S.F. Said opened the exhibition Animal Tales at the British Library: http://www.bl.uk/events/animal-tales.

Earlier this year, I was incredibly honoured to open the British Library's wonderful exhibition of Animal Tales.  I was even more honoured to see my book Varjak Paw as one of the exhibits.  It was particularly thrilling for me because many of the books in the exhibition had a profound influence on me as I was growing up, and then later, as an adult working on my own writing.  Books such as Watership Down and The Jungle Books are among the most formative and important that I have ever read.

Book cover of Varjak Paw by S.F. Said (Random House 2010), illustration copyright: Dave McKean, text copyright: S.F. Said.

 

But then, I think animal tales have had a profound influence upon most of us.  The earliest known human art is all about animals.  They dominate the human imagination from the moment that paintings appear in the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux and Altamira.  Animals are also visible in the oldest surviving sculptures, such as the 40,000 year old Lion Man who mesmerised crowds at the recent exhibition of Ice Age art at the British Museum.  That exhibition showed just how deeply animals were embedded in the early human imagination - both as subjects of what appear to be closely observed nature studies, and as the focus a seemingly more magical kind of thinking, in which animals shade into the human, and the divine.

 

The British Library's Animal Tales exhibition has shown us that animals are just as deeply embedded in human storytelling traditions as in visual arts.  They are ubiquitous in ancient mythologies, and remain present in so many traditional fairytales and folk tales from around the world. 

 

© The British Library Board

One of the earliest illustrated printed editions of Ovid, La Métamorphose d'Ovide figurée from 1583, on display in Animal Tales at the British Library.

 

And at the very moment that animals began to disappear from most people's daily lives, in the 19th Century, there was an extraordinary explosion of animal literature which continues to the present day.  Why is this?  Why have animals not disappeared from our imaginations, but if anything, become a larger presence there than ever?

 

Perhaps because, as Claude Levi-Strauss once observed, "animals are not chosen because they are good to eat, but because they are good to think".   

 

I love this idea that animals are good to think.  John Berger, in essay his 'Why Look At Animals?', takes it even further: "It is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal." 

 

For animals give us so many ways to think about the world, and our experience of being in it.  There is no one single form of the Animal Tale.  There are many kinds, and they use animals in many different ways. 

 

© The British Library Board

An illustration from the  1877 edition of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, on display in Animal Tales at the British Library.

 

Black Beauty is widely seen as beginning the modern preoccupation with animal welfare, by crediting animals with subjectivity, agency, sentience - encapsulated in that marvellous author credit, "Translated from the original equine by Anna Sewell."  But this is a tradition that runs from the anthropomorphic tales of Beatrix Potter to the rigorously observed nature writing of Henry Williamson's Tarka The Otter; from the magical talking animals of CS Lewis's Narnia books to the political allegory of Orwell's Animal Farm or Art Speigelman's Maus. 

 

Animal writing and art are such broad and diverse traditions; every writer and artist brings something new, something of their own to it.

 

For my part - I have to admit, I didn't set out to write an animal story as such when I wrote Varjak Paw.  The story began when I got a kitten.  He was very young when we first got him, and had never been outside in his whole life. I will never forget the first time he went outside. He went out into the garden, and at the bottom of the garden was a high stone wall, a hundred times bigger than he was. But before anyone could stop him, this tiny kitten ran straight up the face of the wall, until he was sitting on the very top, looking out at the whole world, for the first time ever.

 

Page from Varjak Paw by S.F Said, illustration copyright: Dave McKean, text copyright: S.F. Said.

 

His adventures seemed so dramatic, and so resonant to me.  Who among us hasn't at some point in their lives felt like someone very small, facing a very big world for the first time, all alone?  That, for me, is what Varjak Paw is really about, more than cats, as such.  And yet - the cattier I made it, the more powerful it seemed as metaphor.  The more specifically feline my story became - the more universally human it seemed, too.

 

The same was true with the illustration of Varjak Paw.  Again, I remember wanting my cats to look like real cats, not cute fluffy cartoon cats.  And Dave McKean had drawn the cattiest cats I'd ever seen in his comic Cages, and that was why I thought he would be perfect for Varjak Paw - as well as the fact that he's my favourite artist!  But again: the cattier Dave made the cats, the more universal they became.  To the point where Varjak Paw has now travelled the world, been read by hundreds of thousands of people, and became part of an extraordinary exhibition at the British Library.

 

I can't explain or unpick all that.  I can't tell you why animal stories are still so popular, so powerful, so compelling.  I can't even tell you why my new book, Phoenix, has a Phoenix in it - or why the next book, that I'm writing right now – TYGER – is all about a tiger! 

 

What I can tell you is that this animal stuff goes very deep.  It touches something powerful and profound for children and adults alike; and it has been an enormous honour to see my work as part of this tradition, and this exhibition.

                                                                                                                                             S.F. Said

By Deborah Dawkin, who is a translator and currently working on a collaborative AHRC PhD project with UCL and the British Library focussing on the archive of Ibsen translator Michael Meyer.

On the 4th October the British Library hosted International Translation Day 2015. Marking St Jerome’s day, the Patron Saint of Translators, ITD is a day when translators, authors, publishers, booksellers, critics come together to share ideas, take stock of some of the challenges in the industry, and importantly celebrate its successes. In her opening speech Rose Fenton, Director of Free Word, aptly described this symposium, now in its sixth year, as the “gathering of the translation clan”.

The “translation clan” gather over morning coffee in the British Library conference centre.

 

If translators do indeed belong to some sort of “clan”, then we, the general public, are nonetheless touched by their work in countless invisible ways: not only in the form of literary translation, but in the international news reports splashed across our television screens and front pages, the ingredients lists or instructions on foreign products, and the subtitles for the latest TV Scandinavian crime series. Translation and translators, it seems, quietly intersect with our reality every day. It was this intersection, and with it the exciting potential of engagement between translators and the public ­– through more interactive publishing, readers’ groups, blogs and literary festivals, as well as outreach work in schools and communities - which emerged as a recurring theme of this year’s International Translation Day.

 

The empowerment of readers in a fast-changing media landscape was the subject of the opening panel. Entitled “The Rise of the Reader” the discussion was chaired by Alex Clark and panellists included Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, Anna Jean Hughes, Founder and Editorial Director of The Pigeonhole; and Will Rycroft Community Manager at Vintage. We no longer inhabit a world in which publishers are alone in choosing which books to publish, and in which newspaper critics have the last say on quality. As Rycroft pointed out the fact that people are using a single app on which to play, talk and read – even reading on their phones – opens up possibilities for engaging new readers. Hughes described how The Pigeonhole publishes books in serial form online, including authors and readers in conversation, and hopes translators too might join that conversation. Hughes’s ultimate aim is to “enhance books through conversation across the globe” and suggested that we might experiment with the crowd sourcing of literary translations to speed up the process of bringing translated literature to the public.

 

One of the seminars I found of particular interest explored the growing interest in Translators in Residence. Translators in Residence schemes are comparatively new, but proving an extremely worthwhile initiative in engaging the public in translation. We heard from several translators who were involved in workshops in schools. Sam Holmes explained how sometimes the most productive work a translator in residence can do, is that which runs counter to what students might usually encounter in the classroom. Instead of focussing on the rigid expectations of an exam syllabus, children are encouraged to see their own potential as translators and to work creatively with language. Projects run by Lucy Greaves, during her residence at the Free Word Centre included a Translation and Creative Writing workshop in a refugee centre. Her workshops culminated in the event 'Signs', a showcase of the work of pupils from Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children as part of Islington Word Festival. Translator in Residence schemes are not only a wonderful way in which to generate interest in translated literature and foreign language learning but can be empowering for the communities which they reach out to.

 

There were countless other subjects that inspired animated discussion during the day. The eight seminars on offer covered a wide range of issues. Subjects included the running of translation workshops in libraries, bookshops and schools offering the public an insight into the art of translation; how book sellers and publishers might involve translators in the promotion of books at literary festivals and events; self-publishing by foreign authors and translators in collaboration; the new opportunities and challenges for the translation industry created by developments in the digitised games, video and AV; and the strategies used by translators to give cultural and historical background where needed, without overloading the text.

 

An interesting and amusing experiment opened a seminar entitled “Translation-Speak: Literary difference or bad English?” The audience and panellists were given anonymous passages from various published novels and asked to guess which had been written in English originally and which were translations. It proved an almost impossible exercise, with most passages splitting the vote. What was revealed was that there were often stylistic oddities in those texts originally written in English, that might have been regarded as awkward and therefore faults in a translation, and that the translated texts often read very (perhaps too) smoothly. This led to a discussion about whether translators and their editors are daring enough in their use of language, or often confined to producing texts that are an attractive and “easy read”, even where the original might be more stylistically demanding.

 

The panel for the “Translation Speak” seminar: Chair Nicky Harman (translator), and panellists Meike Ziervogel (publisher, Peierene Press),  Shaun Whiteside (translator) and Laura Barber (Editorial Director, Granta).

 

The final panel of the day “From Page to Stage” included readings by actors from Sasha Dugdale’s translations of Belarusian playwright Pavel Pryazhko’s work.  In the discussion Dugdale and Chris Campbell, Literary Manager at the Royal Court, explored the journey made by a play as it passes through the hands of the translator, writer, dramaturg, director and finally the actors themselves.

 

The day was rounded off with the Found in Translation Award Ceremony, which was awarded this year to Ursula Philips for her translation of the novel Choucas by the Polish author Zofia Nalkowska.

 

International Translation Day 2015 is organised by Free Word, English PEN, and the British Library in partnership with The British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), The Emerging Translators Network (ETN), Literature Across Frontiers (LAF), The Translators Association (TA), Wales Literature Exchange (WLE), Words Without Borders and the Writers Centre Norwich. ITD is supported by Bloomberg, The Booker Prize Foundation, the European Commission, the Arts Council England, Foundation Jan Michalski and ALCS.

 

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by Debbie Cox, Lead Curator of Contemporary British Publications at the British Library.

National Poetry Day gives us the opportunity to showcase the wonderful array of poetry pamphlets submitted recently for the Michael Marks Awards.  The Awards, in which the Library is a partner, were set up to celebrate the poetry pamphlet as a unique form of publication, having a fundamental importance in poetry.  The Poetry Award recognises an outstanding poetry pamphlet published in the UK in the previous year, and the Publishers Award singles out an outstanding UK publisher of poetry pamphlets.  Additionally for the first time this year, there is a prize for outstanding illustration of a poetry pamphlet.   For this year’s awards, a total of 115 pamphlets were entered. The publishers’ submissions detail their efforts to sustain and develop the pamphlet as an important element in the poetry landscape.   Pamphlets, defined for these Awards as publications of no more than 36 pages,  play a role in bringing the work of newer poets to an audience, as well as enabling more established poets to bring out a smaller collection, maybe around a single theme or in a particular style, between their major collections.

 

Image 1/5 showing the full range of pamphlets submitted for the 2015 Michael Marks Awards.

Although the publishers of poetry pamphlets are keen to bring the poetry to as wide an audience as possible, many undertake pamphlet publishing more as a labour of love than for commercial reasons.  Although this has its own challenges, it is also liberating in that it gives publishers freedom to put forward work they like, according to their own criteria and preferences. It also allows these publishers to follow their passions and work in a way that expresses their own interests. Some focus on the association between illustration and the written word, others are more concerned with the physicality of the finished object, as something good to hold onto and keep.   Because of this, the pamphlets submitted show great diversity, not only in poetic styles and themes, but also in their production.  In many cases the publishers work closely with the authors selecting the design, typeface and layout, whilst other publishers seek to create a recognisable series of pamphlets through a more unified design.  Many work in a close relationship with local printers, and locality shines through many of the pamphlets submitted, not only in their production but also in their voice, with regional accents including Brummie, Geordie and Highland English featuring in the poems.

 

Image 2/5 showing the full range of pamphlets submitted for the 2015 Michael Marks Awards

In very many cases the sale and promotion of the pamphlets also depends heavily both on locality and on relationships built up with their audience.  Very few bookshops take poetry pamphlets, partly because, without a spine, they are not suited to being displayed on shelves.  So they are sold at poetry readings, book fairs or poetry festivals or through other sympathetic outlets.    And although these are printed pamphlets, they are also promoted energetically through publishers’ websites, social media and blogging.  

 

Image 3/5 showing the full range of pamphlets submitted for the 2015 Michael Marks Awards.

For both the poets and the publishers, pamphlets offer a means to introduce poetry to new audiences, as many hope that affordable pricing will enable more people to buy these collections. And although these are contemporary poems, published in the UK, their scope is not limited either in place or time.  The collections include work by writers of different nationalities, as well as work inspired by travels or stays in many countries.  There are collections based on historical events alongside current concerns, and there are poems translated from languages other than English.

 

Image 4/5 showing the full range of pamphlets submitted for the 2015 Michael Marks Awards.

For the British Library the Michael Marks Awards provide a means of ensuring that the Library’s coverage of this important format is as complete as possible, for whilst many of these pamphlets will be sent to the Library by their publishers as the “legal deposit” copy, some pamphlets may not have reached us by this means.  In its role as the national published archive, the Library endeavors to collect and preserve the whole range of UK publishing, across all formats, and sees independent and alternative publishing, and self-published works, including pamphlets and zines, as vital elements of cultural expression alongside the output of commercial and academic publishers.

 

Image 5/5 showing the full range of pamphlets submitted for the 2015 Michael Marks Awards.

The pamphlets submitted for this year’s Awards will be added to the Library’s collections, alongside those submitted over the previous six years, forming an important addition to the Library’s coverage of poetry in the UK and beyond.  The Awards were started by the British Library with the Poetry Book Society, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in 2009. The Wordsworth Trust joined the British Library as lead partner in 2012, and the TLS joined as media sponsor. The shortlist for the Poetry and Publishers’ Awards will be announced by the end of October and the winners will be announced on Tuesday 24^th November.  

There are events across the UK and specially commissioned poems on this year’s theme of light to mark National Poetry Day.

 

 

                       

 

On Friday 2nd October, the British Library will open its doors once more to the translation community to celebrate International Translation Day. Translators, authors, students, publishers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers and reviewers, all with an interest in translation, will gather to debate significant issues and developments within the sector, as well as to celebrate its successes. This annual event, presented by Free Word, English PEN and the British Library in association with the British Centre for Literary Translation, Literature Across Frontiers, the Translators' Association, Wales Literature Exchange and Words With-out Borders has become one of the highlights of the British Library’s calendar. 

Translated literature may only represent between three and four per cent of books published each year in the UK, but most literature lovers will find that their bookshelves (real or virtual) hold a far greater proportion of translated works than such a statistic implies. The personal library of any serious book-worm is very likely to include international classics such as Homer, Tolstoy, Proust, Ibsen, Nietzsche and de Beauvoir, as well as examples of more contemporary authors such as Saramago, Kundera, Knausgård and Murakami…and perhaps some Scandinavian crime, for lighter, though somewhat dark, reading. Without this international literature our world would certainly be a great deal narrower, and our literature a great deal poorer.

 

It is easy to forget when discussing the latest work by Murakami that the words on the page are in fact those of his translator/s and as such represent an act of interpretation. We have no way of knowing the challenges that the original text has presented the translator with, or how much is lost (or perhaps even gained) in translation. Even more hidden from our eye is the collaborative pro-cess that goes into the making of a translated text: the discussions that took place between the translator and the editor, or original author, over issues of style or ‘meaning’. Neither can we guess at the various levels of negotiation that bring a work of foreign literature to our shelves:  the impassioned letters from a translator to a publishing house persuading them to publish the latest literary gem they have discovered; the fierce negotiations over foreign rights at the international Book Fairs; the wrangling over author’s and translator’s fees; the concerns of publishing houses about the marketability of a work. In a sense, then, it is not just the translator and his/her process which remain largely invisible to the public, but all the other professionals who collaborate to bring translated fiction to our shelves.

It is this ‘hidden life’ of a translation – the whys and wherefores of translators’ choices and the complex process of translated literature reaching our shelves – which is often revealed in the archives of translators. Within its contemporary literary manuscripts collections, the British Library holds the extensive archives of poet Michael Hamburger (1924-2007) and playwright Michael Meyer (1921-2000). Both authors in their own right, Hamburger and Meyer are best known for their translations. Hamburger was responsible for bringing some of the most important German language writers, particularly poets, to our shelves, including Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, Friederich Hölderlin and W. G. Sebald. Meyer translated the works of the great Scandinavian dramatists, Ibsen and Strindberg, for the British theatre, radio and television of the 1950s and 1960s, bring-ing a freshness to the texts which helped to ensure their status in the twentieth century’s dramatic repertoire. These two archives, containing draft manuscripts of their translations alongside correspondence with editors, literary agents, publishers and other prominent literary figures shed light on the ‘hidden life’ of a translation.

Other equally interesting translation-related material is to be found in the recently acquired archives of contemporary poets Ted Hughes and Peter Dale, both prolific translators. Hughes believed passionately in the importance of translation, and the archive includes letters and papers relating to the journal Modern Poetry in Translation which he and the publisher Daniel Weissbort founded in 1965 with the express aim of bringing contemporary foreign poetry to the Anglophone reader. Hughes’s own translation work included the poetry of Ovid, and plays by Euripides, Racine and Wedekind. The archive includes correspondence about his translations of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding as well as drafts of his translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Peter Dale’s translations from the French include the poetry of François Villon and Paul Valéry and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The Library’s archives collections do not only represent translations into English. A collection of correspondence between Harold Pinter and his Japanese translator Tetsuo Kishi not only throws light on the relationship between author and translator but also on the cultural transformation that Pinter’s plays undergo in translation, giving us pause for thought about the Pinter we know and love, and what it is it about his work that transferred so effectively to Japanese theatre.

Older translation-related treasures are to be found in the British Library vaults too. The archive of the nineteenth century drama critic, translator and author William Archer, who brought many of Ibsen’s plays to the British theatre for the first time in the late 1800s, includes papers related to performances of the time, and discussions with George Bernard Shaw about Ibsen’s work. The literary manuscripts of William Morris contain drafts of his translations of the Icelandic Edda and Beowolf, along with correspondence and notes. The archive of William Henry Fox Talbot, known chiefly as a pioneer in photography, but also an Assyriologist and one of the first decipherers of the inscriptions of Nineveh, includes a collection of notebooks with his draft translations.

And from even further back in time there are many Early Modern British and European manuscripts of translated works; not just into English but from English into Latin, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Swedish and Arabic (to name but a few). Some even earlier examples of translation are to found in our Arabic and Islamic Heritage collections - among them a thirteenth century manuscript of Ptolemaeus’ Almagest, an influential astronomical text thought to have been translated from the Greek into Arabic by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar in about 900 AD. The manuscript was owned by the mathematician Tusi, and is annotated with his comments and improvements on Ptolemaeus’ system, as well as remarks where he finds fault with the translation (visit the Qatar Digital Library at http://www.qdl.qa/en  to find out more). Such documents offer important historical clues into the impact of translation in the history of the international ex-change of ideas on philosophy, medicine, surgery, theology, as well as politics, trade and diplomacy, from as early as the thirteenth century.

The fact that translation and international literature is an intrinsic part of our national heritage, both past and present, is not only represented throughout the British Library’s collection, but is celebrated in our calendar of events through-out the year. This June, for example, UCL held the ARTIS 2015 Conference: Multidimensional Methodologies: collaboration and networking in translation re-search. The conference included a panel discussion about the relationship be-tween Archives, Museums and the study of Literary Translation, followed by a “show and tell” session led by curators at the Library to showcase some of our collections.

For the general public with an interest in international and translated literature, there are a variety of events to be found on the British Library’s calendar, not only including the forthcoming International Translation Day, but The PEN Pinter Prize held this year on October 6th, European Literature Night held each spring, and a plethora of events throughout the year which offer audiences an opportunity to hear international and British authors from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, as well as translators, discuss their work.

Deborah Dawkin is currently working on a collaborative AHRC PhD project with UCL and the British Library focussing on the archive of Ibsen translator Michael Meyer.

 

        We are delighted to announce that this year’s Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets are now open for entries. There are three awards for Poetry Pamphlet, Publisher, and Illustration. Works published in the UK between July 2014 and June 2015 are eligible, and full details of how to apply are available from the Wordsworth Trust website.

        The Awards were started by the British Library with the Poetry Book Society, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in 2009. They are now entering their 7^th year, with the Wordsworth Trust joining the British Library as lead partner in 2012, and the TLS joining as media sponsor.

Laura Scott, winner of the Michael Marks Award 2014, for her pamphlet ‘What I saw’.

Laura Scott: What I saw. Aylsham: The Rialto, 2013.

            The Awards were inspired by the Scotland-based Callum Macdonald Memorial Award, also supported by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, and founded by Tessa Ransford. They were established to celebrate the poetry pamphlet as a unique form of publication, having a fundamental importance in poetry. Traditionally the poetry pamphlet is often seen as the first step to publishing a collection of poetry by emerging writers, but it is also used by established poets who may have a piece of work that they want stand alone, or want to use the opportunity to collaborate with an artist or writer.

Helen Mort

        Judges for the 2015 award include Helen Mort, Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at The University of Leeds, and former Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust; Rory Waterman, poet, lecturer in the Department of English at Nottingham Trent University, and regular reviewer for the TLS; and Debbie Cox, Lead Curator of Contemporary British Publications at the British Library.

        There are two major Michael Marks Awards, one of a work of poetry in pamphlet form, and one for a publisher of poetry. Pamphlet publishers are the lifeblood of new poetry, often working on a voluntary basis and often with only their own resources. The Awards are unique in recognising
that commitment.

Winner of the publishers’ award in 2014 was Welsh poetry pamphlet imprint Rack Press

 

        This year, for the first time, we offer a new Award for an illustrator of poetry pamphlets, celebrating the pamphlet as a beautiful object in its own right. The Illustration Award will be judged by Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, London from 2008 – 2015.

        The shortlist for the Poetry and Publishers’ Awards will be announced by the end of October and the winners will be announced at a special dinner at the British Library on Tuesday 24^th November.

Full details of the Awards are at www.wordsworth.org.uk/poetrypamphlets.

Closing date for submission of pamphlets is Friday 28^th August 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                            Lee Harwood (1939-2015)

Chris Beckett writes:

        There is a haunting valedictory quality to Lee Harwood’s recent collection, The Orchid Boat (Enitharmon Press, 2014). And yet the poems, many of which recapitulate with a light (and last) touch themes and motifs familiar from Harwood’s considerable body of work, are far from sombre:

I don’t intend to sit here waiting in my coffin,
gathering dust until the final slammer,
adjusting my tiara.

I’ll stamp my foot
and, checking the rear-view mirror,
head for the frontier.

Sadly, the sense of journey’s end – or journey’s beginning – that characterises The Orchid Boat is now made all the more poignant by the news that Lee Harwood passed away last month, on Sunday 26 July.

So where’s the boat?
A sampan or a lugger?
or an elegant steam launch?
Is there room for me and that crew of sages? 

‘Sailing Westwards’, the poem that concludes The Orchid Boat, moves seamlessly in typical Harwood manner between landscapes imagined and landscapes remembered, from the mountains of China to the hills and mountains of Snowdonia that Harwood climbed with untiring enthusiasm and a perpetual sense of wonder. We have seen the ‘elegant steam launch’ in Harwood’s poems before; and the lifelong delight that he took in the orchids of the Sussex Downs finds new resonance in ‘Departures’, the poem that opens The Orchid Boat: ‘Without thinking / I step aboard the orchid boat, / the feel of silk / carrying me beyond all mirrors’.

       Lee Harwood established his reputation as a distinctive new voice in English poetry with The White Room, published by Fulcrum Press in 1968. Landscapes (1969) and The Sinking Colony (1970) quickly followed, and in 1971 his work appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 19, along with selections from Tom Raworth and the American poet John Ashbery. In 1975, Trigram Press published Harwood’s translations of the poems of Tristan Tzara, a seminal influence whose work Harwood discovered in the early 1960s. Thereafter, Harwood was published exclusively by the small presses, a state of affairs that reflected the divided and divisive territory of English poetry during the 1980s. In 2004, Shearsman Books published Harwood’s Collected Poems to considerable acclaim, prompting an upsurge of retrospective interest in his work. The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, a collection of essays on his work, was published in 2007, and this was quickly followed by a series of illuminating interviews conducted by Kelvin Corcoran, Not the Full Story (2008). Recently, Harwood’s poems found an appreciative home in the London Review of Books, and his work was championed in sensitive reviews by August Kleinzahler and Mark Ford.

       It is a great pleasure to report that the extensive papers of Lee Harwood, which were acquired from the poet by the British Library in 2012, will be made available later this year. The preparation of the catalogue, which has benefited from the poet’s close involvement, is now in its final stages. It is a matter of great regret that Harwood did not live to see the release of his papers, although he took great satisfaction in seeing his papers join the national collection. The archive is a rich record of the life of a singular poet who belonged to no particular school, finding sympathetic friends across poetry’s territorial divisions, both at home and in America. Journals, diaries, notebooks, and much poetry in draft, are supplemented by a considerable number of letters received: there are 77 files of letters and 146 correspondents, from Ashbery (John) to Wylie (Andrew). A sense of the variety of Harwood’s correspondents, and the number of letters in the collection, can be quickly given by some examples: Paul Evans (122 letters), Harry Guest (354), August Kleinzahler (48), Douglas Oliver (48), F. T. Prince (22), Tom Raworth (58), and Anne Stevenson (in excess of 400). Harwood greatly valued the close reading of his work by other poets, and one of the instructive rewards of the letters is to read their detailed responses to his work.

 Additional MS 46700

 

       Tomorrow sees the anniversary of the now world famous boat trip on the River Thames in Oxford, when the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics don at Oxford University, rowed up the river with the three young daughters of the University’s Vice-Chancellor. The middle child was Alice Liddell, then aged ten.

       Dodgson recorded the trip in his diary for 1862, one of nine volumes of his diaries that are held at the British Library. The details of the rowing trip itself are recorded on folio 15 of his diary:

Additional MS 54343

but the page opposite records why the trip turned out to be so important in the history of English literature. As he rowed up the river Dodgson began to tell the girls a story about a bored child called Alice who follows a white rabbit and ends up having a series of surreal adventures. The story, as recorded in Dodgson’s diary, was initially called ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’. One year later, under his pen name of Lewis Carroll, the story was published in an expanded form with the new title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Additional MS 54343

         After the trip, Dodgson had written up the story, painstakingly added his own illustrations, and presented the manuscript to Alice Liddell as a gift, with the dedication: ‘A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day’. This manuscript is now one of the British Library’s treasures; however, its journey from its original creation to its home in the Library is quite a marvellous tale in itself. Alice Liddell kept the manuscript until 1928 when she was forced to sell it to pay death duties after the death of her husband. The manuscript was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for £15,000 to an American dealer, Dr Rosenbach, who in turn sold it to Eldridge Johnson upon returning to America. Following Johnson’s death in 1946 the manuscript was again sold at auction. This time, however, it was purchased by a wealthy group of benefactors who donated the volume to the British people (and the British Museum) in 1948 in gratitude for their gallantry against Hitler during World War Two.

        This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland and gives us a chance to celebrate and to reflect upon the continuing influence of this much-loved story. The Alice manuscript has just taken a trip back across the Atlantic to be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Later in the year it will have a short sojourn at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia before returning to us and going on display as part of our Front Hall exhibition which will explore the many ways that the story has been adapted, appropriated, reimaged and re-illustrated since its conception. The exhibition curators will be blogging later in the year as we work towards the launch on 20^th November.

       Though if you can’t wait until then to find out more, you can explore this manuscript and much more besides on the British Library’s Discovering Literature website, which you can find at http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alices-adventures-under-ground-the-original-manuscript-version-of-alices-adventures-in-wonderland

 
The British Library is very pleased to announce that it has acquired the archive of the playwright, screenwriter and novelist, Julian Mitchell. Julian Mitchell began his playwriting career adapting novels for performance, starting with several novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett. He adapted Jane Austen’s 'Persuasion' (1971), Paul Scott’s 'Staying On' (1980) and Ford Madox Ford’s 'The Good Soldier' (1981) for television. Among his original works, he is best known for his play, 'Another Country', recently revived in the West End and on tour.

'Another Country' is based on the life of the spy Guy Burgess and explores the tensions of politics and sexuality within the context of the hypocrisy of the English public school system in the 1930s. The play won the Olivier Award for best play in 1981 and Julian later wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation in 1984. Early productions of the play were instrumental in launching the careers of Rupert Everett, Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth, and Julian's involvement with these productions can be seen in the archive. He also won the SWET Award in 1985 for 'After Aida' his play about the composer, Giuseppe Verdi, and wrote the screenplay for the film 'Wilde' (1997). Julian also wrote numerous screenplays for the Inspector Morse series and the archive including notes on adapting Colin Dexter’s books for television, along with drafts, shooting scripts and other related papers.

 

Just some of the 80 boxes of the archive in their new home at the Library

The archive includes successive drafts of Julian’s work providing a real insight into his creative process and the subjects which inspired him. In addition the archive includes correspondence with a wide range of people from theatre and television including the actors John Gielgud and Alec Guinness, the American writer, Philip Roth and the poet, Stephen Spender. A series of personal diaries, photographs and press cuttings are also included.

Some of the research notes, letters, scripts and other papers relating to 'Persuasion'

Julian’s archive is an exciting addition to the Library’s literary and creative archives and I am sure that it will be a great resource for researchers.