17 March 2010: The past few weeks I have been reading Julie Kavanagh's biography, Rudolf Nureyev. Today is an apt day for posting this blog as it would have been Rudi's 72nd birthday.
When I was a teenager, everyone else I knew had posters of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones on their walls. I had a dozen different posters of Rudik. He was a huge and charismatic presence and, even 17 years after his death, he still seems to be here among the living, one of those rare people you can't quite believe still does not walk (dance) this earth.
Born in 1938 on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he was constantly performing, choreographing, teaching. He had a huge intelligence, educating himself about everything from Byron's poetry to how to spot the best kilims. He worked endlessly, pushing his body to extend his repertoire and technique. From 1973 until his death in 1993, Kavanagh writes "Rudolf had been dancing with a permanent tear in his leg muscle; he had destroyed his Achilles tendon by years of landing badly; he had heel spurs; his bones were chipped so that even basic walking gave him pain." None of this stopped him from his passion of performing. One of the many ballets he left his stamp on was Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. If you want to see the final heartrending scene, watch this YouTube clip and weep. Stay tuned . . .
Anne Aylor
10 March 2010: Translations have always fascinated me and even more so when I read this quote by Miguel de Cervantes: “Translations are the other side of a tapestry.” That set me thinking. You have the original writer writing in their own language. Then you have the translator writing in theirs and, in some cases, you have translations from translations, not to mention literal translations. Most early English translations of Turgenev were not from Russian, but from French!
One of the great Chekhov translators was Constance Garnett (1862 – 1946) who translated seventeen Chekhov works, seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol and four of Tolstoy. She worked so quickly that when she came across an awkward passage, she would leave it out. D H Lawrence remembered her 'turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. The pile would be . . . almost up to her knees, and all magical.'
In 1994 Donald Rayfield compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov’s stories: 'While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive . . . Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable.' In the 1998 anthology, The Essential Tales of Chekhov, the Constance Garnett translations were used by its editor, Richard Ford.
In the spirit of exploration I thought it might be interesting to look at the first sentences, translators and titles of one of Chekhov’s most famous stories. Here goes:
1) ‘People were saying that someone new had appeared on the seafront: a lady with a little dog.’
Rosamund Bartlett, “The Lady with the Little Dog”
2) ‘It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.’ Constance
Garnett, “The Lady with the Dog”
3) 'People said that there was a new arrival on the Promenade: a lady with a little dog.' Ronald Wilks,
“The Lady with the Little Dog”
4) 'There was said to be a new arrival on the Esplanade: a lady with a dog.' Ronald Hingley, "A Lady
with a Dog"
5) 'The appearance on the front of a new arrival - a lady with a lapdog - became the topic of general
conversation.' David Magarshack, “The Lady with the Lapdog"
On the basis of the story title and the opening sentence alone, which 'other side of a tapestry' would you choose as the most authentic 'voice' of Chekhov? Which has the most nuance and style? Having read all the various versions of this story, I know who my money would be on. Stay tuned . . .
3 March 2010: Books are so important that some regimes have burned them. There have certainly been books which have marked me as permanently as a branding iron. The first I can remember was a biography of Anna Pavlova which made me want to become a dancer.
The next was one I had to read in school when I was thirteen, A Tale of Two Cities. It was with a chill I realised that the broken cask outside the Defarge’s wine shop was Dickens’ foreshadowing the blood that would flow during the French Revolution: “The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.”
Another book which changed my life was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast which, with 20/20 hindsight, encouraged me to think of writing as something I might do. It also made me determined to come to Europe as I wanted to see the Paris he had written about so poignantly. On my arrival in Europe I spent a month there, surviving on $5 a day. Four weeks in a bug-infested hotel on the Quai de la Tournelle whose only advantage was that I could see Notre Dame from my window. Walking from one end of Paris to the other, I could hardly believe that I was in the city of two of my literary heroes. Standing in the Place de la Concorde where the statue of Louis XV
had been replaced by the Obelisk of Luxor, I saw not only the stoneneedle pointing to the sky, but something that had never physically existed: the knitting needles of pitiless Madame Defarge secretly stitching the names of victims who would one day lose their heads. Stay tuned . . .
24 February 2010: One of the exercises I give my students is to ask them to list what they would take if they were suddenly forced into exile. This always results in profound and moving writing. Objects chosen range from a pinch of garden soil to a map of the London Underground.
An Iraqi exile is the poet, painter, novelist and Guardian columnist, Haifa Zangana. Her book, Dreaming of Baghdad, has just been published by the Feminist Press, New York City. One of the strongest parts for me is the chapter about Haifa’s mother attempting to visit her in Abu Ghraib in the 1970s where she was held as a political prisoner. “That little woman with big black eyes, full lips, and a round face, that woman who hated walking the streets alone, hated shopping alone, hated sleeping in the dark, went to the Ministry of Defense alone for weeks on end.” Haifa’s moving account of her mother trying to bring her food and clothing, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, reminds me of Anna Akhmatova’s searing poem, “Requiem”, some of which is about a prison vigil when Akhmatova was trying to visit her son during the Stalinist Terror. In a video interview I recently did with Haifa, she reads an excerpt from the chapter, “Heart, What Have You Seen”. To view it, click here. Stay tuned . . .
17 February 2010: My father-in-law was editor of The Lancet. Though long retired, he is still a stickler for meaning what you say and saying what you mean. He remembers the Daily Express headline at the time of El Alamein which lacked an all-important comma: “8th Army Push Bottles Up Germans”. Another headline during World War II that made him laugh was “Monty Flies Back to Front”.
Here are some interesting facts about punctuation. In Roman times, writers did not punctuate. “The marking of pauses in a copy of a text was normally left to the initiative of the individual reader who would insert them, or not, according to the degree of difficulty presented by the text, or the extent of his comprehension.” (M B Parkes,1992). Until approximately the eighth century, writers did not use spaces between words. Until the middle of the nineteenth, punctuation in books was usually determined by the printer rather than by the author.
I have my own favourite sentences with missing commas (or hyphens) like this one at a safari park: “Elephants Please Stay in Your Car” or “Sheep rustling in the hills”. Apostrophes are also something that need to be used correctly. A vegetarian café advertised goat cheese salad on its menu. Its ingredients included “tomatoes, onions, goats, cheese.” Spot the missing apostrophe and superfluous comma! Edgar Allan Poe was right: “The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood . . . For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.”
Then there are those wonderful mistranslations such as this one seen in a Moscow hotel: “You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursday.” Or this one at a tailor shop in Rhodes: “Order your summer suit. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation”. Or this photograph of a Korean sign with its hilariously accurate, but unintended, English translation: “For Restrooms, Go back toward your behind.” Tautology or what? Stay
tuned . . .
10 February 2010: I've just booked a ticket to New York City where I used to live. After so many years away, it will be interesting to visit my old haunts, one of which is said to be haunted. The New Amsterdam on West 42nd Street is the oldest surviving theater on Broadway and, according to Wikipedia, “the first concrete example of art nouveau in NYC”. The New Amsterdam was, for many years, the home of the Ziegfeld Follies. During the Depression it became a movie house, but by the late 70s it was derelict. It was only returned to its former glory in the 1990s when the Disney corporation spent a rumoured $34 million to restore it. It reopened in 1993 with The Lion King and is currently the Broadway home of Mary Poppins.
I went to the New Amsterdam’s old rooftop theater in the 80s to see a showcase evening of what was eventually to become the movie, Popeye, starring Robin Williams. On the way up to the miniature theatre where the naughtier version of the Ziegfeld Girls used to perform, the elevator operator told me an intriguing story. The place was haunted by a ghost called "Olive" who had been a famous Ziegfeld star. He said she had killed herself by overdosing on her two-timing husband’s pills.
During research for this blog, I read a Playbill article by Robert Viagas that said that not long after she committed suicide, stagehands at the Rooftop Theater started seeing Olive wearing her green beaded Follies’ dress, her beaded headpiece and sash. She was carrying a big blue bottle which had held the mercury bichloride pills her husband had used to treat his syphilis. During the Disney restoration, a security guard was patrolling the building and saw someone on stage in a Twenties’ dress. He yelled at her and was terrified to see Olive’s ghost vanish through a stage wall on the 41st Street side.
I didn't see Olive when I visited "the Roof", but the dilapidated theatre with its dusty seats and flaking gilt felt distinctly ghostly. The place was so atmospheric I decided to write a story with its setting there, something unusual for me, because I usually start with character. I don’t know where the narrator, Ruby McGuire, came from, but maybe Olive wanted someone’s story to be told, if not hers. “Roman Candles” which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 was the result. Click here if you’d like to hear it and go the bottom of the page. Stay tuned . . .
3 February 2010: My writing career began many years ago with the purchase of an Adler typewriter. I hated writing by hand, hated the look of my own kindergartenish writing, and so it was not until I purchased my new machine from the Regent Street Typewriter Company for the then huge sum of £50 that I started in earnest. It was on this machine I wrote, and re-wrote, many short stories and clacked out my first novel, No Angel Hotel. When home computers came onto the market in the 80s, I resisted moving to one for a few years, knowing I would miss the athletic fingerwork and the percussive noise of my reliable German machine.
Now I work on a sleek, silent, state-of-the-art Apple, but I also make good use of my Ryman's lined notebook which I use when I travel or when I set exercises in class. I still hate my handwriting, but I like the look of my neat printing so I do that instead. While the students write, I write too, plugging into the creative energy that comes when a group of people are drawn together to bring something into existence that has never existed before.
The idea for this week's blog came about when I saw this picture of what I first thought were sculptures, only to find out that they are graphite pens. I was tempted to order a set of them for their beauty alone: acorn and twig, curled leaf, spindle shell. Then I thought about it. If I did, these beautiful objects would disappear. If I used them to leave words on a page, they would vanish. Then I wondered which writers in the past might have wanted these on their desks. My research showed that Ernest Hemingway frequently wrote in pencil, beginning his writing day with the ritual sharpening of dozens of them. John Steinbeck used pencils too. When he complained that hexagonal pencils cut into his fingers after a long day's work, his editor supplied him with round ones.These gloriously anarchic pencils wouldn't have worked for him!
Thomas Wolfe wrote with pencil stubs he kept in a coffee can. Truman Capote’s favourite writing tool was the Blackwing No 602, an intensely black lead pencil made by Faber Castell. Stephen King and Elmore Leonard are among those who write in longhand, though I'm not sure whether they are pen or pencil pushers. Ernest Hemingway said, “You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.” Stay tuned . . .
27 January 2010: Margaret Atwood’s blog has ten tips for writer’s block. Number 1 is to go for a walk. Others include “Write in some other form - even a letter or a journal entry. Or a grocery list. Keep those words flowing through your fingers.” (No 3) and “Eat chocolate, not too much, must be dark, shade-grown, organic.” (No 6)
Whether I am struggling with my current manuscript or not, I walk on Hampstead Heath. Where I turn back to go home, there is a bench with this verse in place of the usual dedication to a deceased loved one:
I was born tomorrow
Today I live
Yesterday killed me
Perhaps I should use these words by the Iranian writer, Parviz Oswis, in an exercise and ask my students what Parviz meant. Each time I look at them, I come up with a new meaning.
This being Hampstead, there is quirky poetry too (Leslie Noaks1914 - 2000):
“Seagull, seagull, how do you float?
Upon the water without a boat?”
He thought to himself and then he frowned
Turned on his side and slowly drowned
There is one near the ponds on the Parliament Hill side of the Heath which was meant to be funny, but has undergone a change since its original inscription: "Now in years bestride my eighties, this Elysian seat I have vacated, but gentle neighbour sigh not yet, I’ve only moved to Somerset." It has an addendum: “Died 1999”
These benches are wooden memorials, as well as places of rest and refuge. Those marking a life are poignant reminders of how precious, and short, life is. One of my students, Pat Conway, came to a workshop last year and sent me the following: "Write Now! in New Mexico” was the best writing workshop I've ever been to. Every aspect was helpful: the exercises, the feedback, the sharing. It made me realize that WRITING is the point, not writing a book or even getting published. Those can all come or not; writing is the goal. Your teaching helped me remember that I don't want to die with my song unsung." So go for that walk, look at the sky, the kites, the grass. Then come home and write. Stay tuned . . .
20 January 2010: I was walking in a small park near my home when I saw a woman with binoculars, intently staring at a tree. For a long time she stood in the middle of the path. Intrigued, I asked her what she was looking at. She pointed at hundreds of small birds perched on several tall trees which I’d not noticed. She said they were redwings, a type of thrush who spends the winter months in England. In cities, she said, they gather in parks and small woods. ‘You’ll never find them in gardens. They like to stick together.’ She said they come from Scandinavia and Russia, arriving in November and returning north in March.
After being alerted, I could hear their excited chirping. The writer Maya Angelou said, "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song." That’s true, but I think there is more to it when it comes to the redwing. Surely it sings to keep in touch with the flock when in flight over great distances, hence its scorn for small gardens where there isn’t enough room for them to roost together. To hear redwings, click here.
One of the exercises I set is to write about birds because we need to protect them, as well as watch them. Join the RSPB, leave food out in your gardens. Look out for the birds. Stay tuned . . .
13 January 2010: This week I went to see Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the biopic about the rocker, Ian Dury. It's not a movie I would have chosen to see but, because of the snow, I couldn't be bothered to travel into town in the ice and cold for Jane Campion's Bright Dreams or Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story. I was pleasantly surprised.
Dury is brilliantly played by Andy Serkis who spent three years getting into character. Ian Dury suffered from polio which caused his lameness. To capture his ungainly walk, Serkis injured himself while wearing a leg brace to prepare himself physically, and
psychologically, for the part. Directed by Mat Whitecross, the film is a fantastical take on standard biopic film-making. In an act of alchemy, Serkis literally becomes Dury. Today, the actor now sings with Ian’s band, The Blockheads, the result of his commitment to the part.
Those three years of Stanislavskian preparation is the filmic equivalent of a writer truly getting under the skin of a character. Annie Proulx spends years researching her next project, even going so far as to draw most of the plants in the landscape where her books are set.
This kind of thoroughness has lessons for us all, whether we’re actors or writers. Go see this movie and check out Dury's songs for yourself. Stay tuned . . .
6 January 2010: Over the holiday period I went to see Lee Hall's Pitmen Painters at the National Theatre. It is the extraordinary story of a group of Ashington miners in Northumberland who, in 1934, hired an artist to teach them art appreciation. Bored with lectures on the intricacies of Rembrandt's use of shadows and Modigliani's lines, they rapidly abandoned theory in favour of practice.
In their evening classes the pitmen began to paint . . . and to paint well. Within a few years, avant-garde artists became their friends and their work was acquired by prestigious collecters, but every day they continued to work as miners.
Pitmen Painters is a humorous, yet serious look at art, class and politics. As a creative writing teacher, I know that the world is full of “pitmen painters”. Many who enrol on my courses are initially worried whether they will be competent enough to write. I never hesitate when I answer: “Yes, you are good enough.” And then I quote Henry Van Dyke: "Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best." Stay tuned . . .
30 December 2009: This marks the first instalment of my weekly blogs so here goes . . .
Last night I went with my administrator and playwriting tutor, David Wilson, and spent an evening with Michael Walling and his actress wife, Nisha.
Mike is Artistic Director of Border Crossings, a maverick theatre production company. In 2009 he was responsible for staging Origins: Festival of First Nations, with actors and directors from Cherokee playwrights to Australian Aboriginee actors. As someone who is part Cherokee, I love what he's doing. The First Nations have much to teach us if this planet is to survive. To read more about Border Crossings, click here.
Mike directed David's first play, Simple Writings, which is based on Grimmelshausen's novel, Simplicissimus. Last night's discussion crossed many borders, inspiring new ideas: always useful for a writer. Talk ranged from Chaucer's subversive use of the English language to why Genghis Khan was buried beside a baby camel. More about this in a later blog. Stay tuned . . .
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