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106 Draycott That landscape’s rich array and the path through a forest where Fortune now led the way, were beautiful beyond telling, far past my powers of human speech to describe. As if transported, I walked without stopping – no slope was too steep or hillside too high. The further I wandered into that wood the finer the fields and fruit trees seemed, the spices and hedgerows, meadows where streams ran steeply down in threads of gold, till I reached the curving shore of a river – a river of, Lord! such shining adornment. What blazed most brightly were the banks, arrayed with beryl, a channel of light where echoing water circled and swirled, an eddying flood that seemed almost like words. The stream-bed also was bright with stones that glowed with the glint of sunlight through glass or the streaming of stars from deep in the sky in winter, when men of this world are asleep. Every pebble that lay in the lap of that pool was an emerald or sapphire, a storehouse of jewels, so the length of the river seemed lit from within adorned with such glitter and glistening.
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The 19th International Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, 2–4 November 2007 An intriguing element of this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival programme is that it features two poet/translators who translate one another’s poems. Jacques Rancourt and John F. Deane – French-Canadian and Irish respectively – will be reading both their own poems and their translations of each other’s work. They have also agreed to put their long-standing and unusually symbiotic relationship under scrutiny in ‘Alter Ego / Ego Alter’, a specially-convened Festival conversation. They’ll discuss what effect inhabiting someone else’s poems enough to translate them has had on their individual writing; and disentangle the creative risks and rewards of this ongoing entente cordiale. This kind of event is a typical example of the way Aldeburgh has developed and diversified over the past few years. Still committed to its major readings, the Festival also capitalises on the particular interests of, and connections between, its unique line-up of poets. So as well as eight high quality readings – each involving two, three or four poets – this year the Festival offers another forty-two events (sixteen of them entirely free), a stimulating mix of craft talks, close readings, lectures, workshops, performances, interviews and conversations.

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The 19th International Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, 2–4 November 2007

An intriguing element of this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival programme is that it features two poet/translators who translate one another’s poems. Jacques Rancourt and John F. Deane – French-Canadian and Irish respectively – will be reading both their own poems and their translations of each other’s work. They have also agreed to put their long-standing and unusually symbiotic relationship under scrutiny in ‘Alter Ego / Ego Alter’, a specially-convened Festival conversation. They’ll discuss what effect inhabiting someone else’s poems enough to translate them has had on their individual writing; and disentangle the creative risks and rewards of this ongoing entente cordiale. This kind of event is a typical example of the way Aldeburgh has developed and diversified over the past few years. Still committed to its major readings, the Festival also capitalises on the particular interests of, and connections between, its unique line-up of poets. So as well as eight high quality readings – each involving two, three or four poets – this year the Festival offers another forty-two events (sixteen of them entirely free), a stimulating mix of craft talks, close readings, lectures, workshops, performances, interviews and conversations.

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