How on earth do you pronounce that?

Okay, yes, I'm ridiculously snowed under with work and study, and can't blog, even to bring you up to speed with the great sea-changes that have taken place in my life recently.

Instead, with apologies, I bring you a site I stumbled across today when checking how to pronounce a French place-name: Forvo.

All the words in the world. Pronounced correctly.

How useful is that?

'Leamophants' in Latin

As promised, here's that commissioned "Leamophants" poem elegantly translated into Latin by John King, my friend and Latin teacher these past two years. Just for fun!

Many thanks for this, John. It's marvellous. Though I'd better spare you the Leamington Railway Station poem ...


IN MEMORIAM MAGISTRORUM ELEPHANTIUM LEAMINGTONENSIUM SAMUELIS ET GEORGII LOCKHART

Barbarico splendore suo longisque tegentes
palpebris oculos saeptae senioribus adsunt
rugosis placie lentas agitantibus aures.
Lascivae lepidam praebent speciem agmine lauto,
civibus ostentant sese mediamque per urbem
iucundae incedunt festo candore nitentem:
quas homines spectant mirati praetereuntes,
haud timidas veluti tandem sine matre puellas
antiqo vel amore aegras Heroidas aevo.
Rure huc advenere, urbano ut sole fruantur,
et vitream opposuit cum forte taberna fenestram,
ipsae se simili mirantur imagine captae.
Serica cuique sua est umbella proboscide curva,
leniter huc illuc quae pulverulenta movetur.

Centum anni fugiunt: illas nunc cernere possis
ante oculos hortis lento agmine procedentes
vespere per mediam frigus sub fluminis undis
corpora mersuras: naso caudaque catenam
inter se nectunt: durum pulsant pede campum
et vasto et tenero - sic stat serrata columna
firma solo. Modo non ingenti mole dianthos
contundunt tagetesque instructos ordine flores.


John King
(Classics Department: Rugby School)

Strange Likeness

A short period of illness can be useful for a writer, forming a firebreak between stretches of intense mental activity; not so much scorched earth as a fertile space where new ideas can spring up, free from other influences.

So my brief spell in bed most of Easter and into this week has been useful for that reason, and also as physical downtime, good for recharging the batteries, or refilling the well, however you want to see it.

Filled with new energy, I took myself into Oxford today and renewed my Bodleian card in order to read this book, which I couldn't afford to buy and which is simply not available through the usual library channels.

It was a worthwhile trip. Not only did I manage some research into the impact of Old English on modern poetry - my pet project this spring - but a few phrases in Chris Jones' magnificent Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry struck hard, in particular when touching on Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, and left me far more sure of my direction as I begin work on my own extended poem/poem sequence inspired by Warwick Castle:

The present book's title comes from the twenty-ninth of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, a sequence of poems that dissolves historical linearity to superimpose glimpsed shards of the reign of Offa ... with fragmentary images of the twentieth-century Midlands, a mosaic of the familiar and the unfamiliar which prompts the speaker in the hymn to comment: 'Not strangeness, but strange likeness.'

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Now playing: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Souvenir
via FoxyTunes

Salt Autumn Party

I'm off down to London later today, for tonight's Salt Autumn Party at Foyles. This involves readings by a whole host of Salt poets who have new or newish books out, plus vino and nibbles for the rest of us.

I'm also hoping there may be a trip to the nearest pub afterwards, then I'll be back on the late train and home for about half past midnight.

Work for the train includes a sheaf of unpublished poems that need revisions and some Latin homework - a modern verse translation of a shortish passage from the Aeneid. I've finished the actual translation as a rough draft but I need to improve on the poetry itself, to avoid embarrassment in my evening class.


One of the big problems with my modern version of the Aeneid passage - she says, easily distracted from the main purpose of her blog entry - is that part-way through, it suddenly started to rhyme. And the effect was rather good in places. So I decided to rewrite the less mellifluous first half and 'fit in' some rhymes to smooth out the transition from blank to rhyming.

Disastrous!

To make matters worse, some of the rhymes were not only full but distinctly Victorian in places. For instance, 'fell' - in the sense of grim/terrible - to rhyme with 'hell'.

So the whole thing needs more work. To put it mildly. Okay, it may only be a short piece for my Latin evening class, but I still want it to be good, damn it!

Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at West Stow

Back in the summer, after a violent altercation with some over-zealous home school blog-ring folks, I set my home school blog to Private. That means only my family - and any interested friends - can catch up with what we've been doing recently on the home education front. However, the drawback of that decision is that people searching for photos and other information on various of my blog entries - such as the following one on the Anglo-Saxon Village at West Stow - are no longer able to access the information.

So, since I'm steeped in poetry revisions and not yet ready to blog about Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, I'm reposting it here for the world to see. Apologies for those who only want to read about writing on this blog, but normal service should be resumed once I've finished tinkering with the latest draft of my third collection.


REPOSTED FROM OUR HOME SCHOOL BLOG: A trip to West Stow in 2006



Last month we took a two-day trip from the Midlands across Cambridgeshire into Norfolk and Suffolk. One of the best places we visited in this brief trip was the Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at West Stow. This is a small portion of an Anglo-Saxon village reconstructed on an original site where many artefacts have already been found. The work was supervised and carried out by archaeologists and other experts using traditional methods and trying to get the reconstructed 'village' as close as possible to how they think the Anglo-Saxons might have lived.

The kids absolutely loved their trip. We bought some handcrafted kids' swords and bows and arrows in the shop, for messing about with afterwards in nearby Thetford forest, plus some books on runes and Old English. Here are some photos from our day at the centre:



The village consists of five or six buildings in a loose cluster: individual huts for living and sleeping in, such as the one pictured above, a larger meeting house, and several crafts buildings such as a hut for spinning and weaving wool on looms, a hut for firing pots and woodworking, for grinding corn, and also some covered or open areas where animals could be kept.



The kids enjoyed pretending to cook around this open hearth. People used to think there would be a hole in the thatch, rather like a chimney, for smoke to escape, but this is now considered unlikely. I presume smoke would simply have drifted up and slowly out through the thatched roof. Those Saxon huts must have been very smoky places on a windless day!



The huts are mainly constructed of wood, with the typical thatched roof you can see in the picture. Some are different styles, constructed as experiments to see which style of housing would be most practical and provide the most likely explanations for some difficult questions the archaeologists wanted to answer.



One of their main problems was the existence of a mysterious pit excavated underneath each original Anglo-Saxon hut on the site. Various explanations for its use were considered, but in the end, the archaeologists have decided to remain open to ideas on that score, as it's hard to prove definitively what the pit was used for.

Here's a lovely atmospheric shot of M. lurking behind a hanging pot on one of the raised 'sleeping' areas. As you can see, it's very dark inside these little huts, especially with the fire unlit and the door pulled to.



The roof beams were probably used for hanging dried food on (for smoking, perhaps, over the fire) and also for general storage of equipment, such as nets, household goods and cooking utensils.



Still, I'm sure that with the fire crackling nicely on those long dark evenings, and an enclosed bed of rushes and perhaps even furs to retire to after the last chores had been done, and perhaps a little poetry had been listened to, an Anglo-Saxon hut would have felt like quite a cosy place, even in our British winters.



The wool-crafting, woodworking, corn grinding and pot-firing workshops would have been built apart from the living quarters, as they are now at West Stow. There were also areas set aside for corn and other crops to be grown and for animals to graze, with probably a small pig-sty of some description on the site. Chickens would have had the run of the place, and some of the more vulnerable animals may possibly have spent the worst of the winter indoors with the villagers!



The Anglo-Saxons used a Runic Alphabet for some of their writing, particularly when commemorating something important or when writing on a sacred object.

This is a Rune on the doorpost of one of the reconstructed houses. It represents the letter 'h', as you should be able to guess, and would have been engraved on stone monuments, weapons and armour. This runic writing system is called the furthorc, after the first few letters, just as our alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek writing system, alpha and beta (α & β).



It was a fantastic day out and, if you're a history hound, I can thoroughly recommend the trip. Take boots for the mud on wet days though, and a picnic if it's fine weather! There is a cafe there but eating al fresco under the trees, surrounded by new oaks, is a lovely experience after visiting the Saxon village. And if you go into the nearby forest areas, be prepared for some Blair Witch Project scenes in the woods afterwards. That's a wooden broadsword my son is wielding there, by the way!

Find some more text and pictures about the West Stow Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at 'Experimental Archaeology'.

And, since this particular post is now attracting so many visitors every month, here's another link, this time to the Friends of West Stow Village: more photographs, opening times, and other useful information.

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, thick fog and a Breton lay

I got back from the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival rather later than I would have liked last night, not wanting to beat the old banger into the ground, so nudging her gently the hundred and fifty-odd miles back from the Suffolk coast to Warwickshire.

Fog clamped in on me for the last half-hour, making the journey even slower; down to 30 miles an hour on the motorway on some stretches, so thick it was like driving inside a cloud. Which I suppose is exactly what I was doing. It brought back memories of long anxious trips over the 'mountain' in my Isle of Man days, the heights of Snaefell being prone to thick dangerous fog patches, particularly at this time of year.

My husband blamed the fireworks for last night's pea-souper. But I couldn't help wondering how much damage such minor activities as fireworks can really cause, having seen numerous industrial towers continuously belching out smoke in the flatlands of Suffolk and further into the Midlands on my way home.

For the next day or so, I need to sit down, mull over what I saw and heard at Aldeburgh, and then write up some sort of meaningful account for Raw Light.

Meanwhile, here's a link to The Expulsion of the Blatant Beast, one of my favourite - though highly eccentric - blogs on poetry, spirituality, and Celtic & other languages, featuring a delightful Breton lay available both as written words and sung, via YouTube.