writing and writers – Page 172 – don't confuse the narrator

april 23rd

Lance Tooks drawing from Sketches from Spain

And the date offers a number of reasons to celebrate:

It’s World Book and Copyright Day, it’s traditionally celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday and the day of his death, and it’s also the day Miguel de Cervantes died.

It’s St George’s Day, too, (San Jordi) and Castile Day – not to be confused with Bastille Day, of course – or, perhaps more accurately, El Día de Castile y León.

It seems to me quite apt to celebrate castles in Spain and the world of books on the same day, and it’s also appropriate that the picture accompanying this post is taken from Lance Tooks’ upcoming book Sketches from Spain, due out in May. (Thank you, Lance, for permission to use it!)
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notes about poetry

Looking back through old notebooks at the weekend, I found some notes I must have made after talking to Joan Margarit back in 2002, I think. The conversation was in Spanish, and the notes (made later in English) are my personal interpretation of what he was trying to say.

There were two points about translation that I hadn’t remembered:

Form, metre, rhyme etc. are superficial elements of a poem. What gets translated is something more essential.

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workshop discussion

I’ve been thinking about workshops recently.

No, not the sort that illustrates this post, but writing workshops for the commentary, critique and creation of original texts.
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stars on a stalk

I’ve had this single stalk of forsythia on my desk for several days now, as I found it hanging loose on the bush and thought I might as well cut it off and put it in water.

The flowers were still tightly closed when I brought it in, but I expect they will start to drop within the next day or two.

Each time I look at it, the phrase ‘stars on a stalk’ comes to mind.

It doesn’t strike me as the sort of phrase I’m likely to use in a poem, so it may as well be noted here along with the photo just to brighten things up a bit.

‘it gives us the other’

The abstracts have been published for the sessions at the It Gives Us the Other poetry and translation conference & workday to be held in Nottingham in April.

I suspect some people will wonder who on earth I am and what I’m doing leading a workshop there, so they’ll Google my name and some of them will end up here. (Although I don’t think there’s anything on this blog that explicitly says who I am, the Googlebots are cunning little spiders and have managed to make the connection.)

So, just so that things are made a little easier and a little clearer, I’m gathering together a few relevant posts here:
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