Technology | 2009.05.23
BBC plans to send poet to Afghanistan
Honouring the works of Owen and Sassoon, the BBC will send Simon Armitage, who was tipped for the poet laureate\'s job, to Helmand province to capture the lives of British troops in conflict
When Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon told of life in first world war trenches, technology did not allow soldiers to kill at long range at the press of a button and dispatches from the French battlefields took days to reach home.
As the nature of warfare has changed, so have communications, but a BBC team is hoping to revive the British tradition of war poetry by taking one of the country\'s leading poets to Afghanistan.
The programme-makers plan to film Simon Armitage\'s response to frontline operations around Helmand province. While a handful of visual artists have worked in the theatre of war since fighting began in October 2001, Armitage will be the first poet to be granted access.
The Yorkshire writer, who was heavily tipped for the post of poet laureate that went to Carol Ann Duffy this month, already has an impressive track record of work reflecting the impact of war. So far Armitage\'s writing has concentrated on the trauma of combatants who have returned to pick up the threads of their lives in Britain. The award-winning poet believes that the current wars, although conducted far away, have altered the nature of British life.
"It could be argued that the permanent backdrop of our current military situation makes almost every poem a war poem," he said.
This weekend Armitage said that the film project was still in its infancy and in the hands of the BBC and the Ministry of Defence. The planned one-hour documentary, Behind the Lines, is to be produced by BBC veteran Roger Courtier, who hopes to send Armitage to Helmand for a month. Courtier believes the tradition of the British war poet deserves to be reinstated: "We think it is a fabulous idea, but are at the early stages. It will be some time before it comes to fruition."
The programme-makers point out that when Andrew Motion finished his 10-year stint as poet laureate he said he regretted that nobody had sent him out to a war zone. If the BBC is successful in setting up Armitage\'s trip, it will be a first both for the armed forces and for a living British poet.
"It will be a chance to see, at first hand, life on the front line - and to carry back the stories from British troops," a member of the production team said. "Not just the sober stories of terror and injury that are uneasily familiar, but tales of lives left behind and new worlds discovered."
Last year Armitage, a former probation officer, published a volume of poetry called The Not Dead, about the soldiers who fought in the Gulf war and Bosnia and Malaysia. At the time, his two daughters were young, so he decided not to travel to see military action at first hand. Now he has changed his mind. "There was something missing from that book. I couldn\'t see it at the time, but I realised later that it missed the present tense, the adrenaline that flares up through real experience," he said.
The documentary will follow the poet through his preparations and training. Once in Afghanistan, Armitage will be joined by the bestselling writer and former SAS soldier Andy McNab. The two will gather military stories, travelling together in the area of desert, four miles long by two miles wide, known as Camp Bastion. Around 20 wounded soldiers are airlifted from Camp Bastion in a typical week.
For Vivien Noakes, an expert on British war poetry, the project is a promising but perilous exercise for any writer who is not a "soldier poet".
"A lot of the great war poets were great poets because they had been immersed in what they were describing. And they were speaking for their men," she said. "Somebody who has just been sent out won\'t have that. A lot depends on how long a writer is at war and if they are a combatant. Of course, a poet can give the view of a sensitive outsider, but you can almost become a voyeur if you are not careful."
Noakes, who edited Voices of Silence, a collection of writing from the first world war, and a collection of the writing of war poet Isaac Rosenberg, says there have always been many types of war poet.
"There are cheerleader poets and those who are anti-war. If you are talking about the great poets of the first world war, Sassoon and Owen, they were responding to the fact they didn\'t feel people had the slightest idea what was going on. Sending out a writer is a marvellous idea, but there can be a dangerous assumption that a poet has a hotline to truth."
As Noakes adds, today the public are fed immediate images of war on television and believe they know what is going on. Online blogs from troops on the front line also provide a clear picture. But Courtier and his documentary team aim to offer a "completely different perspective". They want to "put the current war inside a longer story of conflict across centuries - all recorded by poets" and mark "a new era in war poetry for the 21st century".
A war reflected in verse
Wilfred Owen: 1893-1918
The Sentry
We\'d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew/And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell/ Hammered on top, but never quite burst through. Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime/ Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour/ Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
Siegfried Sassoon: 1886-1967
A Working Party
Three hours ago he blundered up the trench/Sliding and poising, groping with his boots/Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls/ With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.
He couldn\'t see the man who walked in front/Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet /Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing /Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.
Vera Brittain: 1893-1970
Perhaps
Perhaps some day the sun will shine again/And I shall see that still the skies are blue/And feel once more I do not live in vain/Although bereft of You.
Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet/ Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay/And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet/Though You have passed away.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may[...]rmitage-poetry-afghanistan-bbc
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1529
Here’s a ‘Brand-New’ Massive Multilingual Dataset for Machine Translation views: 1526