Simon Armitage and Robert Macfarlane, Brighton Festival, 5.05.07
Monday, May 7th, 2007 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthOn Saturday I went with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymoonray and swisstone to Brighton to hear Simon Armitage (poet) and Robert Macfarlane (mountaineer, author) talking -- with particular emphasis on the role of English nature in the poem -- about Armitage's new translation of Gawain and the Green Knight.
I studied Gawain (medieval poem, author unknown, written in highly alliterative northern dialect in the 14th century) at university, but haven't looked at the source text since then -- though I keep encountering the myth, reworked, in fiction.
The talk was chaired by a gentleman whose name I didn't note: he definitely had a list of topics to cover, and the transitions were sometimes abrupt and graceless.
SA started off talking about the difficulties of 'translating' the poem -- whether to keep the alliteration, or to go for a direct translation of the meaning. Together, sound and meaning form the 'warp and weft', without which the poem is just so many fine threads.
RM: the more specific you are about a place, the more mythic it can become.
SA: reading from his translation ... 'garbaged the guts'. A mix of modern idiom, latinate words and alliteration that sometimes jarred
RM: the sense in the poem of human places defended against nature -- drawbridges, walls etc -- and humans sallying forth into enemy territory for the Hunt. But there's an ecological reading as well: the Green Knight as a personification of Nature, testing Man and calling him to account for his actions.
SA talked about going to see a deer being butchered as part of his research: "it hasn't changed much for six hundred years". He didn't know what 'numbles' (the edible bits of the intestines) were, though. (How do I know this? Aha, a quick google reveals that it's the origin of the term 'humble pie', via numble -> umble -> humble ... and a slower google shows that numble comes from French lumble which comes from the same root as lumbar, e.g. concerning the (lower) back ... )
RM talked about the seasonal structure, living close to nature, and the numerology.
SA: seasons more distinct, more apparent in Britain than in more southernly countries. The dramatic cycle of the year reminds us of the life cycle, of mortality -- a lot of English writing is 'about' man and nature, and takes its imagery from the seasons.
SA: refers to Gawain as 'the last great British road movie', a time when it was possible to set off -- into unmapped territory -- and not know where you were going or how long you'd be travelling for/
RM talked about writing about wildness in the UK today. There's more than you'd think. Swimming out to tidal islands and sleeping there: sleeping in forests, walking through winter nights. Of being in the woods in snow: "it seemed strange that so much motion provoked so little sound". yes, I thought, that's it exactly. I love that spark of recognition.
Some questions from the audience: does the availability of knowledge, the rise of sat-nav and Google Earth, preclude the possibility of the quest? (No: fantasy, internal landscapes.)
What about outer space?
SA: it's funny how old-fashioned 'outer space' sounds.
RM: best book he's read on landscape this year -- Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson.
SA on landscape artists -- ephemeral art such as standing and reading a poem aloud, rather than leaving something to be found. Literature wants to last: landscape art only exists 'til it's eroded or changed, sometimes only overnight. The temporariness is liberating.
RM on displacing objects, picking things up and taking them home as talismans of place. (Ian McEwan apparently got in trouble for taking stones from Chesil Beach while getting into his latest novel: but Chesil Beach is a SSSI).
Oh, and apparently SA was approached by Disney re film options. "I think it'd make a dreadful film but I forgot to mention that .. I think they think I wrote it." And talking about the use of literary characters -- Hercules, Gawain etc -- and how an author can make them his or her own. There's no such thing as sacrilege, the character belongs to you as much as to anyone else. (I wonder where his cut-off point is?)
I came away much more interested in Macfarlane's work than Armitage's. And I was intrigued and overjoyed to find that one of his published pieces, available online in PDF format, is about sleeping out on a September night on the sea-wall south of St Peter's Chapel, on the Essex coast -- one of my cherished places.
There's also an archive of his Common Ground pieces for the Guardian. And he won the Guardian First Book Prize for Mountains of the Mind -- a fact that I don't recall being mentioned on Saturday. I'm looking forward to reading The Wild Places when it comes out: I think we might be thinking about some of the same things, or at least finding transcendence in some of the same experiences.
in other news, have been in bed all day. And much of yesterday, as soon as Demon Decorators had departed. What a waste of a bank holiday weekend! Next time I feel this rough, I'd like it to be the result of wild partying and alcoholic overindulgence.
Boo to werk tomorrow.
ladymoonray and swisstone to Brighton to hear Simon Armitage (poet) and Robert Macfarlane (mountaineer, author) talking -- with particular emphasis on the role of English nature in the poem -- about Armitage's new translation of Gawain and the Green Knight.I studied Gawain (medieval poem, author unknown, written in highly alliterative northern dialect in the 14th century) at university, but haven't looked at the source text since then -- though I keep encountering the myth, reworked, in fiction.
The talk was chaired by a gentleman whose name I didn't note: he definitely had a list of topics to cover, and the transitions were sometimes abrupt and graceless.
SA started off talking about the difficulties of 'translating' the poem -- whether to keep the alliteration, or to go for a direct translation of the meaning. Together, sound and meaning form the 'warp and weft', without which the poem is just so many fine threads.
RM: the more specific you are about a place, the more mythic it can become.
SA: reading from his translation ... 'garbaged the guts'. A mix of modern idiom, latinate words and alliteration that sometimes jarred
RM: the sense in the poem of human places defended against nature -- drawbridges, walls etc -- and humans sallying forth into enemy territory for the Hunt. But there's an ecological reading as well: the Green Knight as a personification of Nature, testing Man and calling him to account for his actions.
SA talked about going to see a deer being butchered as part of his research: "it hasn't changed much for six hundred years". He didn't know what 'numbles' (the edible bits of the intestines) were, though. (How do I know this? Aha, a quick google reveals that it's the origin of the term 'humble pie', via numble -> umble -> humble ... and a slower google shows that numble comes from French lumble which comes from the same root as lumbar, e.g. concerning the (lower) back ... )
RM talked about the seasonal structure, living close to nature, and the numerology.
SA: seasons more distinct, more apparent in Britain than in more southernly countries. The dramatic cycle of the year reminds us of the life cycle, of mortality -- a lot of English writing is 'about' man and nature, and takes its imagery from the seasons.
SA: refers to Gawain as 'the last great British road movie', a time when it was possible to set off -- into unmapped territory -- and not know where you were going or how long you'd be travelling for/
RM talked about writing about wildness in the UK today. There's more than you'd think. Swimming out to tidal islands and sleeping there: sleeping in forests, walking through winter nights. Of being in the woods in snow: "it seemed strange that so much motion provoked so little sound". yes, I thought, that's it exactly. I love that spark of recognition.
Some questions from the audience: does the availability of knowledge, the rise of sat-nav and Google Earth, preclude the possibility of the quest? (No: fantasy, internal landscapes.)
What about outer space?
SA: it's funny how old-fashioned 'outer space' sounds.
RM: best book he's read on landscape this year -- Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson.
SA on landscape artists -- ephemeral art such as standing and reading a poem aloud, rather than leaving something to be found. Literature wants to last: landscape art only exists 'til it's eroded or changed, sometimes only overnight. The temporariness is liberating.
RM on displacing objects, picking things up and taking them home as talismans of place. (Ian McEwan apparently got in trouble for taking stones from Chesil Beach while getting into his latest novel: but Chesil Beach is a SSSI).
Oh, and apparently SA was approached by Disney re film options. "I think it'd make a dreadful film but I forgot to mention that .. I think they think I wrote it." And talking about the use of literary characters -- Hercules, Gawain etc -- and how an author can make them his or her own. There's no such thing as sacrilege, the character belongs to you as much as to anyone else. (I wonder where his cut-off point is?)
I came away much more interested in Macfarlane's work than Armitage's. And I was intrigued and overjoyed to find that one of his published pieces, available online in PDF format, is about sleeping out on a September night on the sea-wall south of St Peter's Chapel, on the Essex coast -- one of my cherished places.
There's also an archive of his Common Ground pieces for the Guardian. And he won the Guardian First Book Prize for Mountains of the Mind -- a fact that I don't recall being mentioned on Saturday. I'm looking forward to reading The Wild Places when it comes out: I think we might be thinking about some of the same things, or at least finding transcendence in some of the same experiences.
in other news, have been in bed all day. And much of yesterday, as soon as Demon Decorators had departed. What a waste of a bank holiday weekend! Next time I feel this rough, I'd like it to be the result of wild partying and alcoholic overindulgence.
Boo to werk tomorrow.
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Date: Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 01:21 pm (UTC)