Research Themes and Projects
Poetries On and Off Air at the BBC World Service (Tom Cheesman)
Rationale for a small research project, within the AHRC project on BBCWS as a "cross-diasporic contact zone": to involve Stephen Watts (London), Adel Guémar (Swansea), John Goodby (Swansea) and further collaborators, both outside and within BBCWS.
Once upon a fabled time, poets practically ran the BBC World Service (Empire Service, as was). This was the Golden Age, the 1930s and 1940s: Louis MacNeice as commissioning editor, and other poets on salaries, such as W. R. Rogers and Roy Campbell, bringing in their friends, fellow-poets, to write and present on air. Bush House on the Strand was a nest of poets: internationalists, cosmopolites, translators from classical and modern languages, bohemians. Many a man of the pen (and they were [nearly?] all men) kept the wolf from the door with the Reithian shilling: W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, F. R. Higgins, and others.
The foreign language services (many, if not all of them?) developed a similar culture. Those preferentially hired were émigrés and exiles from their countries' educational upper echelons: all brilliant linguists, and many of them poets, as well as dramatists and novelists and, of course, script-writers. We focus on poets and poetry here, to keep it a bit more manageable, and because this topic lends itself better to exploring more informal, off-air dimensions of cultural life - or so we hope.
The bi-annual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation was in large part born out of the World Service. It was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, who called first at Bush House in seeking contributors. 38 years later, Weissbort dedicated his farewell issue (NS 22, 2003) to Poets at Bush House. This volume amounts to an elegy to an institutional and para-institutional culture which has not survived recent waves of market-oriented rationalisation - or at least, this is what many of the contributors suggest.
MPT, a creature of the Cold War, focused initially on poetry behind the Iron Curtain, although its remit soon broadened. It is striking that Poets at Bush House involves only (broadly) "European" languages: it features poetry, memoirs and essays by eminent Russian-, Tatar-, Hungarian-, German-, French-, Czech-, Slovenian-, and English-language poets, and poetry translators, all of whom work (or worked) at Bush House (with translations also from Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish). Russian is particularly prominent in the issue; African and Asian languages are conspicuously absent. By contrast, MPT NS 17 (Mother Tongues, guest edited by Stephen Watts, 2001) is a compendium of work by poets who live in the UK and write in diverse "minority" languages, including African, Middle Eastern and Asian languages: some 30 in all. Here, too, many contributors are associated with the BBC.
The reminiscences in Poets at Bush House testify above all to an institutional culture of off-air literary and linguistic, poetic cross-fertilisation. Several poets describe poetry activity (reading, translating, writing; and much less often: reciting or listening) as a compensation, an escape from the tedium and/or stress of journalistic work. One gains the impression that, on the one hand, some poets were constantly meeting on the stairs and in nearby cafés, reading, encouraging and sometimes translating one another, sometimes (by no means usually) for broadcast; while on the other hand, some poets kept the nine to five (or night shifts) of their working life strictly apart from the poetry they did elsewhere, alone, as a private satisfaction. Yet the moment they made the poetry (original or translations) public, they in some sense joined the institutional culture of poetry-making and remaking.
Poets at Bush House has relatively little to say about poetry on air at the BBC. Only Helen Constantine (who became one of MPT's new editors in 2004) writes on the role of poetry within BBCWS programming now. She details what work is put on air by the English-language service, allowing a lament to be read between the lines: it was once so much more. She mentions Kate Howells and Amber Barnfather, responsible for the ongoing series "Poems by Post" (a section within "The Word"); "The Reading Group" (no longer running); the one-off "The Lyrics" (four contemporary UK poets discussed a "classic" poem and wrote a poem responding to it: webcasts available); poetry competitions (one in 2001-2002 generated 1400 entries); "The Art of Translating"; and "Working out the Words". Current English-language programmes with poetic content also include "Political Songs" and "Women Writers". As for the foreign language services, we have not begun to explore to what extent poetry forms part of the broadcast diet.
A project on poetry at BBCWS would need to explore both historically and in the present. Taking Poets at Bush House as a starting point, we will want to find out more about poetry on-air and off-air at BBCWS and allied services (Monitoring, etc), both in European and in extra-European languages, today and in the past.
If poetry on-air may have receded behind news and current affairs agendas - and we do not yet know if this is equally the case across all the language services - there seems little reason to think that the off-air culture is extinct.
To give just a couple of examples (provided by Stephen Watts): several Bengali journalists and editors at BBCWS are noted poets and poetry translators; likewise some working in Arabic (although one journalist interviewed by Marie Gillespie complained that the only Arabic poets who receive coverage nowadays are those who are caught up in political controversy - but perhaps, again, it was ever thus? - poetry is anything but unpolitical); and the Russian-language service continues to be a home to exilic writers. Hamid Ismailov, who heads the Central Asia and Caucasus Service, is a good example. He has published several volumes of poetry and prose in both Uzbek and Russian; his satirical novel The Railway appeared in English in 2006. He wrote it in the 1980s; was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1994 because of his "unacceptably democratic tendencies"; is completing a new novel called Comrade Islam;[1] was guest of honour at the Edinburgh Book Fair 2006.
Preliminary Plan of Action: We will meet and interview poet-journalists working in the full range of languages used at BBCWS, in order to build up a picture of the poetry culture(s) in and around the institution, on and off air. We will invite poet-journalists to write, in a personal capacity and/or as BBC representatives, about poetry on and off air in their professional and personal domains. In the light of the larger AHRC project's focus on questions of cross-diasporic contacts, we especially want to discover to what extent language-specific cultures interact, in particular in the practical form of poetry translation. Is English the sole or even the main lingua franca? In what ways is poetry a vehicle or vessel of cultural identities, or is poetry translation a vehicle of cross-cultural communication and cross-fertilisation? Where there is poetry, is it page-poetry or voice-poetry, or both? Canonical, or newly minted? What different kinds of poetry culture co-exist, or meet, and conflict, or mutually enrich, among individuals and groups of differing backgrounds, using different combinations of languages, in and around BBCWS?
We will also explore the archives. In particular, for Cheesman, the German Service (1939-1999) is of interest. Proceedings of a conference held at the Institute of Germanic Studies in 2002[2] provide a useful starting-point for an investigation of this service's poetic-political culture and its translational ties with other, language-specific cultures at BBCWS. Adel Guémar can investigate French and Arabic archives, and we hope to commission further researchers to retrace poetries in BBCWS's past, in/between other languages; by no means excluding English. Here John Goodby's expertise in Dylan Thomas and his peers, as well as in more recent English poetry, can be brought to bear.
We are naturally keen to collaborate if BBCWS is interested in feeding our research into programmes; and we aim to produce an edited volume, ideally including poetry as well as research papers - perhaps even a new issue of MPT?
[1] Marcus Dysch, "The Banished Novelist", Barnet and Potters Bar Times, 3 May 2006
[2] "Stimme der Wahrheit": German-language Broadcasting by the BBC, eds Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove. = Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 5. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2003.