Monthly Archives: June 2014

Susan Wicks

sue

 

Congratulations to Sue Wicks, a member and committee member of our society. She is this year’s winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz (Arc publications).

The judges said:

Talking Vrouz is a wonderfully inventive and yet faithful translation of poems which are already at an oblique angle to their own language (French). Susan Wicks renders a unique poetic voice, with all its eccentricities and privacies, into a matching English.  The translation is exact, inventive and full of life, and offers readers something new and startling in English poetry.

The Prize was awarded at an event at St Anne’s College, Oxford, at which the shortlisted translators read from and discussed their work. This was the crowning event of Oxford Translation Day, a festival of talks, readings and workshops staged in collaboration with Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, English PEN, the Poetry Translation Centre, the Oxford German Network, the East Oxford Community Classics Centre and the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities.

This year’s judges of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize  are the academics and writers Jonathan Katz, Adriana Jacobs, Patrick McGuinness and Matthew Reynolds (Chair).

 

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Charles Bainbridge at the Camden Centre

Charles Bainbridge

Charles Bainbridge freed us from the constraints of the current British scene with his entertaining and informative talk on Frank o’Hara at our June meeting in the Camden Centre, Tunbridge Wells.  It is a long time since we opened our ears to poetry from outside the UK, so it was refreshing to recharge the batteries for our own writing and to be enthused about a style so different, with flamboyant self-portraits, mock melodrama, the enjoyment of role-play and silliness, including mockery of English aristocratic posturing in the early poems. After receiving the Hopgood Prize for poetry, Charles told us, o’Hara’s style changed.  He stayed wild, chaotic, sarcastic and violent, yet also evidenced Romanticisim. His poetry remained idosyncratic, but developed in later years, with a controlled depth of voice and phrases that reach out to include us all.

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June 23, 2014 · 11:09 am

Summer 2014

                                                              Frank-O-Hara_FRANK151     Frank o’Hara
On Tuesday 17th. June Charles Bainbridge will be coming to the Camden Centre to give a talk entitled Self-portraits in New York: the poetry of Frank o’Hara. It’s a long time since we had a talk about poetry rather than poets reading, so this will make an interesting change and should prove informative and interesting.
Frank O’Hara was a dynamic leader of the New York School of poets. O’Hara’s poetry engages with the worlds of music, dance, and painting. His style is vaired, and includes everyday conversations and notes about New York advertising signs. He was both poet and art critic, creator and intellectual.
On Tuesday 15th. July, members of our society have been invited to give a reading as part of a month-long event at Mascalls Art Gallery in Paddock Wood.  The exhibition is Discovering Palmer’s Kent and concerns the work of Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland and Paul Drury.  Further details can be found at http://www.mascallsgallery.org
Hope to see you there!

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