Poetry in a foreign language...

It's been an incredibly long time since my last post; I imagine this is because the more you leave such things, the greater the task of returning to it feels. In any case, a lot has happened since my post on Cold Comfort Farm, Bright Star and various other things. I am now back in the UK, my 'year' abroad in Tours finished and my year abroad project written (it was about the roles of women on three chateaux in the area around Tours if you are particularly interested!). Although I've got used to it again I do miss France and speaking French. I hope to go back at some point in August, though.

In a weeks' time I start something called the Student Associate Scheme; a project to encourage students in Higher Education to take up teaching, specifically in 'shortage' subjects (maths, science and modern foreign languages). I'll therefore be spending three weeks as a classroom assistant, learning about the British secondary school system from the opposite perspective. Should be interesting! It will be especially intruiging for me to compare teaching English in France to teaching French in England.

One thing I tried once or twice while an 'assistante' was to use poetry. We are fortunate to have such a broad and beautiful range of poetry in our language, and it would be a shame for my students to have missed out on it. I used a few different ones - 'little tree' by e.e.cummings at Christmas and 'i carry your heart with me', also by cummings - amongst them, and got some really positive responses ranging from poetical analysis to emotional response. I was expecting to give a Shakespeare lesson to one particularly bright class but it sadly didn't happen; I was planning to look at a sonnet or two. I did one exercise a few times with a couple of different classes, using Jenny Joseph's famous 'Warning':

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.


I didn't give it to my students like this, though; I gave it to them in pairs on a piece of paper, with some words blanked out. For example:
'When I am an old woman I shall wear ______
With a red _____ which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me'
I asked them to fill in the gap with words they felt were appropriate to make their own poem. I supplied some words if they asked - 'spit', 'brandy', 'beermats' - but in general the vocabulary isn't too demanding. At first it took a while for some students to understand what I was asking. They whispered with panicked faces, "But Madame... we don't know the words, we will be wrong!". I tried to explain that they should use their imaginations; there is no wrong answer as long as the poem makes sense. After a few false starts almost everyone finished and we read them aloud.

I wish I'd kept some copies because some of them were truly hilarious, updating the 1961 poem with a real 21st century feel. I seem to remember hearing things like:
'When I am an old woman I shall wear a leather skirt
With a red g-string which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me'
and:
'And eat only hamburgers and fries for a week
And hoard money and drugs and alcohol'
Even the students agreed that their versions were better than the original!

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In other news, I've been reading a lot more blogs in the past year. Five of the best are without a doubt:
http://www.cakewrecks.com/
http://1000awesomethings.com/
http://www.trufflegirls.com/
http://bookshelfporn.com/
http://thxthxthx.com/

Some of my favourite blogs are the ones my friends write; from spiritual reflection to journalism they remind me what wonderful, interesting and talented people I know. I feel like I would like to make this blog more interesting and accessible; perhaps the answer is to write shorter but more regular blogs on random literature-related things. We'll see how that goes...!

Cold Comfort Farm, Period Dramas and other news

A bitty post of assorted literary thoughts...

Firstly, I have been re-reading Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1932), a comedy which tells the story of Flora Poste, orphaned at the age of nineteen and who decides to live with relatives the Starkadders. This strange family, whom she has never met before, have messy lives which she determines to clean up for them. Amusing in its own right, it is also a clever parody of several popular works of the time (now unknown) and of D.H.Lawrence - something I never noticed before, but having read Sons and Lovers (1913) fairly recently I 'got' some of the allusions. Despite this link to a canonised writer, and despite a good 1995 TV adaptation starring the lovely Rufus Sewell and a rather young-looking Kate Beckinsdale, it is relatively unknown and uncritiqued. Even searching academic online journals I found only one good article devoted solely to this clever book. If you fancy a giggle from a writer who doesn't take herself too seriously, this book is great.

Secondly I stumbled across a fantastic blog today called merely 'Costume drama reviews', which I'm sure I will be returning to again and again in the future. It's a good place to look if you are interested in 'the classics', in watching adaptations or finding recommendations. From here, and from my mini-series obsessed American friend here in France, I learn that there is an imminent new film of Middlemarch, although how they'll squeeze 700+ pages into 2 hours is beyond me!

In books, I found an interesting one in the V.O. (Version Originale) section of Tours library last week: An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) by Theodore Zeldin. In it Zeldin explores the full range of human emotion - love, fear, curiosity, ambition - where it comes from, how it has developed and what it seems to be doing now. His aim is to provide us with an idea of our roots and heritage as humans, rather than as Brits/Americans/French/Japanese etc and is very interesting. He begins each chapter with stories of French women (why, I don't remember) and then broadens his view to see history, so we see both an intimate and a long-sighted view of history, which is interesting. I also found Kate Morton's second novel The Forgotten Garden (2008) (after enjoying The House at Riverton - 2007) - not bad for what can be a very hit-and-miss couple of shelves!

Lastly, I've been to the cinema twice this week! I know, indulgent... well, I do only pay 3,70 euros each time. Thursday I saw Invictus (apparently not out yet in the UK?!) which was just fantastic, even if the last twenty minutes did go a bit heavy on the rugby, and incredibly inspiring. Go and see it. I'm definitely going to be hunting out Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Actually, I wanted to talk about Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion (directed The Piano - no, I haven't seen it either, not yet). It's the story of John Keats - one of my favourite poets - and his fiancee Fanny Brawne. It was a beautiful film in every way - music, direction, actor who plays Keats (!), poetry - but I wouldn't blame people for not enjoying it. It's slow-moving and the ending's predictable but most importantly, I think, the poetry doesn't get in the way, it enhances the story. Wait, didn't someone say something like that about literature and reality...?! Most importantly we hear 'Ode to a Nightingale' (one of my favourites), 'Bright Star' (possibly the only poem directly about Brawne), 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and 'Endymion', and not just from the mouth of Keats himself.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the way Keats' own words from his letters were occasionally put into his mouth in the film. For example, during Fanny's first 'poetry lesson' he tells her: "A poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence" and goes on to quote one of his own, most famous letters. What I felt was done successfully was to show the depth of Fanny's emotions and feelings, but also to show her to be a very ordinary woman in many ways (despite her sometimes startling clothing). One of the best scenes, I though, was the one in which Keats believes his friend Charles Brown to have sent Fanny a Valentine and storms into the woods with them both following him. This is followed by Brown's tirade against Fanny, where she stands silently listening. However I couldn't help feeling that there was something a little Twlight-like about Keats and Fanny's relationship - not only the moping around and crying in the woods but also the theme of the unusual and extraordinary man falling in love with the surprisingly ordinary woman. I suppose the appeal of this kind of story lies in the fact that we all feel somehow that we deserve to be loved in such a way.

The best thing I can say about this film is that I saw it with a friend who knew nothing about Keats and who doesn't particularly like poetry, but she came out having enjoyed it and wanting to try and read Keats' poetry for herself. Give it a go!

P.S. Next time I hope to give some anecdotes on the subject of "Teaching English (and literature) in France"... watch this space!

'What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth'. Discuss.

Between the ages of about 13 and 15 I was unhappy. Before then I enjoyed primary school or was managing OK with the senior school transition. After that I was busy working on my GCSEs before escaping to sixth form. The reason I was unhappy wasn’t anything particular, it’s just I was a teenager. I was also not very popular, difficult to get along with and acted like I was superior to everyone else. In any case, books were my escape. I think it was in this period that I would read almost one book per day. I remember coming home feeling miserable and lying on my bed with yet another book, escaping.

Books help us deal with reality. Or at least, they seem to give us the impression that there is shape to our lives, that one day we will get to the end of whatever thing is troubling us and move on, in the same way that we know the hero or heroine will win through in the end. I suppose when I was reading fantasy novels I was, in my imagination, also adventuring in ways I never would in real life. My own quest was to finish my five years in secondary school intact.

I’m fairly sure that if I were to read back over some of those novels – mostly a mixture of fantasy novels and novels about children in various wars and conflicts – they would evoke that part of my life. It’s this layering of reality and fiction that I’m finding while reading Reading Lolita in Tehran (Aza Nafisi, 2003). I must have picked it up a few years ago but never got round to reading it until a friend told me how much she’d enjoyed it. I’m about three quarters of the way through and am indeed finding it very interesting, although it’s difficult to know how much of it is fact and how much (especially conversation) is fabrication. It’s about the author’s career teaching English Literature at various universities (and a book group) in Tehran, Iran, during the 1980s and 1990s and is stimulating and heartbreaking at the same time. It did remind me, oddly, of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (2006). This is the story of a young girl, Matilda, who lives on a tropical island where the only white man becomes the teacher and uses Dickens’ Great Expectations as his main teaching aid. Considering Mister Pip was so highly acclaimed (and was nominated for the 2007 Man Booker prize) I was underwhelmed, but I have a feeling that if I had more affection for Great Expectations (my least favourite Dickens) I might have enjoyed it more.

My overall impression is that in Reading Lolita in Tehran it seems that the novels and writers under discussion are being read into the Iranian society of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas with Mister Pip the emphasis seems to be to be on the utter foreignness of the text. It’s completely out of place on the island, and wondering about this other world – Pip’s world in unknown England – is what helps Matilda to escape what is happening in reality. For Azar Nafisi and her students, every novel becomes a starting point for political debate and to illustrate what is happening in Iranian society. Lolita, a young girl whose life and textual voice has been taken away from her, seems to embody the position of Iranian women, with so many rights and freedoms taken away from them. Yet literature is for these women an immense escape. Nafisi describes how, racked with insomnia during night attacks at the time of the Iraqi-Iranian war, she would read. Yet she describes herself as being capable of greater concentration than usual under these straitened circumstances.

Right at the beginning of Reading Lolita Nafisi tells us she warned her students: ‘...do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.’ Yet she admits that “It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov’s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.”

Perhaps C.S.Lewis was right to say that ‘Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it’ after all. Because in the end what we bring to our reading of any text – our beliefs, prejudices, experiences – shapes how we view it and how we remember it, as well as how we experience life itself.

On a lighter note... Literary highlights on stage and screen recently for me have been:

BBC’s new adaptation of Emma. Light and delightful, although everyone is far too beautiful! (Oddly enough I quite enjoy adaptations of Emma although I heartily dislike the book itself and only got through the whole thing with much will-power and at least three false starts)

RSC’s production of Hamlet as shown on Boxing Day in the UK. David Tennant impressed me greatly, particularly by the fact that he genuinely made me laugh. There was something particularly memorable about the grave scenes (the digging of Ophelia’s grave and her burial) for me, although I’m not enough of a Hamlet buff to know why. Of course, when you sit through three hours of something like that, it does make it slightly (and accidentally) amusing to see the majority of the cast die in the last 5 minutes!

A stage production of Flat Stanley (original book by Jeff Brown, 1964) which I went to see this very afternoon with my mum and two of my young cousins. Anyone else remember the story about the boy whose notice board fell on him in the night and made him flat? It was excellently staged and lots of fun, although the fake American accents were a little grating.

Southbound Train

Oh, and I guess they'll say I've grown
I know more than I wanted to know
I've said more than I wanted to say

I'm headed home
Yeah but I'm not so sure
That home is a place
You can still get to by train

So I'm looking out the window
And I'm drifting off to sleep
With my face pressed up against the pane
With the rhythm of my heart
And the ringing in my ears
It's the rhythm of the southbound train

Oh, well the wind starts to look like her hair
And the clouds in her bright blue eyes
As the sea and the shore fall and rise
Like her breast as she breathes by my side

And the moon is her lips as the sun
Is headed on down to the sea
Like her head as she lays down on me
Until we reach ocean side

Over and over I hear the same refrain
It's the rhythm of my heart
And my sleepy girl's breathing
It's the rhythm of my southbound train

Oh, I suppose they'll say I should've known
Or maybe I'm just feeling old
Like a lawyer with no one to blame

I'm headed home
Yeah but I'm not so sure
Home is a place that'll ever be the same

So we're picking up our things
And we head out in the cold
And your eyes are where you carry the pain
When I hear the whistle weeping
It's crying to the sky
It's the rhythm of the southbound train
It's the rhythm of my southbound train


This afternoon I walked into Tours to go to the library, and this song came on my mp3 player. It's a track from Jon Foreman's EP 'Fall' (a series which also includes 'Winter', 'Spring' and 'Summer', all well worth a listen) and seemed to fit with the beautiful autumn afternoon - a clear blue sky, orange light, turning trees and just-warm air. It contains one of my favourite song lines: 'I'm not so sure/That home is a place/You can still get to by train'. It sums up how I feel in life as I travel to new places and meet new people and realise that it's OK to feel at home everywhere and nowhere. My home is not here, it's still to come. And I think Foreman's saying the same thing, but he's also talking about a person being his home too. This is something I've definitely experienced; with close friends and loved ones it doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing, you can feel at home.

The words are beautiful and the music is too, with the wonderful use of strings and harmonica and the throbbing train-like motion of the cello bass complementing the words. It's a love song but it's also a song about life, experience, change and going back.