Careers Advisers Canterbury Epsom Farnham Maidstone Rochester UCA Showcase About Us Research Enterprise Business Alumni Services & Depts Home Contact Us Jobs myUCA Sitemap Staff Student Information UCA Email Accessibility Terms & Conditions FOI
RSS
© 2008-2009
Voice, Place, Translation - In search of a Poet - Alan Young
22 January - 27 February 2004
George Rodger Gallery
Maidstone
I am a step towards chance and destruction,
I am a leap into freedom and the self. . .
I am blood whispering in a man's ear,
I am the soul's fever, the desire and denial of the flesh. . .
The voice is Edith Sodergran's, as experienced through her poetry, addressing us directly, despite the cultural distance between our world and her early 20C Finland. The place is Raivola, the village on the Karelian Isthmus, near the Russian border, where she lived in poverty, afflicted by the tuberculosis that ended her life at the age of 31.
Alan Young has made his own translations of the leading Finnish modernist poet for an illustrated artist's book. The process of translation is more than the attempt to make Sodergran's poetry come alive in English, it is also a description of Young's personal response to her imagery through drawing.
The exhibition includes work carried out by Young in Finland and Russia, funded by an award from the Arts & Humanities Research Board.
