about Brad Pitt’s Achilles in Troy not speaking in Homeric Greek, after all. It’s as if the directors have slipped a Babel fish in your ear. You can understand because the visual experience is so seamless that you can’t not understand. Location-specific films, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, can be tackled in this way – again, you’re not supposed to notice that they’re not speaking Swedish. They’re just speaking, and you’re understanding. Trollhunter could have been done in this way – it’s not beyond the realms of possibility – but, as described, why waste such a great opportunity to play on some generic conventions? It’s a lot cheaper and deliciously effective.

If there’s such a covetable prize for the audible experience, we ought still to ask why there isn’t more credit given for the translated script. Is a script-translator expected to assume the same ‘invisibility’ as a translator of literature? They may not have come up with the concept, but that doesn’t make them any less creatively important.

On the continent, there is far more recognition for the voice actors who help turn English-language films into French or Italian or German critical successes. Surely it should not stop there? No translator’s name appears on the credits for the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Yet somebody must have written the subtitles. Were they so wholly divorced from the film creation process that they deserve no acknowledgement at all? And even if they were – what they have done is still part of the viewer’s experience. We should at least be offered their name. We have Steven Zaillian’s.

It’s a small point, perhaps, but it applies more widely, too – not just to translation, but to totally reworking a film, or a book or play or symphony or poem. Every reinterpretation has value in and of itself. Instead of bemoaning ‘another’ adaptation or version, take a step back and think about it from the point of view of the translator. Since every film is an exercise in adaptation, maybe it’s time to give some more credit to the ones most obviously engaged in it.

Sometimes I go to places and think things: Tate, Liverpool

I spent this delectable, sunny Bank Holiday weekend oop nooorth visiting my dearly beloved E. Our activities included (but were not limited to) babysitting a tiny curly-haired tot, cooking, drinking, wearing silly clothes, playing Carcassone, walking through woods and watching Doctor Who. We cracked open a box that had been rusted shut for some time and discovered the family dressing up box, containing a pair of leggings so fierce they actually made eyes water. Drinking necessitated wearing said leggings and frankly, I came away inspired. I will be acquiring my own pair of paisley leopard print leg coverings very soon, make no mistake.

Anyway, our mutual interests are slightly broader than just getting wazzed and dressing up so on Sunday we went into Liverpool, narrowly avoiding the derby match. We spent a thoughtful hour or two in the Tate at the Albert Dock and it got me thinking. Here are some of the blossoms (I wouldn’t say they’re sufficiently developed to call them ‘fruits’) of my musings on the subject.

The first exhibition was about sculpture. So far, so reasonable. The breadth of medium, styles and influences was vast – two buckets welded together to look like they were undergoing mitosis; three basketballs suspended in a tank of saline solution; a standing iron tripod ‘mobile’ – the whole gamut. Each piece was interesting as a standalone, though after the eternal Orwellian rule, some were more interesting than others. I was intrigued by the blurbs describing how various pieces had been at other exhibitions and had been moved, or lost (the infamous urinal-piece being one of them) or intended to look different. What does this add to or take from the piece as it stands? Do we need to know the context from which it was taken in order to understand the piece in its new context, or does this cloud our understanding of what it means ‘now’ at the moment of our first interaction with it?

I suppose if the gallery wants to explain why the three basketballs that you may have seen neatly spaced out in a picture don’t look quite the same now because the piece has been moved, that’s fair enough. On the other hand, perhaps decline and decay is fundamental to the process of art and doesn’t need to be ‘explained’. Perhaps explaining that this has happened makes it part of the art in a way that was never intended. Perhaps the intentions of the artist don’t matter once the work is finished and let loose into the public domain. Or perhaps the decline does need to be acknowledged (although whether it’s ‘acknowledgement’ or ‘unnecessary pointing out’ is another question again).

Anyway. At the time, I was quite happy to just look at the stuff, read the blurbs where I wanted to and ignore the ones where I didn’t. Some of the art didn’t catch my attention and some of it held on with considerable tenacity. I’m no art critic and I don’t have an informed understanding from which to draw conclusions that others in that field would find meaningful. But. Bear with me.

The next series of exhibition rooms was called ‘Constellations’. Here’s a link so you can check it out for yourself if you so wish: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/display/dla-piper-series-constellations. The idea behind the collection as I understood it was to display works by different artists that complemented and set off each other in illuminating ways, to create a sort of constellation – a series of links and branches that can be defined by one name even though they are light years apart in real space and time. Some of the links were more obvious from the pieces than others – some were pretty difficult for my untrained eyes to make out. Crucially, though, I took away these thoughts.

• Outwardly acknowledging and actively promoting the juxtaposition of particular artworks to demonstrate linking features is a new and interesting thing – it encourages the reception of these artworks in a certain way. Instead of seeing them as individual pieces, the viewer sees them in the context of ‘the gallery’ or ‘the exhibition’ rather than ‘the frame’.

That’s all well and good, for starters, although as was pointed out to me when I suggested this was interesting – all galleries and exhibits encourage a particular reception of materials.

• The point of the curator is to select pieces that create chemistry between each other as well as on an individual basis. While the explicit self-awareness of this Tate collection is a new (to me, at least) and interesting thing, it is not new per se.

If all space in which we experience art defines or helps define how we respond to it, this says an awful lot about how we ought to treat reception theory and reception studies. Physical space and proximate objects can affect our reactions just as much as our cultural background, our political ideals, our gender, our age, our education and/or our language.

Well. I haven’t decided whether the self-awareness of the Constellations collection and its directive nature is something with which I am comfortable, yet. I am aware that so many other receptions – of literature, film, music and the rest – are heavily dictated by the ways in which we experience them and these ways are all manipulated by those who manage said media. Explicit acknowledgment of that manipulation is a step in a thought-provoking direction, if nothing else.

April’s books

Hullo my lovelies. Those of you among the faithful will be familiar with the monthly book review. As it is now the end of April (with all the attendant Joys of Spring etc that this brings) it is time to look back and consider what I have read.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have a list as lengthy as – well, any of my previous ones. I don’t know if I just burned out after March or if it was something to do with getting off to a bad start, but I’ve only read three books this month, and they aren’t even big ones. Nevertheless, ours not to reason why, so I will give you the (dubious) benefit of my thoughts on them notwithstanding.

I got part of the way through the Mill on the Floss, but after two weeks I realised that I just wasn’t going to finish it. If there is one problem with reading books on a Kindle, it is this: you can’t tell – physically – how far through you are. Now, with something that’s not terribly verbose or is highly character/plot driven (eg Game of Thrones), this isn’t really a problem. But with a Victorian novelist it’s a bloody nightmare. I’ve had the same problem with Vanity Fair. I still haven’t finished the damn thing. And I haven’t finished Mill on the Floss, either. So I’m not counting that as one of my ‘completed’ books, but I thought you should at least receive some explanation for the lack of other titles…

I did, however, read Flatland, by the excellently named Edwin Abbott Abbott. Flatland is a late Victorian novel which was recommended to me by my mathematician friend Michael. I am pretty average at maths and fairly awful at spatial awareness, so even though this is a very short work, it took me a few days to read it – properly – and assimilate what on earth was going on.

Basically, Flatland is a 2-dimensional world inhabited by shapes; the more sides the shapes have, the higher their social prestige and mental capacity (the two are inextricable). The story is narrated by a self-described ‘respectable square’. He lays out the principles and features of Flatland, then goes on to describe a dream he has where he visits a 1-dimensional world. Stepping down the dimensions prepares the reader – though not the poor square – for a visitation by a denizen of Spaceland, who arrives in the square’s home on the evening of the millennium to announce that the concept of three dimensions is  possible. The square takes some convincing but eventually considers himself enlightened; however, he cannot remain in Spaceland and his knowledge of it makes him a traitor in Flatland. He is consigned to a prison and there he ends.

It’s an effective story about the limits of our perceptions and the way that our understanding about how we live reduces our capacity to think in a different way. It’s also an interesting example of analogy and its various powers. And it’s a social study, too – hierarchy, education, upbringing, social mobility, intelligence, the position of women – all are presented in such a way as to seem perfectly congruous with (perhaps not our own experiences, but certainly) those of a late Victorian – yet also ridiculous.

I can’t say the plot was necessarily ‘gripping’, nor could it be described along generic lines – but it was provoking, engaging and enlightening. A curious read, and not in a bad way.

Well. Empowered by my new understanding of planes and solids, I cracked my literary knuckles and picked up another Virginia Woolf – this time, Mrs Dalloway. My previous experiences with Woolf – detailed in March’s Books, if you’re looking – did not prepare me for this. Woolf the essayist is not the same as Woolf the novelist. Or rather, the core is very much the same, but you are looking in through another window altogether. The Voyage Out is such an early work that it can barely be held up as an exemplary piece of her writing, so that didn’t help me much either, except to make me wonder why the names of some of the characters seemed so familiar (yes, she does reuse them; Richard and Clarissa Dalloway feature in The Voyage Out too).

Anyway. It was – difficult. Stream of consciousness writing is immersive; you have to be able to commit to every line, every sentence, every paragraph, one after the other, unwinding your thread of understanding so you can follow it all the way back through the labyrinthine text and see the point from which you started. Close the book and the skein is cut – you won’t find it again unless you go back to the last place where you tied it to something solid; a chapter heading or new section. So that meant it took me a little while, even though it is, again, only a very short book.

It is short, but it is intricate. There are phrases in it that made me laugh out loud and ones that made me murmur them again to myself, just to feel the buzz of the words on my lips. “The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him…” – it’s a lexical aneurysm, a sentence you can’t understand when it first hits you but leaves you reeling with the effects. I could wax lyrical about the words, the characters, the truth, the folly, the compassion, the levity, the painful relevance – but others have said it better. Read it, then decide for yourself if you want to read anyone else.

Finally – finally! I read Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. I struggled with this one, too.   I don’t know why. It’s not a particularly difficult book; it’s certainly not a long one. It is, however, dense and dark and it clings to you like a viscous, poisonous mud. There are moments where it feels incredibly current and true and cruel – and others which are anachronistic and jarring. I haven’t quite decided where I stand on it yet. I am glad to have read it. That’s about as much as I can tell you today.

That’s your lot, I’m afraid. That’s really all I’ve read. I dabbled a bit with some Hippolytus because I don’t like to feel I’m forgetting all my Greek, and I did the same with the opening of the Aeneid, too, but those aside – that’s April.

I can’t promise great things for May, on this basis, although I have got some good novels lurking around my room, bought in great eagerness earlier in the month. The best I can say is ‘wait and see’.

The First Pimms of the Summer

The first Pimms of Summer 2013 struck on Tuesday evening. Actually, the first two Pimms. Not only did the dusty and slightly sticky bottle consigned to the cupboard with a sigh last year make it out again, but I even managed to dredge up some ice lost in the depths of the freezer and to forage some orange segments, cucumber and even a lone strawberry. I love a bit of fruit in my Pimms. I love how a drink can go from a humble spirit-and-mixer to a Glorious Incarnation of All that is Wonderful about Our Great Nation AND get healthier at the same time. I mean, seriously.

Perhaps you think I’m romanticising this a bit and maybe you’re right. I read an article in The Times this afternoon – which you too can read if you’ve a subscription, here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3747972.ece . It warns us to lower our expectations about summer, because it’s always disappointingly less halcyon than we are prepared to admit when the first rays of sun peep out from their 6-month long cloud cover. Which is valid. It is. Sometimes by a considerable degree.

I think back to last year at this point, when we had delicious weather from March until mid-May and halfway through my exams the rain came. The rain didn’t stop until the Olympics. I had been dreaming of how I was going to spend life after finals for – well, the whole of my degree. Punting in the sun. Champagne on the lawns. Excessive amounts of Pimms over croquet; with a book; at the pub – wherever. Crisp G&Ts at garden parties. Boozy picnics. Outfits that were not designed with the library in mind. Glorious sunshine from 11am, rising and then descending to balmy evenings and warm breezes so one could sit on the quad outside the bar and talk into the small hours. Oh, to be a post-finalist! I thought. Then summer will truly be all I ever wished it to be. The months leading up to the Weeks of Doom, during which I turned into a gibbering pasty-faced creature in leggings and woolly jumpers subsisting almost exclusively on tea and whatever deals on chocolate were to be had that week, only made my dreams more beautiful.

But, as I said, it rained. It rained and rained and rained. It rained on the day I finished exams, a relentless miserable driving rain that melted my paper hat and made the confetti bleed into my white shirt. When I got back to college to have the customary buckets of water thrown over me (yes, that’s a thing) my shoes were already just about ruined. A kind soul had presented me with a bottle of fizz and a can of G&T immediately I had left the exam halls and I ended up in my room with these, soaking wet and shivering.

In my imagination, this was the point where I would don my finest summer dress and go and lie triumphantly in the Fellow’s Garden, where all non-finalists would look at me in awe for having survived. As it was, I moped in my room. The rain lashed the windows. My roommate took pity on me and dragged me to the pub and for the day, we put things to rights. But the final week of term continued much in this vein.

We had one nice day before it was time to leave – we wisely took full advantage of it and spent the afternoon illegally drinking Moet in the Botanic Gardens. It wasn’t exactly warm, but we managed to convince ourselves it would do, and by the time we were due to meet our tutor for a goodbye drink, we were all so sloshed that the temperature was of little significance.

The complete dashing of my aspirations for a hedonistic post-finals life was, I am fairly sure, one of the reasons it took me so long to get over leaving and to get over all the other disappointments that came with it.

Summer is psychologically important. Obviously, it’s great that sunshine means that crops grow and flowers bloom and fruit ripens. Those things are good. We need those. But we also need a clear break with the relentlessly dismal features of winter. We need there to be a few weeks every year where the smells of barbecues drift along village roads, where people play cricket on greens, where tree-climbing and picnicking and butterfly-spotting are legitimate days out. Swimming in outdoor pools! Freckly noses! Flipflops and clashing toenail varnish! ICE CREAM VANS!

Our brains need seasonal differentiation in order to cope with the idea of progression. If seasons are static or seamless, we feel like we’re stuck, too. Humans have this weird mental tic about ‘new’ things. Novelty, novelty, novelty! Our brains scream, all the time – but also, familiarity, familiarity, please. Seasons provide both. And as summer feels *so* novel, with its sunshine and warmth and flowers and loveliness after months and months of bleakness, it’s that much more covetable. I start mentally preparing for summer from about March. This year, I’ve physically started preparing for summer from – the end of April. I should point out that this is by no means a record.

There’ll be another Pimms on the cards soon enough, I hope. If it’s not Pimms, it’ll be cider. There’s another good summery drink. But I’ll spare you my extensive feelings on that subject. More from me soon! X

NB – a few hours after I first drafted this, I can confirm there has since been more Pimms. Whatever. I’ve been celebrating.

Waiting. Ironic, eh?

Like a raisin on a string, I am currently in an uncomfortable position of limbo.

(pause while you figure that analogy out – and continue).

I am waiting. Waiting for emails. Now that it’s possible to send an email in mere moments and have it arrive seconds later, straight to your phone/pooter/other portable device, the assumption that said waited-for-emails can’t be long in heading my way is hard to shake off. Despite the fact that the emails for which I am waiting refer to things that take time to decide, I nevertheless have this sensation that – because they can be sent in the blink of an eye – they may actually arrive at any moment. I’m transferring the qualities of the medium onto the message.

Since these emails could all be either joyous or woeful, it is even harder to wait for them. Emotional limbo may be less physically strenuous than actually dangling from a string but I would suggest it is significantly more mentally damaging. Unless you’re being hanged, or something. But is it really limbo if you’re hanging until you are dead? Not in quite the same way. Anyway. I digress.

I have a gift for prevarication. That’s not to say I can’t be extremely efficient, when I want or need to be. I can. But when I am slightly lacking in motivation, or my motivation is suspended in the web of past actions, I can prevaricate like there is no tomorrow.

Waiting for something you’ve done to catch up with you – for better or worse – is a sticky business. Held back by treacly threads of intention, it’s easy to hang there limply until the Great Big Spider of Misery comes to wrap you up and devour your delicious, sugar-saturated insides. It’s sickly sweet to imagine this web cocooning you while you nurture your ideas and are born from them, uplifted by the response you desire. Or, perhaps, that you will be cut free by the response you feared, but can at least leave and go off to spin a new dream elsewhere. The longer you wait, flailing hopefully or hanging disconsolately, the more likely you are to atrophy. Whatever led you to build your own gallows in the first place disintegrates and you can think of nothing else but the sensation conferred by the airy freedom of resolution.

There’s only so long you can wait before you get bored. Often, though, you’ll be surprised how much longer you can keep waiting.

Anyway, while I gently turn to dust, I’m lightening the mood with some Monty Python. If there are any Beckett enthusiasts out there preparing to ask ‘shall we go’, I say to you – yes, let’s go. But no-one will move.

Picture the scene

It is a wet Tuesday afternoon in March. You are on a long weekend trip to Paris, which you thought would be beautiful and empty at this time of year but is actually quite grey and busy with Easter visitors. Your feet ache slightly from the shoes that you thought would be ‘sensible’ but are in fact rather uncomfortable, due to being quite a lot heavier than what you’d normally wear. You cunningly brought an umbrella with you. It is far more ornamental than useful, but since it has owls on you are unwilling to part with it in favour of a utilitarian yet undoubtedly boring model. However, now that you are indoors and it is damp from the light precipitation outside, you are less than keen to put it back in your bag, so it bangs limply at your knee as you meander along. Your jeans have soaked up most of the rain that almost caressingly came into contact with you, as has your scarf, but a few of the pearlescent drops still rest lightly on the hood of your coat and catch your eye with their reflections whenever you look behind you. You have a camera in your bag but you can’t quite bring yourself to get it out for fear of looking too much like a tourist. You pass some full-on tourists, with their long shorts and pulled-up socks, hiking boots and bumbags, SLRs and baseball caps and you think – maybe, maybe in comparison to them I don’t seem so bad, but you still can’t quite do it. I’ll get it out when I get there, you think.

You have arrived at what you came to see. Everyone else seems to have come to see it, too, and you are jostled from all directions by a multitude of languages, faces and cultural attitudes to strangers. You are not in a hurry, though. You know what it looks like. The image is, as with everyone else present, burned indelibly on your brain. It is seminal; one of a kind; endlessly mysterious. It is one of the most-discussed and most iconic enigmas in the world. It endlessly reveals meaning, shedding it in layers like fine snake skin – but like fine snake skin this meaning turns to dust with every new revelation, nor does it seem to leave the original any smaller for its loss.

You wait. You marvel at the hall of the Louvre. It is a beautiful building. How many must pass it by, desperate to witness this one painting – to take a picture of it on their camera phones, not even experiencing it directly via their screen-glazed retinas, their eyes perpetually basted with the wash of technology? You are patient. You loosen your scarf and undo the toggles on your duffel coat and watch.

There – there! The crowd parts, just for a moment, and you have a direct eyeline. There, behind the bullet-proof glass, swarming with devotees – people who look but don’t see; who see but don’t experience; who observe but make no effort to engage – the Mona Lisa. It is there. You have affirmed to yourself it exists; you have witnessed it and you feel a little part of your being flower under the gleaming ray of what this image stands for. By confirming its reality to yourself, a part of the world that only existed previously in a theoretical space has come to light. If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? If there is a painting in a room and no one ever sees it, does it exist? Well, now it does. You have been a part of that reification.

Outside the Louvre, you sit on the rim of one of the fountains and bask in the pale sun.

My friend Laura, having a Parisian chic moment.

Hope is a bit like the Mona Lisa. You can’t touch it. You don’t know what it’s made of. You know what it looks like – or at least, you know you would recognise it anywhere. It is mysterious in its appearance and in its essence. It is beautiful, although you can’t say exactly why; possibly it’s because everyone says it is, says it must be, and you believe them. You can go a long, long way without getting a glimpse of it, but all it takes is for you to start out on that journey and to wait until that moment when the line of sight is clear. And the image, the heart-stopping, stomach-twitching sight that makes you feel like there’s a jellyfish in your tummy whose alarm has just gone off on the morning of its wedding – will stay with you long after you drift away.

I’ve actually never seen the Mona Lisa. But I have caught a glimpse of hope. This is what it looked like, from where I was standing.

Why I can’t write poetry

Apparently it’s National Poetry Writing Month (or NaPoWriMo, if you like things short and pithy [apologies for the double brackets but I just wanted to let you know that this makes me think of a kumquat. Short and pithy. No? Never mind.] ) I think I’m in the wrong ‘nation’ for this but I’m going to plough ahead and buy into it anyway because, woo! Globalisation.

Yesterday I cobbled together a couple of limericks just because, well, you know. They were all right. They were, in the best traditions of limericks, a bit rude and rather nonsensical. I sent one to my friend because a) it was about him and b) it was sort of also about Doctor Who, of which is he a fan. The other one was an exercise in two-syllable rhyming (conclusion: it’s really hard). I will not repeat it here and shame myself.

The truth is that despite my best efforts and concerted attempts, I am just no good at writing poetry. It’s either emotional drivel, or unfunny punning. If I could splice some emotionality to some hilarious wordplay a la Ovid, trust me, folks, I would be rejoicing til the cows wended their way home, possibly after a long weekend in Magaluf, partying hard as only cows know how.

Oscar Wilde said that all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. I can certainly testify. Some of the worst stuff I have written has been about boys, their distance from me and my moping, boo-hoo state as a result. The other worst stuff I have written has been about me trying very hard not to write the first lot. Given that I spend a significant amount of my time pendulating[1] gently between these two scenarios, or in a deep existential crisis, there’s not really much hope. I doubt strongly that anyone is going to gather up my notebooks and publish them to great critical and/or popular acclaim at any point in the future.

I have just about reconciled myself to this literary ignominy. When you can’t write poetry, there’s nowt a lot you can do about it. Given the tragic lives of some of my favourite ladypoets, maybe I should be grateful. As much as I admire Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker, I’m not really interested in modelling my life on theirs. Clearly the fate of a female poet is not necessarily limited to depression and suicide (Carol Ann Duffy, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson etc are all still very much alive, hooray) and there are certainly men who’ve gone the same way, but one seems to need a certain mind set to be a poet. An introspective, ferociously self-critical, trying-to-laugh-it-off attitude which allows you to comment objectively about a human experience and then make it achingly, despairingly personal. Or vice versa. Or a heady mash-up of same.

I’m in the position of experiencing the two ways that I believe poets see the world, but I don’t have the apparatus to tie them up. I’ve got both lenses for the pair of 3D glasses, but no frame, nothing to hold them together. I can hold the red and the blue up to my eyes and see in poetry – but then my hands are full, and I can’t write.

So until I stumble across a decent set of frames (I like to think they’d be pleasingly retro, hipster-ish tortoiseshell ones, but knowing my luck they’ll be 19^th century pince-nez or something equally ridiculous) I cannot be a poet. As I have said – this doesn’t especially bother me. I won’t cry myself to sleep at night, knowing there’s a magical tool out there that will clarify my imagination until it drips like melted butter through my fingers and smears itself indelibly onto a page. I’ll just carry on writing the way I like. Hope you’re ok with that. I am.

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[1] Yes I just made this up. What of it?

March’s Books

Hey team,

It’s the first day of April, which means (among other things) that the list for March’s books is now CLOSED. And that you get to hear all about them. Woop!

I’ve read quite a lot this month. I don’t quite know where I found the time to do all this. I’ve also seen an unprecedented number of films. Again, not sure how I did this. The long Bank Holiday weekend can only account for so much.

Without further ado, then: I started the month with Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (not that David Mitchell). This had been on my radar for some time – in fact, since I saw the BBC version of Richard II in the summer and was totally captivated by Ben Whishaw. Anyway. I knew that I wanted to see the film (and not just because of Ben Whishaw) so I read the book first. Coming straight after Wolf Hall, it’s a very different kettle of fish – Mantel writes Cromwell in an almost ahistorical way; Mitchell writes his characters in a manner that is supposed to delineate very clearly where they are from and who they are. The book is divided into the story of 6 characters and each story is split in half so it brackets the stories that come inside it, like a Russian doll. The central ‘doll’ is whole – the character and story are entirely self-contained. If you had to describe the plot – well, you couldn’t, really. You’d have to be content with the idea that the novel is an exploration of the theme of the renegade against a greedy corporate society.  If you haven’t read it, it is really very good. And, incidentally, so is the film.

Next I read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. It is only a very short book; more like a couple of chapters to Jane Eyre rather than a standalone, requiring as it does fairly good knowledge of Bronte’s novel. I enjoyed it as a study of what you can do with a source text; people can get quite hoity-toity about authors writing sequels or prequels to well-known books (Eoin Colfer’s take on Douglas Adams, for example). There’s really no need. It’s just a more explicit acknowledgment of influence, and it can be very successful. Bertha Rochester isn’t just a madwoman who stands in the way of Jane and E.F.R’s love. Her backstory may not have been something Bronte was prepared to explore or elucidate on, but another’s take on it is fascinating. And, as is the idea with this ‘reception’ lark, the more recent work informs subsequent readings of the earlier one. Next time I re-read Jane Eyre, I daresay I’ll notice things I didn’t previously. 

Next on the list - Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. I heard there was going to be a radio serialisation so I wanted to read it (as it happens, the serialisation was very good and I could have not read the book, but anyway). Neil Gaiman is great. He combines some of my favourite elements of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and delivers them forth with lightness and nonchalance. He’s the sort of writer who makes you hug yourself when you come across a really great line, because it’s so delicious and it feels as though it’s been tailored specifically to amuse you. Also, a villain that collects and eats priceless Chinese porcelain. That’s just – inspired.

After a bit of a diversion into Gaiman, I returned to my monster book order with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I thought this was great – a very twisted, dark story about solitude, reality and sex. Interesting questions raised about narrative, authorship and memory. I wasn’t sure whether I felt let down by the ending or not – on the one hand, an epilogue that contextualises and concludes the story is usually a good thing; on the other, the nature of the epilogue almost made me feel uncomfortable. The ease with which the narrative was explained as a historical account cast a slightly noxious light over my own experience of studying history. So – the novel was still very much a satisfying read, but the ending didn’t quite close down the book as I expected it to do. In retrospect, I think I prefer that.

Around the time I started reading the Handmaid’s Tale, I realised I was running out of books. So I put in a substantial book order, almost exclusively composed of Virginia Woolf. I decided I should get stuck in sooner rather than later, so after Atwood, I began A Room of One’s Own. I know purists would say this isn’t really a book so much as an extended essay based on a couple of lectures, but whatever. It was enlightening and inspiring and so – well, simple. Just a very reasonable rejoinder to so many criticisms people make of women and have done for centuries. I don’t know why it isn’t compulsory reading. I felt a lot better about myself and my insecurities after reading Woolf. I followed up this essay/book with The Voyage Out, Woolf’s first novel. I enjoyed how it seemed very familiar, very close to the late Victorian novelistic tradition and yet – it was more; there was definitely something else to it. I thought there was a powerful subversion of the unity one normally gets from a conclusion. Anyway, two books of Woolf seemed like a good start to improving my general understanding of the development of 20th century literature.

I concluded March with Bring up the Bodies, the second in Hilary Mantel’s projected trilogy on Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. Knowing Mantel’s prose style this time, it was much easier to slip into the spirit of the narrative, and with so many threads already set up in Wolf Hall (and a considerable chunk of this history being much more familiar to me than the early years of H8) the story flowed smoothly onward. I suppose the great boon of a historical novel is that it is much harder to accidentally leave a line hanging – every character plays a part, and these parts can be reflected backwards as well as forwards within the novel’s unfolding to cast light on motive and cause. But Mantel shows the folds you can also smooth out of the history – the covered up events that don’t suit the chronologists (or rather, the ones you can invent on this pretext) that can stand as explanations for sudden policy changes and the like. The promotion of Richmond; the return of Henry’s bad leg; Mantel can turn these into elements of her story so skilfully that her retelling could well feed back into our historical understanding of the period.

So. There you have it. March. Lined up for April – a whole bunch more Virginia Woolf, some Betty Friedan and probably some George Eliot, for a personal project.

Til next time, then!

Seder night: the view from under the yarmulke

Hi guys. I hope you aren’t feeling neglected by my lack of blogs recently. I’ve been writing some articles for other people/things (I KNOW RIGHT) and I thought it would be a bit cheeky to put them here as well. I will when I know what’s happening with them. Promise.

Meanwhile, you can have my thoughts on Passover.

I read a Guardian article the other day (well, I say article… it wasn’t the most flowing stream of ingenuity I’d ever come across, but whatevs) written by a guy who was reminiscing about the Passovers of his childhood and how much more he enjoys the holiday now he’s grown up. Inane and ill-informed comments beneath it aside (on reading which I nearly broke my resolve never to ever get engaged in CiF) it struck a pleasant chord and I was reminded of why I, too, enjoy Passover.

However, 2 days into the Matzah-fest and I have to admit, I am struggling more than usual. I think it’s because I am at work and people keep bringing in things I can’t eat. Yesterday it was cakes (topped with mini eggs and the like). Today it is doughnuts. Some of the cakes are still in the kitchen. I’m afraid to make too many cups of tea in case I break down, pass out and come to with my face encrusted in sugar and jam.

Normally I would have spent a significant amount of time pre-Passover or during the festival busily engaged in preparatory baking. This year I made cinnamon balls, macaroons, a chocolate and chestnut torte, chocolate pots and matzah-meal rolls, but there still seems to be no food. The macaroons didn’t even see Passover. The cinnamon balls never made it past the first evening. We finished the torte last night. We ate the chocolate pots already. Meanwhile, delicious flour-based products are accruing all around me and the temptation is great. Oh, it is great indeed.

Anyway. Enough of the woe. Some of you may have given things up for Lent and that lasts much, much longer than Passover. Also, I have massive respect for people who cope with Ramadan. So, yeah. I’ll shut up about that now. Let me tell you about our Seder.

Passover, or ‘Pesach’, to use the proper Jewish word, is, like so many other Jewish festivals, primarily about redemption and food. The focal point of the 8-day celebration is the first-night Seder, a meal during the course of which the story of the Exodus from Egypt is retold. This is my favourite bit. Of course it is.

I like preparing the Seder plate. Ours is big, round, gold and blue, with hollows in which all the different symbolic foods sit. The one in the middle is for the bowl of salt water, to represent the tears of the Israelites. Then there’s the hollow for the shank bone, to represent the paschal lambs slaughtered by the Israelites so that the Angel of Death would not also slay their first-borns. Then there’s the hollow for the burnt egg, which relates to the seasonal nature of the festival, and another for the parsley on the same basis. The bitter herbs are for the bitterness of the lives of the Israelites, and the charoset – a fruit, nut and wine mixture – represents the mortar they used for building as slaves. There’s also a mystery extra hollow on our Seder plate and every year we have a light-hearted argument about what to put there. This is a long standing, traditional argument and only the first of many at the Seder meal.

There are three slices of Matzah put aside at the start of the meal and wrapped in a special silk cloth. This year, we used a new one that my parents brought back from their trip to Israel in 2012. The slices are symbolically broken and dished out at various points in the meal. Half of one – called the afikoman – is hidden at the start and once the eating is over the children are sent to look for it. My dad always makes a great show of sound effects to convince us he has been all around the house. These were terribly effective about ten years ago but not so much now. Nevertheless, the tradition continues.

When we sit down at the table – this year laid with a new tablecloth, a present from my Israeli great-aunt – the service begins. No matter how stressful the preparations have been, how busy we are, what complicating factors have been thrown at us, we always start cheerfully. Before the meal we wrangle who will be using which Haggadah. The Haggadah is the service-book, the Passover manual, if you like. I don’t know if it’s traditional worldwide to have a selection within each family, but we do. It makes the evening more interesting. We have one that belonged to my father as a child, written for children. Then we have two new version of this, which were given to my parents when my brother and I were very small (before my sister was born). We also have a very archaic brown leather-bound version, full of words like ‘awakeneth’ (I didn’t make that up) and ‘thence’. We have a couple of others that are exclusively in Hebrew. And this year, we have a new book, accompanied with plasticine-figurine illustrative photos. This year, my mum has the new book. My dad has a photocopy of the book. My brother and sister have the new versions of the children’s book. I have the leather one.

We open the first page and my dad launches into a blessing. Immediately there is a discussion about whether we’re supposed to start with this, or with something else. A few pages later and we all seem to be on about the same page. The first cup of wine, blessings, washing the hands, breaking the matzah, hiding the afikoman. So far, so good. We have the traditional exacerbation of my sister to ask the Four Questions. This is a song, supposed to be sung by the youngest child, which requests that the rest of the family explain why we do things differently at the Seder meal. My sister, as is traditional, refuses, because her Hebrew isn’t very good, and while we all know the tune, the words can be a bit tricksy. So, as is traditional, we all sing it with her. We are not a very tuneful family but it doesn’t shatter any windows, so we proceed.

We tell the story. Some of it is read in Hebrew, by me (not very fluently) and by my mum (much more so). Most of it is read in English (quasi-Victorian by me, simple by everyone else with their ‘21^st century’ books). Occasionally we break into the traditional songs, and we are traditionally bad at them. My dad misses his cue to say ‘in every generation, a slayer is born’ (parodying with his characteristic wit the sentence of the service which begins ‘in every generation..’), which is unusual, but since he’s taken the trouble to remind us, the tradition is nonetheless fulfilled. We name all the plagues and spill a drop of wine at each one, to commemorate the havoc wreaked upon the Egyptians, and their suffering. We’re not allowed to lick our fingers after this.

Onwards we proceed. There is an argument about dipping things into other things. This is where the Seder plate comes into its own. We dip parsley in salt water. We sandwich raw horseradish between two pieces of matzah. We put the fruit and nut mixture on some horseradish (my sister complains that this is messy). Then we all eat our burnt eggs dipped in salt water (nb, this is delicious). And then we eat a full meal, including dessert. Delicious.

After the meal, more wine, grace, further blessings, more terrible singing. We are sent off to find the afikoman. My brother retrieves it in minutes and we all eat a piece. The Seder is over for another year. Now it is time for the traditional sluggish movement towards the washing up.

The tablecloth has wine spills and matzah crumbs on it. The Seder plate is messy. The ornamental wine cups which we fill for (and then drink on behalf of) the prophet Elijah are dirty. But everyone is happy and full.

Some years we do two Seder meals. This is supposed to cover the eventuality that it isn’t actually Passover in Israel when you hold your first one, because of time and date differences and the like. While this may have been a problem five hundred years ago, it’s not so much of an issue now. The tradition persists, nevertheless. This year we can’t, as we are always busy on Tuesday nights. That makes this one more special, though.

Who knows where we’ll all be in 2014? Maybe the wish we express during the service will come true, and next year, we’ll be celebrating from Jerusalem.

Chag sameach!

The Ides of March/Red Nose Day

GUYS

I totally forgot until now but today is the Ides of March. Supposedly, according to Shakespeare and before him, Livy, Suetonius and a bunch of others, Julius Caesar was warned by a soothsayer that he would not see the end of this day in 44BC. At any rate,  soothsayer or no, he was definitely murdered brutally by a bunch of senators while the rest of the Curia (that’s the Roman senate house) stood by. These days, the site believed to be where he died is a cat sanctuary in the centre of old Rome, not far from the Coliseum.

The story is that Caesar looked up at his attackers as they descended on him and realised that one of them was his buddy and protégé, Brutus. Caesar was so dismayed he asked (in Latin), ‘et tu, Brute?’, or, in translation, ‘you too, Brutus?’ (‘Brute’ is the vocative form of Brutus – it is not pronounced like the English word ‘brute’!). There is some disagreement here, though. Some historians report that Caesar actually said και συ τεκνον (for those of you without Greek but hoping to impress somebody with this story later, that’s pronounced ‘kai su, teknon’), which means ‘you too, child?’.

That’s an interesting reflection on what Caesar, Brutus and all their subsequent chronologists thought about their relationship to each other. There was even a rumour, popular at the time, that Brutus was the illegitimate son of Caesar, although rumours around the same time reported Caesar had sold his virginity to the king of Bithynia and used to wax his legs with a hot nutshell (Catullus, the poet, wrote a crackingly vicious poem or two about Caesar and his cronies). Basically, don’t get carried away by rumours. The Romans didn’t have the Daily Mail, but if they did, they would have loved it.

Caesar’s murder in the middle of March, 44BC, reignited the civil war that had barely died down three years previously. The following bloodshed culminated in the Battle of Actium in 31BC, between Mark Antony, a Hellenised Roman with much of Greece, Syria and Egypt on his side and Octavian, the nephew of Caesar and the man in control of the centralised Roman army. Octavian was a bit of a wimp but luckily one of his best mates, Marcus Agrippa, was an excellent general, and the sea battle was won by team Caesar. (If you’ve ever been to Rome and seen the Pantheon, you’ve seen a dedicatory inscription by this same Marcus Agrippa – it says ‘M. Agrippa cos tertium fecit’, or ‘Marcus Agrippa built this in his third consulship’).

It would be easy to say that 31BC marked the decisive change from sort-of-democratic government to an empire, but that’s not strictly true. Octavian – who changed his name to Augustus in 27BC, basing his new moniker on a line of religious foundation poetry by the writer Ennius – did not have a smooth ride. Riots, protests, war abroad, a terrible massacre in Germany, grain shortages, infrastructure problems, family drama – something like the West Wing meets Coronation Street. Nobody could have predicted that a teenager with a dead uncle would have been able to take power and manipulate the Romans into thinking he would give it back whenever they asked.

Augustus died in 14AD. That’s pretty good going, all things considered.

Now. Imagine, for a moment, that – eg – Colonel Gaddafi is ‘Caesar’ (if you watched the recent BBC televisation of the RSC’s Julius Caesar, this’ll be easy). Think how long that means Libya might be in some serious shit before a contender for making a viable peace comes along. Thirteen years of vicious civil war before a decisive victory. Four more years of an uncertain constitution. And then however much longer it takes for that constitution to establish itself to reach some sort of stability. Doesn’t sound great, does it? Nope. Well, it’s also Red Nose Day. Maybe my little history lesson will encourage you to put your hands in your pocketses.

All right, sermonising over. Today’s lessons: don’t be a tyrant, and give to charity. Simples!