Author: podmeister

(Nearly) two hundred years of the Old Vic

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The Old Vic first opened its doors in May 1818. Back then, building a new theatre south of the river was a commercially risky venture, and the Royal Coburg Theatre (as it was originally known) was only made viable by the recent construction of Waterloo Bridge. The first night programme included a melodrama, a pantomime and a harlequinade. Outside, Waterloo Road was unpaved and only half-completed, Waterloo station was still thirty years in the future. The approach to the theatre was across a badly lit bridge and then through Lambeth Marsh and theatre-goers worried about falling prey to thieves… Terry Coleman’s fascinating history of the Old Vic covers all of the astonishing ups and downs in the theatre’s history from opening night via Lilian Baylis and the Olivier era as first home to the National, to Kevin Spacey and beyond. I was lucky enough to get the chance to talk to him about it in this interview recorded on location in the circle bar last month for the Faber podcast. And here is an interview …

Conversations with translators (II): Rosamund Bartlett on Anna Karenina

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For this, the second in a series of Conversations with Translators (following my interview with Oliver Ready on Crime and Punishment from earlier this year), we stick with the Russians and turn to a new version of Anna Karenina produced by Rosamund Bartlett for Oxford University Press. This was in fact my third visit to see Rosamund – we met previously to talk about her Chekhov translations, About Love and other stories, which is published in Oxford World’s Classics and again in 2010 when her acclaimed biography of Tolstoy came out. Of this life, A.N. Wilson (himself one of Tolstoy’s biographers) wrote: “The extraordinary character of the giant is captured better by Bartlett than by any previous biographer” and former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams  – who is also a Russianist and translator – chose it as one of his books of the year and called it “superbly readable”. You can hear my interview with Rosamund about the biography here. In this new interview (click on the Soundcloud player above to listen), we talk about …

Sunny Brain, Rainy Brain – the science of optimism

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“The core components of optimism surprisingly don’t really have too much to do with positive thinking at all. One of the major components actually is a sense of control; what psychologists have found is that optimists are people who have a sense that they’re in control of their own destiny […] there are lots of experiments demonstrating that that’s one of the reasons why optimism is so beneficial, and in fact even some experiments have shown that sometimes that sense of control is an illusion, but nevertheless, even though it’s an illusion, it still has a bit of a benefit.” Elaine Fox is professor of cognitive and affective psychology at the University of Oxford. In this interview (recorded in summer 2012, when Elaine was still at the University of Essex) she talks about her book, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: The New Science of Optimism and Pessimism, in which she explores such questions as: how does having an optimistic or a pessimistic outlook affect the successes and failures in our lives? How do small biases to …

Uncivil War: the Israel-Palestinian Conflict and the Jewish Community

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  “For Jews, Israel goes very close to the heart, whether you’re a Jewish supporter of Israel or you’re a Jewish critic of Israel and of Zionism, it’s very hard to be indifferent about it. In fact, it would be very odd if most Jews were indifferent about Israel because this is the major project of the modern Jewish people. […] The author Joel Schalit says in his book Israel vs. Utopia that it isn’t just an issue for Israel and the Palestinians; it’s really become the world’s conflict. Everyone seems to have a stake in it, whether they are Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, whatever. It’s something that it’s very difficult generally to be indifferent about, which has its positives and negatives, but I think it’s mainly negatives…” This podcast features an interview with sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris about his new book, Uncivil War: The Israel Conflict in the Jewish Community. This book sets out not only to examine the heated, often vitriolic, even poisonous nature of that debate and explore how it has come …

Anton Chekhov: About Love and other stories (an Oxford World’s Classics audio guide)

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Without quite planning it, Podularity seems to have been having a bit of a Russian season of late, so I thought it would be worth re-presenting this audio guide which OUP commissioned me to produce a couple of years ago with Rosamund Bartlett, translator of Chekhov’s short stories (and also Anna Karenina (forthcoming, 2014)). Here’s a link to all the OWC audio guides. “Seventeen peerless examples of how much life you can put into a few pages of fiction if you have Chekhov’s economical mind, his eyes and ears, his feel for comedy and his sense of humanity. Chekhov is better known for his plays. But these are small masterpieces of their own, in a revelatory new translation.” – The Economist Click on the links below to hear Rosamund Bartlett, who edited and translated the stories in the collection, About Love, introduce Chekhov and his work and read from her translations. Who was Anton Chekhov? Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) came from an unlikely background for a future literary celebrity. Unlike most of his fellow writers, he …

Conversations with Translators (I): Oliver Ready on Crime and Punishment

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I visited Oliver Ready recently at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he is a research fellow in Russian society and culture, to hear about his five-year engagement with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics, 2014): what persuaded him to take the project on? how did he limber up for it? and why – unusually – did he write his version out longhand rather than work on a computer? Below, there is a short extract from our conversation: Oliver Ready: Something Russians talk a lot about in translation is the idea of a tuning fork when you’re setting out on a translation – ‘kamerton’ in Russian – and like an actor trying to get into the role you read something which isn’t a precise model, but which moves your linguistic resources in a particular direction and starts you thinking in particular rhythms. [Translating Crime and Punishment] was experimental for me because I’d never translated a classic before and the first question people ask is ‘What are you doing? Are you going to write in the archaic …

Rebecca Mead on The Road to Middlemarch

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Rebecca Mead is an English-born, Brooklyn-based, New Yorker staff writer. I met her recently when she visited Toppings bookshop in Bath to talk about her new book The Road to Middlemarch. Rebecca’s book explores her fascination with George Eliot’s great novel, which started when she first encountered it at the age of seventeen, and has accompanied her through her life, growing, changing, developing, revealing new aspects, as Rebecca’s own life and experience have changed. ‘Reading [Middlemarch]’, she writes, ‘does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us as much as we understand them, or even more. […] This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance. It might lead us back to the library in mid life, looking for something that eluded us before.’ Rather than a work of literary criticism, the book is a blend of biography, memoir, travel, and reflection that defies easy classification. Here’s a …

Catriona Kelly St Petersburg interview – part II

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I don’t want to normalize it completely, but I think Britain has many of the same problems as Russia actually: mass alcoholism – there’s plenty of that – a governing elite that doesn’t really give a toss for anybody, doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of what’s going on, what happens when you administer cuts at the top level and so on. And instead we sit round and point the finger at them… In this concluding part of my interview with Catriona Kelly about her recent book, St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, we talk about the shadow cast by the Blockade over the post-war life of the city; getting by under communism; adapting to life post-Communism; and Catriona’s own experience of becoming a part-time resident of the city – including a visit to a builder’s merchant on its outskirts.

Catriona Kelly on shadows of St Petersburg’s past

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The present and the past are intertwined and it doesn’t matter if what people remember about the past isn’t true – it’s got significance for them now. I’m going between lots of different layers, because that’s what people do in their conversation. My guest in this programme is Catriona Kelly, who is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford. Catriona appeared in one of the very first editions of the programme in early 2008, when we talked about her monumental history of childhood in twentieth-century Russia, Children’s World. That interview is still available here. I visited Catriona in Oxford last month to talk to her about her latest book, published in January by Yale University Press. St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past presents a multi-faceted portrait of a great city that has undergone decades of transformation since the late 1950s and examines how layers of shared memories of the past have left their mark on the present. What interests Catriona is less the official memory enshrined in St Petersburg’s monuments and museums, but rather memories …

Historical novelist Maria McCann on Ace, King, Knave

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[An] exuberant revivification of grave robbers and gamblers, hucksters and whores in 18th-century London: like Hogarth sprung to life. – Hilary Mantel, Books of the Year 2013, Observer This is my second interview with Maria McCann – I first interviewed her back in 2010 about her previous novel, The Wilding, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. That novel was set during the Restoration in 1672. For her new book, Ace, King, Knave, Maria has moved forward almost a century to the Georgian England of the mid-1760s. The novel is the tale of two young women: Sophia, born into the Somerset aristocracy, and Betsy-Ann, the daughter of travelling fair people, and their relationship with the same man, though they each know him under a different name. To Sophia, he is Mr Zedland, heir to an estate in Essex with an elegant townhouse in London. The man Betsy-Ann knows as Ned, however, comes from a much more disreputable background. The Georgian capital is a world where everyone, whether highborn or low, is looking for the Great …