Tuesday, April 29, 2025
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Eyes Wide Open: How Stanley Kubrick saw humanity

David Alexander
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Eyes Wide Open: How Stanley Kubrick saw humanity

Deep in idyllic Hertfordshire, in the last quarter of the last century, there lived an uncompromising genius. The director Stanley Kubrick was a recluse of sorts, who largely limited social interaction to phone calls. He didn’t have much time for socialising: he was, after all, a workaholic and a technophile, and a believer that only by combining these statuses could he produce great art. 

Many disagreed, and still do, when looking back at Kubrick’s not-so-prodigious output (five films in his last thirty years of work). For his critics, Kubrick’s love of private tech-tinkering was an impediment to the emotional effectiveness of his work. It led only to ever-more carefully artificial stories. Indeed, it trapped the exuberant dynamism of living in the exquisitely manicured cage of the camera-frame.

So say the critics, anyhow. But I disagree with them. I like Kubrick’s work not because it’s ‘real’ – the critics are right, it’s not. It possesses something better than realness, or at least more interesting. It distils the human experience to the fundamental impulses which compromise its core, and pushes past those shallow real-life influences which normally obscure these.

Take Barry Lyndon. Kubrick’s tale of a young man’s opportunistic rise and fall through the social ranks of the 1750s has been regularly attacked for alleged emotional asphyxiation. The pace is decidedly slow, the dialogue laconic, the settings florid and orderly. But there are serious passions boiling away under the corsets. There’s impulsive, starry-eyed adolescent love. The weaselly, scurrying will to survive, too, as Lyndon deserts the various armies he fights for. And then, finally, the fall; the inexorable spiral from overindulgence to destitution. Big, universal themes, woven into a single narrative, as in life. 

And if the faces of the characters don’t show all this emotion? Well that’s the whole idea. 18th century Europe provides a society painfully restrained enough, in its social manners and hierarchies, to smash against the raw passions of the human spirit, and barely keep them under the surface. In that tension lies the drama. 

Kubrick does a similar thing with The Shining, a tale of a winter caretaker and his family trapped in a cursed hotel. Again, the human condition is pared down to its essential, self-perpetuating impulses. Unlike in other horror films, love is central. And this resolute love between mother and son endures all that the Overlook Hotel can throw at it, whether lifts erupting with blood, blow-jobbing bear-dogs or Jack “Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny” Nicholson. 

Much attention has been paid to Nicholson’s possessed caretaker – predictably, given he’s the biggest star. But really he’s as much a narrative device as anything. It’s the appropriation of his tormented mind by the hotel that shows the hotel’s terrifying power. With that established, we can appreciate how monumental it is that his wife and child escape. How deep, and how resourceful, is their love.

Kubrick engaged in a similar task with his biggest ever film, and maybe his most famous. This time he highlights the endless durability of the human condition not by honing in, but by zooming out. In fact, the story of 2001: A Space Odyssey, such as it is, is nothing less than a story of humanity itself, from bone-smashing, tool-inventing apes, to cosmic star children, led into omniscience via abstract neon acid-trip. Alright, so maybe for something so silly, it’s all done a bit po-facedly. But po-faced was how Kubrick looked when he was having fun.

And the vast scale was necessary to make the point. In fact, it was the point: the specifics of 2001 don’t actually matter much. Where humanity is shown to be going isn’t really important, nor is the all-powerful force implied to be pulling us there (a humming, brooding black obelisk; if you haven’t seen the film, don’t worry, those of us who have don’t understand it either). 

The point for Kubrick, though, is that we humans never sit still, not for a moment. We’re continually dissatisfied by the immediate reality in which we live. So, we experiment and tinker and fiddle until EUREKA! And then we start again because what about that other thing, and maybe if we just… We are the forward-looking animal Kubrick seems to say. 

So, I don’t buy the idea that Kubrick was ‘anti-human’. I think that the artist’s detached private life has been allowed to colour views of his art. Surely, we like our creatives to be immersed in the world, soaking it up, then splurging it out onscreen with maximum vitality? We’re not so keen on them hovering pretentiously above it, like 2001’s space baby in its metaphysical amniotic sack.

I actually think, though, that Kubrick’s seclusion gave him an outsider’s clarity. All the intricacies of a messy social life could be chopped off, and the world reduced to the universal narratives Kubrick quietly identified in the endless feast of media he consumed at home. He was the great observer; a bearded, bespectacled HAL 9000, with a resolutely human heart. 

Lost in Translation

Lily Parmar
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Lost in Translation

In an age of globalised literature and artificial intelligence translation tools, to examine the function of literary translators is to question the substance of literature itself. Texts are not one dimensional. To render one piece of literature in a new language is to consider every word and combination of words within it as the deliberate intersection of a huge number of dimensions: context, style, tone, audible sounds, connotations, images, and the original kernel of information that the author wishes to convey.

In its most binary sense, in semiotics, the text is a meaningful unit or “sign” that combines a number of “signifiers” – here, the original words in the exact order written by the author – with the inherently ineffable “signified” – the concept or meaning set forth by the author using those words. Through “signifying” words in the original language, the author can communicate a “signified” meaning to the reader; the translator’s work thus begins with identifying and beginning to draw out this meaning beneath the words. Hence the original question of what makes the substance of literature: its literal meaning, that can be rendered word for word in another language? A story, image, or unit of information regardless of the style in which it is told? What feeling it generates in the reader? A marker or milestone in the culture in which it was written or a social stimulus which must be adapted to the culture in which it is read if it is to produce an equivalent reaction? As such, the translator cannot simply swap words and hope to retain a good amount of these; they must decide on a strategy and do their best to render whatever dimension(s) of the text they are deeming the most important, and they will endlessly decide, compromise, and ultimately compose their version as they make their way through the text. 

In this view, then, the essence of the text is not altogether in its words but in some inarticulable current of meaning that is held within them, one that somehow endures when it becomes necessary to prise away the original set of words written in a language and replace them with another. Friedrich Nietzche wrote (I believe in German) that ‘to use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.’ The translator’s job is not only one of writing but of perceiving – the literary translation is often the result of a life’s work, passion, and study, and has the resounding significance of opening the relationship between author and reader beyond the bounds of a single linguistic population. The translator takes on the enormous responsibility of rendering the author’s meaning and there is a kind of contract whereby the translator must do right by somebody: usually the author, sometimes (as may be the case in liberal translations, rewritings or adaptations) to their own authorial voice, and almost always to the reader in the target language. They are making them a whole new book! One could lightheartedly say that translators are often treated by general readership in the same way as parents by (ungrateful) children, that is, if the translation is “perfect”, we come away thinking what a fantastic book; if the translation is flawed we come away thinking what a terrible translation. But the situation is magnificently serious, including for non-fiction and traditionally “non-literary” texts: translators today have a direct hand in the tone and urgency conveyed in international research articles, news headlines, and government broadcasts surrounding the Covid-19 crisis, which influences the amounts of fear and hope that these generate, and consequently people’s behaviour. Translators tomorrow will play a crucial role in communicating how different leaders and populations behaved during these times, which will shape how the global population learns from itself and emerges into the future. And examples exist abound in the past. In July 1991 Hitoshi Igarashi, a literary scholar and the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, was murdered in his university office following a fatwa and bounty issued by the then-leaders of Iran against Rushdie and all those who played a role in the book’s publication. The onus on the translator is varied and huge, and their role is fundamental to the existence of an international readership. 

Consider the translation of a single word. If there is an equivalent word (in literal meaning) in the target language, the translator will likely lose a number of other dimensions of the original: cultural connotations, the association to similar sounding words, cadence, double meanings, and so on. The structure of each language is unique and so the transplantation of one word into another language pulls away the connections to other words and meanings encoded in a single word of the original text. As the translation takes shape, new connections are formed and the translation may retain much of the original’s sentiment as well as certain idiosyncrasies of its own language, but it is intrinsically not the same text as the first. Then consider a single sentence: the translator may tinker around to come up with a sentence that preserves as much of the literal meaning or that has an equivalent figurative meaning (such as a similar idiom in the target language) but which greatly differs in length or sound. Translating poetry is pandemonium! The preservation of images, register, sound, syllables, and rhyme are in competition with one another and the translator must prioritise as they see fit, according to what they believe would have been more important to the author and their own capacity to work in the language. The phenomenon only expands as we consider the entire text: the accurate translation of one word or one sentence is not necessarily conducive to the best translation of the work as a whole, and we see the dynamic between language and text – repeated words as motifs, different registers, images, (rhyme!) – as it disintegrates through translation. The understanding that the translator will need to creatively repair some of these fissures benefits the legacy of the author (that we do not consider the translation as precisely their work) and recognises the skill taken to create the translated text.

The case feels less momentous when the author of the text is alive at the time of translation. This dialogue between author and translator can then take place (as best it can and in some degree through translation, given that they will most often have different native languages) in real time and the author can have more of a say in how their work is delivered into another culture. Their literary, cultural, and commercial hopes for the translation can be articulated, and as such the translation could be seen more as an extension of their literary vision than when authors are no longer alive to oversee the job. The Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who himself has translated American texts into Japanese, elects for his translators to transpose cultural references into the target language, that is, to aim to structure the reader’s experience around associations that they already know. There is of course a great virtue to the author’s sovereignity over translation techniques: ‘When a literary world that I have created is transposed into another linguistic system,’ Murakami wrote of this, ‘I feel as if I have been able to dissociate me from myself, which gives me a good deal of peace.’ This “Murakami phenomenon” of translatability and a great deal of talent have led to the author’s work being translated into over 50 languages and reaching a hugely international readership, sure, but it is worth remembering that in some degree these are different books that are being read, and perhaps some singularity should always be reserved for the original Japanese version. Sometimes authors translate their own work, where the roles of the author and translation strategist, superimposed, sharpen our focus on the author’s original, pre-verbal, sentiment or tone. The bilingual Irish writer Samuel Beckett, translating his own play En attendant Godot (1952, Éditions de Minuit) into Waiting for Godot (1954, Grove Press), changed the temporal marker ‘depuis la morte de Voltaire’ (since the death of Voltaire, i.e. 1778) to ‘since the death of Bishop Berkeley’ (in 1753). Bishop Berkeley briefly became Samuel Johnson in a London edition and then returned to himself, the loss of accuracy in time being demonstrably less important to the author than the reader’s understanding that he means, essentially, “ages ago”. What agency! The author was alive (so Beckett had to abide by the author’s wishes), but Beckett was the author (so he could do as he liked with the text). 

When the author is no longer alive or is unknown, the responsibilities and nature of translation may differ greatly. When authors die or when copyrights to texts expire, often up to 70 years later, the text enters the public domain and the author naturally no longer exists as an authority in the process of creation of this translation, this translated version, of their work. Literary translators then occupy an important role in shaping, opening up – sometimes, modernising – the text’s legacy and enter a transtemporal dialogue with the author, asking how would you want me to write this? Do you like what I have done with what you meant? Even: is this what you would have wanted? The translation can often be greatly influenced by the translator’s “relationship” with the author: how they feel the words were intended to be read, by their study, in some cases politics, the input of families, perhaps, adjustments made necessary under censors or by untransferable conventions in the target language. The translation is the result of a series of compromises, yes, but also an artefact exemplifying the nature of both languages (what remains when the original text has been pushed through these holes; what holes were there in the first place?), and there is material that the translator has used to rebuild the text in the target language: in the words of Greek-American poet and translator Kimon Friar,

‘this is not a problem of finding the proper word, synonym, or paraphrase, but of ringing over an event, a point of view, a situation, a talisman or totem that is peculiar of one particular nation, tribe, or locale, and which cannot be found or fully understood anywhere else.’


The posthumous literary translation is then decidedly a version and to remember this is to do justice to the author, to the translator, and to our own understanding of a foreign text which can otherwise be so utterly and haphazardly shaped by the edition or translation that we picked up in Oxfam books. It is a wonderful thing: how much closer we get to understanding a language, perhaps an author, and certainly the heart of a text if we superimpose the nuances in different translations, all different studied versions and interpretations. Or we may wish to divorce the author and the text fully (‘The birth of the reader must always be ransomed by the death of the Author’) and likewise the translation from the translator, and so on, but even more so then we would see that the translation is not a shadow of the original but a relative and a version: that the essence of the literary text is not solely its history and its genesis but its future in what it can become in the hands of readers.

In any case, be wary of me. Most of the quotations I used in this article are translated, and perhaps consult the translator of the IKEA instruction leaflets for a less idealistic response.

In Conversation with Dame Harriet Walter

Isabella Colletta
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In Conversation with Dame Harriet Walter

I feel pretty self-assured in characterising Dame Harriet Walter as a “familiar favourite” of British drama. With a prolific tenure at the RSC in her earlier career, and numerous television and screen credits under her belt, she is a performer of enormous technical skill, yet also one keen to surprise. Pinning Harriet Walter down into one category, I learn, is an almost impossible task. The characters she most enjoys playing, and watching, she tells me over the phone, are those with ‘a bit of mystery so you don’t know what makes me tick and you don’t make a judgement about me because you don’t know me.’ We’re talking about the limitations older female actors face with the roles available to them in the latter stages of their career, something Walter has spoken about openly in the past. Whilst maintaining the pressure is important, ‘audience’s sensibility’ is changing, she argues, and for older actress’ there are a growing number of more rounded roles which ‘don’t have everyone go “Oh I see she’s the jealous bitch” or “she’s the crabby old school mistress”. Just inject a contradiction into it and something that makes you go “oh, maybe I was wrong”. That in itself is shifting the ground.’

However, Walter is keen for this conversation to include the broad range of older female actresses’ contending with these issues. ‘It would sound churlish if I were complaining about that because I’m having such great roles myself’ she muses. There’s a level of truth to this, she is currently starring in three critically acclaimed television shows: Killing Eve, Belgravia and The End. Her role as the eccentric Russian gymnast and assassin trainer Dasha in Killing Eve seems particularly refreshing to her. ‘I was sitting around in my silk and corsets filming Belgravia in Scotland and my agent called and said “How’s your Russian?”’ she recalls. Already an admirer of the show’s previous seasons, she speaks with palpable excitement as she remembers landing the mysteriously described role. ‘I just went into ecstasy’ she laughs. ‘Kind of just the ticket. I do the Russian rather over the top, but I’d been so sustained and prim in my corset I was rather enjoying just letting loose.’

She makes a memorable entrance into the show’s third season; after turning up as an uninvited guest to the wedding of Jodie Comer’s Villanelle, both characters engage in prolonged and supremely choreographed brawl. The chaotic ruckus which seemingly follows Dasha everywhere she goes is a world away from her performance as the sharply austere Countess Brockenhurst in Belgravia. Yet Walter finds a strong appeal in her character’s sophisticated but indifferent persona, Dasha is someone who ‘doesn’t give a toss what people think of her’ she tells me. ‘She’s not conforming to anything she’s just living in Barcelona as this absolute one off wearing crazy clothes. You don’t sense that she’s part of a community or has any friends she goes to have cups of tea with, she alienates everyone around her and so I felt that I could behave as badly and as extravagantly as I liked.’

Walter chuckles frequently as we talk about Dasha. She seems to hold a general fondness for her more rebellious and misbehaving characters, the “bad girls” of her repertoire. Another darkly comic role she’s currently playing is Edie Henley in Sky Atlantic’s drama-comedy The End, who is the epitome of the ‘badly behaved granny’ as Walter describes. Much of the charm and fun of Dasha and Edie lies in the audience’s inability to completely know these characters, they are constantly full of surprises. In this way they are not completely dissimilar from Walter herself, who went down what was then a more unconventional route in her pursuit of a career in acting. Born in 1950 to the family who founded the Times newspaper, she turned down an offer from Oxford to study languages, instead deciding to pursue acting. ‘I was quite good academically and I knew that’s what my grandfather in particular wanted for me’ she considers, when I ask her about her initial steps into performance. As the niece of acclaimed actor Sir Christopher Lee, it wasn’t a completely alien world to her, yet to make the decision to pursue this particular path was still a rebellious one. She recalls that her grandfather in particular ‘hated the idea of me being an actor, he was very opposed to it and just thought of it as a waste of a brain. And luckily… I think my father felt a bit rebellious towards his own father and decided to help me.’ 

She was turned down by drama schools five times before she eventually won a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. ‘I’ve never regretted it really’, for her it’s a job in which the challenges and excitements are not always apparent to the outside world: ‘quite often you have to research a period of history or learn a lot about one particular discipline for the job, it’s very eclectic. It’s not years of studying one field, which of course that’s a wonderful thing, I just don’t think I was cut out for that.’

It is in theatre in which Harriet Walters early career began to flourish, and she won critical acclaim in her numerous performances with the RSC. She first joined the company for its performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1979, and went on to star in the company’s productions of All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and Twelfth Night to name a handful. Walter’s experiences in working with Shakespeare’s plays, however, are far from conventional. Between 2012 and 2016, she took on a number of Shakespeare’s roles written for men, starring alongside all-female casts in productions which were intended to completely disrupt how these classical texts were thought of. They are invigorating, highly necessary performances, and since she had worked on so many of Shakespeare’s plays before with the RSC, I questioned if it was something she’d felt an urge to do for a long time.

She had in fact, she tells me, been working with texts such as Julius Caesar and The Tempest and tackling their male roles for some time, if not in the public eye. She recalls the workshops she did with founding member of the RSC, John Barton, in which she would take on Shakespeare’s men to dissect the language of male characters’ speeches and what it revealed. Through these master classes, she identifies, Shakespeare’s male heroes were not so far removed from the heroines she performed professionally. There was ‘particularly one point when I was doing Hamlet, and I thought what is so clear is that this is a human being speaking. The gender, for the most part, is irrelevant.’ Her performances in all female productions of male dominated plays and tackling roles such as Brutus by offering audience’s a new perspective was a ‘great’ opportunity for changing how we think about Shakespeare ‘because it acknowledges that women can think those things and be part of those decisions.’ For Walter personally, it was an opportunity to perform the language she had so much knowledge of, ‘a lifetime really, thirty something years in speaking Shakespeare’s verse’ and experience it in a unique way. 

In a previous interview, she acknowledged that performing the role of Prospero brought her ‘closer to myself than I have ever been’. Questioning Walter on this, she explains the openness and vulnerability the performance relied upon, ‘we were wearing very basic t-shirts and tracksuit bottoms, so we didn’t have a lot of trappings and were really quite raw and naked in a way.’ Being left with the ‘sense of the language’ to embody the struggle with admitting ‘it’s time to bow out it’s not my go any longer’. This closeness with a character and the language of a performance is an exception, and Walter recalls previous statements that she has not identified with a lot of the characters she’s played. When addressing functional or ‘literal’ parts, there remains an element of separation, ‘you think “this isn’t my world, I don’t belong here, I’m pretending”.’ 

When looking over Harriet Walter’s career, it is clear that she has played her fair share of austere and authoritative roles, and in performances from Sense and Sensibility to The Crown she captures a convincing and commanding sternness. I ask if this is a character trait she particularly enjoys delving into ‘I’ve always felt very at odds with those characters unless they’re written humorously,’ she reveals. ‘I find them quite boring to play’. Acting is still often about looks, she tells me, and in many cases the roles she receives and the process of casting can often be visually driven. ‘I’m not pretending that looks don’t come into it, and I think I probably look naturally in repose. I don’t look like anybody’s cuddly granny so I come out as the stern granny.’ Recognising “the real Harriet Walter” in her past performances would be a difficult endeavour, yet this is something she seems to relish. It’s with a slight coyness that she admits ‘I very rarely have played anything terribly close to who I am. So you’ve got to keep guessing as to what I’m really like because I’m not really like any of those people.’

There is frequently a specific curiosity between the actor and their method or the means by which they take on the entire being of another person as a part of their everyday life. With her classical background and formative training, I’m curious if this is a part of how Walter constructs her performances. ‘I’m not a great one for “process’” in terms of I always do this first’ she considers slowly. With each individual role comes different requirements, and she reflects that part of the enjoyment of getting to grips with a character is the variety it offers. ‘I kind of capitalise on a bit of chaos’ she tells me, ‘it’s very much horses for courses, and I let my instincts tell me what it is I most need to do’. She speaks about the various rehearsal processes she undertakes for roles with openness, for Walter it’s a system of working with those around you, being receptive to their ideas but also knowing when to stand your ground, knowing when your interpretation should not be shrugged off. I suggest that her descriptions of the characters she’s played have sounded quite emotive, from an outsider’s perspective it seems like a process of connection. This is something she possesses with an almost instinctive quality, ‘I never grew out of that,’ she responds. ‘That kind of fantasising of looking at a portrait in a gallery of a woman in 1500-and-something, and going “what can I learn from that face, what was she thinking”’. 

Acting invokes a kind of resistant curiosity in the world, and is something Walter has always been ‘fairly obsessed with’. She considers that interest in people a foundational part of her person, and she paints herself as ‘very nosy, very inquisitive, wanting to live lots of different lives not just my own.’ 

Walter does not come off as a closed-off person, but I notice that this is one of the few times she actively describes herself in our conversation, rather than pushing herself away from the character traits which identify many of her performances. Having performed such a wide range of characters throughout her career, it’s difficult to define her as an actor, she eludes categorisation. However this, I feel, is just how she likes it. As she mentioned to me earlier in our conversation, there is a thrill in not fully revealing ‘what makes me tick’.

Readers questions:

“Does big budget TV like Killing Eve allow you to build character arcs more than traditional film?” – Milly Hitching

Yes, is the answer. Particularly there’s more range for non-central characters in a long running series. You can keep a lot of characters plots going at the same time, as per Killing Eve you’ve got four main characters who are ongoing and develop and take different strands of the plot. Whereas in a two hour movie, it’s mainly got to focus on the central story and sub plots don’t get such a look-in, so characters surrounding the main character there’s not time to explore them as much as an actor would like.

A Love Letter to Eurovision

Lizzie Harvey
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A Love Letter to Eurovision

I first discovered Eurovision in 2015. Idly flicking through the TV channels one fateful night, I stumbled onto the largest, glitteriest, and most confusing music competition on Earth. I was transfixed. In the space of four hours, I’d seen over 25 performances (of wildly varying quality), picked my favourites, and then become outraged when the points when to the wrong countries; Germany and Austria even received the dreaded nil points. By the end of the night, Sweden’s Måns Zelmerlöw was pronounced the winner and, as he gave his victory performance alongside a digital cartoon boy, I was left to try and make some sense of the events that had just unfolded. Over the following years, my love for Eurovision only grew, to the confusion of many of my friends.  

Created in 1956 to unite a continent destroyed by war, the Eurovision Song Contest has become a staple of European television. Every May, the contest is broadcast live to around 180 million people in over 50 countries around the globe, with its definition of ‘Europe’ expanded to include Israel and Australia. It has made household names of winners like ABBA and Katrina and the Waves and household memes out of a few others – I’m thinking in particular of Moldova’s epic sax guy and the Ukrainian drag queen Verka Serduchka, famed for her tinfoil outfit and nonsensical song ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’ (banger). The competition is a celebration of music, culture and togetherness like no other, which is why I was particularly devastated when the 2020 contest was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Set to be held in Rotterdam, this year’s slogan was, ironically, ‘Open Up’. With the European Broadcasting Union airing an alternative show on Saturday 16th May, now is the perfect time for me to sit down and explain my love for the show, and maybe convince a few people to give it a watch at the same time. Buckle up.

When most Brits think of Eurovision, they probably picture a lot of tone-deaf singers in a lot of glittery costumes with a lot of politically motivated voting. During my lifetime, the UK has come last twice as often as it has placed in the top five – rather deservedly, I may add. But to think that it’s impossible to enjoy Eurovision when your country doesn’t win is missing the point. Eurovision is undoubtably the most entertaining thing on TV. 

Each year, around 40 songs in a huge variety of genres and languages are performed, often with incredibly inventive and novel staging. Eurovision is full of unique moments. One minute you’ll be hearing a French pop refrain protesting the treatment of refugees, the next a Romanian couple will attempt to mix yodelling with rap, then the Norwegian entry will interrupt their pop song with some guttural joik music performed by a local politician. While not every song quite finds their mark (*cough*, ballads, *cough*), the sheer, incomprehensible variety means there is always something for everyone. Indeed, some songs are actually very good; ABBA won in 1974 with ‘Waterloo’ and other winning entries have appeared in the charts, such as ‘Fly on the Wings of Love’ (Denmark, 2000) and ‘Euphoria’ (Sweden, 2012).

 These songs can often give a glimpse into their country’s history and heritage. Take, for example, Poland’s infamous 2014 entry that made men across the continent, ahem, interested in the country, or the 2016 winning entry which explored the impacts of the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944. Combined with Graham Norton’s hilariously deadpan commentary and the ‘incidents’ that characterise a live show, the contest a spectacle to behold. And that’s putting it mildly.

It may sound cheesy, but Eurovision has helped to unite Europe in a way that politics couldn’t. It has created a common culture and passion in its millions of viewers, facilitating conversations and friendships between people of different nationalities and backgrounds. The songs expose the audience to a variety of languages and traditions and the video ‘postcards’ that precede each song show off the host country’s beauty – much to the delight of their tourist board.

I could list a hundred and one more reasons why I love Eurovision. I have hardly touched on its representation of the LGBTQ+ community, the dramatic costume changes mid-song, or the simultaneously absurd and deadly-serious intensity of the voting. Eurovision has allowed me to make friends from across the world and given me the perfect excuse to throw a party every May. All it has cost me is my taste in music. 

 Unfortunately, the full competition has been cancelled for this year, but the EBU and the BBC are running a range of broadcasts on the evening of Saturday the 16th. If you think you might like to see what all the fuss is about, check out some of the following, or watch a show from a previous year on Eurovision’s YouTube channel. 

Eurovision: Come Together, 6:30pm GMT+1, BBC One / Eurovision: Europe Shine A Light, 8pm GMT+1, BBC One / The A-Z of Eurovision, 10pm GMT+1, BBC Two 

Laurence and Olivia

Edward McLaren
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Laurence and Olivia

Her feelings were in constant melancholy. When that Thursday had accumulated into a sunset, she was unmoved. The dwindling clouds did not produce in her the wonder of a new-born, but reminded her that time erases. Turning to her husband, whose boulder-like face had seemed closed for hours, she saw him wide-eyed. Some element of that fatal sky had forced him to spread his features. In wonder, his saw mouth had dropped open into a smile. It was not for pain. There was no blood starting from the edge of his bottom lip. Since she noticed nothing glorious before his sight, she could not tell if his reaction was rational. She wondered if perhaps her own irrationality had prevented her from seeing something, or appreciating what she had already seen. She looked at the sun and felt her lids stiffen. It was a large, red porthole in the sky and the cirrus flaked alongside it like a shoal of fish. It would sink, she thought, and drown in the night. Unless her husband meant to worship a representation of death, she could not understand him. 

Celestial objects were nebulous things to behold. One had to place her opinion on top of them in order to like them, fabricating a mirror out of their various substances. She already had a mirror inside the cottage, but she was too wrinkled to enjoy looking in it. She said to herself ‘People must look at the sky because their reflections are no longer beautiful’, but this did not sound convincing any more. Traces of dampness lingered in the air from the rain that morning. The scent of watery leaves on the patio was apathetic to her scepticism. It astonished her husband in combination with everything else.  

She would not talk to him about it. For her, the rare instance of the day worth commending was the silence that had remained between them over most of its course. She was convinced she loved her husband, but sometimes she desired to be reminded that her consciousness existed by itself. With Laurence, the necessaries of conversation were never enough. He did not want to grunt when he poured her tea, but complement the variety of perfume she had used. He did not want to cough and say pardon, but comfort her that his indigestion was little cause for her concern or worry. He did not want to talk of pointless things, but speak on the subjects of architecture and politics which she had endeared to teach him from the beginning of their marriage. He had done so well, and she did not know what she could return him in exchange. Quietness absolved this expectation of hers. Without having heard his loving comments she felt no obligation to deliver her thanks, which always felt arduous or guilty.

As a result, her imagination became more available, as if the noise that did not come out of her mouth was saved in its primordial form within her mind. Many times after waking, she had closed her eyes and studied the numerous shapes that were created behind them from large blotches of darkness; the same material, she supposed, of which her words were made. Now, before the indifferent sun, she repeated this task again, reorganising the moulds of possible flirtations and complaints to produce certain fond projections within the theatre of her head. A sculpture of twigs and tracing paper that she had structured in her ninth year solidified into the bench on which she had grieved during her thirteenth. The transition was immediate and reasonable. It was justified by the figure of a horse: the animal that she had wanted as a toddler, received as a girl, and lost as a teenager in the suddenness of a lightning storm. 

When this explanation manifested on the stage, so did a heavy fog that promised thunder. It was as tall as the roof of her mind. She half-expected it to leak into the material cosmos outside when it reformed itself into the same gold ring that she now wore, although in a form that glistened instead of rusted. The original was bound tight. It seemed like it would totally restrict the joint on the wearer’s finger. She could not believe that she had accepted the thing during the wedding that proceeded her education. She felt the older, battered object on her own bony digit and considered how much it had joined with her. It was no more a piece of jewellery than a knuckle, and she preferred it that way. The ring on the stage was virginal in comparison. It had arrived to her at a young age when she denied new experiences, and it affirmed that denial despite the change it signified. 

Now, she revoked the colour of the lightning. The ring was transfigured into the pallid whistle which Laurence had used once that day to call his dog. She knew he bought it the day before but, since he always hid it, she could not work out the precise hour. It might have just appeared to him, like the object of a curse. Its nozzle sloped like a mallard’s bill and the metal at the back dropped down like the top of a neck. To her, it resembled the severed head of a bird. She could not tell if that was significant, yet the whistle in her mind had changed into it. The whistle was the splintered cranium of an old iron duck. She knew it was significant, she was just uncomfortable. Laurence did not deserve the pain of having it. 

She recalled the set of a dry and sandy January, where he first described himself as a singer. He had no interest in a musical career, but he liked to mention his hobby in a professional manner because it gave him a wild sense of confidence. He said on that same date that he liked wildness. Anything untamed pleased him, especially the improvisations of a runaway tongue. He told her the Swiss rhymes he learned on a boyhood trip. He could talk and sing and whistle without interruption for impressive periods of time. He always preferred to exasperate himself than remain placid, and he always hated to rely on other people and other things. He only got the whistle  recently, when he got bronchitis. 

He had left the hospital two nights ago, grinning like a soldier who had lived. He had never before felt well after feeling so terribly ill. Till dawn, he snored in his sleep and when she complained at breakfast he laughed. ‘My body is celebrating.’ he said, before lowering his cutlery to the table. His grin became uncertain. His feet shuffled. Then, he chewed down on his lips, not to withhold one laugh too many, but because laughing had strained him. He was still recovering, it seemed, and he would have to refrain from using his voice if he desired to keep it. He refused to lie down and he demanded to go on the walk they had planned after the meal. She refused, and so he went alone. He went into town with their collie and he came back scarred on the mouth, having grinded his teeth and lips trying to hold back from coughing. It was at dinner she noticed the string hanging around his neck. He told her it was the Cross.

She did not have to ask him much else to discover it was a reluctant purchase. When she knew that, she guessed it was something to make the dog obey him, now that he could not befriend it with his bird-like call. This was reason enough for her to plunder through his coat before he got up the next morning. She seized the string from the breast pocket and pulled it out, learning that he had bought a whistle, not a dog-whistle, and must have been trying it all his walk home to the failed comprehension of the animal with him. For pride, she guessed, he had not queried for the help of the shopkeeper, and now he was suffering for it. 

Still, he refused to be rid of it in the days following, just as he refused to lie down. His pace was as ecstatic as his blow, whether contending the low and airless flats or the high and windy cliffs. So, his throat grew more terrible than both. He defied the world to take away his sense of humour after so long staying in a ward. She told him he would lose his speech if he continued like that. He called her a constant nanny, never allowing him to do as he pleased. He always preferred to exasperate himself than remain placid and defensive and helpless. To him, the whistle had stolen part of his voice, so it might as well have stolen all of it. By Wednesday evening, he struggled to read the headlines.

In the theatre, the whistle dropped and merged with the whispers he had not had the chance to press against her ears. Together they became a murky water, then the blackness that was the interior of her eyelids, then something that dripped beyond them. Olivia opened her eyes and saw that she was crying. They only fell like an involuntary sweat, but they were tears all the same. 

She gaped at the sun like she did before, trying to mimic Laurence’s outer features in such a way as to guarantee the achievement of the same inner conviction. There was the sun again, incompetent and red. If it were a pimple, she should have pierced it. If it were a tangerine, she should have tasted it. If it was of blood, surely she should have heard it drip by now. Merely the pattering of the damp leaves was summoned, and not by a fay or sprite, but the staggering of Laurence’s feet. She understood the sun was a great, garish object that hurt her eyes and from this she could tell that her mind had circled back on itself.

Maybe the roundness of the sun was wonderful because it generated her wheel of remembrances. But the theatre stage she had imagined was square and she knew that she had more frequently drifted into pleasing and shocking sights there on an earlier occasion. Why, when they were walking on the cliff that morning, she had imagined a peacock spreading its wings in the pews. She had enjoyed regarding it better than the spree of unfixed emanations she had just conjured up. 

The paving stones of her back garden were not sublime for thinking. Laurence had laid them some seven years ago and they were only now in use. He looked about as breathless as he did when he first set them down, and back then the sun was shining brightly. Intransigent, his smile remained open, although it could not have improved his breathing. She finally decided to query him about it. 

‘Why does it amaze you into a grin?’ she said. He croaked, turned a small way and wiped his cheeks. ‘Why?’ She approached him nearer.

‘Is it important?’ he said. ‘You were grinning too.’ He coughed twice, but it was hard to tell if he was signalling the fact that he had few words left. 

Olivia felt her mouth to find it was a grimace. ‘When did I stop?’  

He sighed. ‘When you closed your eyes. It’s a pretty sunset, but it hurts to look at it after a while.’

‘After a while. . .’ She paused to scour the heavens for commiseration and murmured to discover they were as they ever had been. Laurence adjusted her coat for her, tutted affectionately and wiped her eyes. He made a sign to go in, but she told him no. She could not believe that a revelation had passed her by.

Ennis and Marie

Edward McLaren
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Ennis and Marie

Ennis reduced me from the thing I was,
Rounded and massive friend of crazed Marie,
And lifted me and placed me in his palm
As I were only of a sand-grain’s size.

He was a concubine to self-respect
And only loved by sympathy: a desert.

I was with Marie before the sand had fell
Trying to harbour me within a dune,
For she would broaden with unhomeliness
Till Ennis had not size to gather me.   

She was a force on several continents
That I, lone moon, controlled: a wild sea.

THE IDEA OF LAND

Edward McLaren
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THE IDEA OF LAND

Of the firm landscape
Men see much
But hold little for sure

What they learn is grown
Before work
Gathers them into a field

Each one admires
A settling
In place, and never going

From the land, all know
There comes not
A house, a room, a pillow

No tractor forms,
Foliaged
With rust, from the earth alone

No post-box rises
From sheathed leaves
Like a new, humble flower

No telephone poles
Mark a road
Back to where all life started

THE IDEA OF HEAVEN

Edward McLaren
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THE IDEA OF HEAVEN

Heaven must be
That old dream
Of my garden, but lasting

When I wake, the leaves
Seem to shred
In the wind like manuscripts

The pollinated
Jungleland
Becomes a sodden ivy

And bouldered ruins
Shrink to squares
In patios that are quite brown

If those sights lasted
If there was
No alarm to disturb

Me, I would see a
Cosmic light
Projected through the woodland

Like a patch of
Certainty
Through the coils of my own brain

Review: Laura Marling’s ‘Song For Our Daughter’

Florine Lips
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Review: Laura Marling’s ‘Song For Our Daughter’

Laura Marling’s seventh album, Song For Our Daughter, was scheduled for release later this year. But, like many other artists and entertainers, the likes of Dua Lipa included, she chose to drop it early last month in the hope of providing entertainment for her homebound fans. In a statement accompanying the album’s release, she wrote: “it’s strange to watch the façade of our daily lives dissolve away, leaving only the essentials; those we love and our worry for them.” Her album, she says, is “stripped of everything that modernity and ownership does to it”, and is “essentially a piece of me”. “I’d like for you to have it. I’d like for you, perhaps, to hear a strange story about the fragmentary, nonsensical experience of trauma and an enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society.”

It is a quietly powerful album, with moments of softness interspersed with more upbeat folk-rock. Her lyrics are introspective and wise, and, set against her characteristically clear vocals, make you feel like you’re being offered advice by an old-soul kind of sister or friend. Building from 2017’s Semper Femina, the title of which alludes to Virgil, Marling explores femininity in all its facets, this time directing her wisdom to an imagined daughter, a figure she describes as ‘The Girl’. It is this universalized listener that she feels she can now guide through life, or, as she describes it, “the chaos of living”. Exactly as she says, the album is like a ‘whisper’ – gentle, brooding snippets of advice that drift into your consciousness through Marling’s clear and soulful voice.

The opening track, ‘Alexandra’, sets the tone – it’s a reference to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving’, which ends with the lines: ‘say goodbye to Alexandra leaving, then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.’ In Marling’s song, she’s wondering “what became of Alexandra? Did she make it through?” It is a strong opener, one of the most powerful songs on the album. Marling was inspired to write it because, as she says, “there’re no suggestion that [Alexandra] has an interior life that’s anything more than being alluring.” So, she wonders “what did Alexandra know?” The urgency of this song implies her drive to delve more deeply into interiority, harking back to the lyrics of her own musical influences and (possibly) drawing upon a recently-acquired Masters degree in Psychoanalysis to wonder at the other side of the story. She probes into Alexandra’s inner life, drawing our attention to what the male perspective in the original song simply cannot tell us.

The quieter songs struck me the most, particularly ‘Blow by Blow’, the only piano-track on the album. It is gentle and sad, more ballad-like, with yearning lyrics like “knowing thunder gives away what lightning tries to hide”, and “sometimes the hardest thing to learn is what you get from what you lose.” The song has elicited comparison to ‘River’ on Joni Mitchell’s Blue: a momentary change in medium to convey something softer and more immediately reflective. Marling is often compared to Mitchell, with her impossibly wise lyrics, open-tuned guitar, light and airy vocal lifts – such as in the second track, ‘Held Down’– and in this album she perhaps most explicitly makes clear her musical influences. The last track on the album, ‘For You’, recorded together with her partner, who plays the electric guitar riff, is inspired by Paul McCartney’s solo work, particularly his song ‘Jenny Wren’ from the 2005 album Chaos and Creation in The Backyard. In other songs, such as the more upbeat, percussive ‘Strange Girl’, her tone resembles that of Bob Dylan. Musical progenitors aside, however, the album is intrinsically Marling – perceptive and nuanced lyrics, folk-rock, a beautifully breezy voice.

As she says, the album is stripped back to its essentials, most clearly embodied by songs like ‘Fortune’, with its beautiful, open-tuned picking. It is soft and steady, profoundly wise, with moments of interspersed lightness and soulfulness that fully display the agility of her voice. Marling has recently been featured in an episode of ‘Song Exploder’, the podcast in which musicians take apart one of their songs, where she talks about being inspired by Maya Angelou’s Letter to My Daughter to re-examine her own experiences as a young woman and seek out a similar, fictionalized ‘daughter’ figure as a way to shape them. It is a great accompaniment to the album, for those of us who can’t get enough of it. And, if you’re inspired to attempt some playing yourself, I can recommend her ‘Isolation Guitar Tutorials’ series on Instagram, where she takes you through everything you need to know about the tuning, strumming patterns and chord progressions of her songs.

On the relation between Autumn and Spring

Edward McLaren
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On the relation between Autumn and Spring

The days of Spring are Autumn’s accolade
For that it can enjoy them, unadorned
With the cloak of sparrows or with the skirt of maize,
Preserving each in a frame upon a wall.

There they do hang and glow, like David’s coat
Had all its glory lasted till the age
Its wearer looked a shrivelled rag himself,
Unknit of fabric worthy young man’s strain.

Among the season’s other furniture
Of darkened leaves and dampened valley grass,
Like ghosts themselves, those ancient clothes remain
And beam remembrance, when they once were worn.

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