The Magic Roundabout

Even though the term “The Magic Roundabout” could be understood as referring to a traffic circle located in Swindon, it’s also a TV series derived from a French one named Le Manège Enchanté. More specifically, it is a stop motion animation show created by Serge Danot, with the invaluable help of his friend Ivor Wood. In France, the series was broadcast on the ORTF channel (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Français) from 1964 to 1974 and in England, on the BBC, from 18 October 1965 until 25 January 1977 at first in black and white, then in a coloured version. As it was a stop motion animation, the method of filming took a lot of time as every episode needed about 7500 pictures, which represents more or less two weeks of work. This TV programme was aimed at children but the parents were also tempted to watch, as the show was shown just before the news. Some of them even complained when it was rescheduled to earlier in the day! 

       Eric Thompson is the one who adapted the show into English. He did not simply translate the work of Serge Danot but created his own version in 441 episodes of only five minutes, doing also the narration and the voice of some characters. The reason why Eric Thompson did not simply translate from French into English is quite simple: he thought it was too complicated to dub, and he did not even like the French version that much, as he found it too noisy. After the success of the series, two full-length films were created: Pollux and the Blue Cat, released in 1972 and The Magic Roundabout in 2005. 

The Magic Roundabout show is a very funny programme which talks about the adventures of Dougal and his friends. As the title suggests, the story takes place around a colourful carousel. 

       The characters of this show are really charming. First of all, there is Mr Rusty, an old man, owner of the Magic Roundabout. He and Florence, the sensitive little girl, are the only human beings in the series. The most famous character is of course the yellow dog, named Pollux in French, Dougal in English, whose voice was Eric Thompson’s in the first series. Dougal is Florence’s best friend. He often complains and hates it when the little girl does not pay attention to him. He is also sarcastic but still, he is the most appreciated character on this show. The funny thing is, Dougal was not supposed to be so important, but after some letters of the audience asking why he didn’t talk often, the directors decided to give him a bigger role.  Dougal is surrounded by a lot of friends, such as Brian the snail, who follows the dog no matter what weird idea he has; Ermintrude the cow; Dylan the rabbit, who seems asleep most of the time; and Zebedee, a Jack-in-the-box that appears in the very first episode to help Mr Rusty to be happier.

       The Magic Roundabout became famous in England with its eight million spectators on average. It is not a surprise if everyone still knows it nowadays because both parents and children could watch it. Moreover, The Magic Roundabout is the first series which gave its name to a famous traffic circle.

 

Catherine Carpentier, Valentine Delvaux, and Axel Zlotowski  

SOURCES

- http://www.jedisparadise.com/2/Magic_Roundabout.htm 

- https://www.revolvy.com/topic/The%20Magic%20Roundabout 

- https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/oct/08/france.television

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Roundabout  

-https://www.kidzworld.com/article/6580-the-magic-roundabout-tv-show-facts?fbclid=IwAR1cVQKXKQPQOaNiFsUu_pSy5E7T5dwUkQUSD1Dp0ZWG0-CWWimADhbd6ME

 

The silver fern

The silver fern, or ‘Ponga’ in the Māori language, is a medium-sized plant endemic to New Zealand which owes its name to the occasional silvery undersides of the fronds. The fronds of the silver fern are dark green on the upper side and the undersides are usually white; only in some northern populations are the fronds silver. The undersides reflect moonlight and they are used as tracking markers in the country’s forests. The perfect habitat for this type of fern is lowland forests as they thrive in moist, mild climates, but they can be found throughout the country.  

The silver fern has deep historical roots. It first appeared as a national symbol in the 1880s when Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent) identified as New Zealanders and no longer as Europeans living abroad, whereas previously the term New Zealanders was only used to refer to the Māori people. Quickly, Native Associations started to form, solidifying this new sense of nationalism and attachment to a newfound home. These associations chose the silver fern as their emblem, which not only grew popular among the citizens, but also came to be seen by foreigners as a symbol of the nation. 

Māori people, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, used the fern in several ways: the foliage to make bedding and the sap for medical purposes, for example. To this community, the fern represents strength, resistance and power. In relation to the silver fern there is the koru a “spiral shape based on the appearance of a new unfurling silver fern frond”.This symbol is also quite important to the Māori culture and is frequently incorporated into many forms of artistic expression, such as carvings and tattoos.  

To this day, the silver fern has continued to be used as a symbol by the national rugby teams and in other sports, as well as in the military and in the immigration department of the government.  recently, New Zealanders used the silver fern as a symbol of resilience after the Christchurch terror attack in March 2019, with one artist modifying each frond of a fern to represent one casualty. 

The silver fern is such an important symbol for the nation that on multiple occasions it has been suggested to incorporate it into the New Zealand flag. There have been a number of attempts to change the flag, but it was in 2015-2016 that the country held a referendum on whether to change the flag or keep the old one, featuring the Union Jack. Even the Prime Minister at the time, John Key, gave his support to the silver fern. But overall, this referendum split opinion and there was not much engagement among the general public. Criticisms of it included the huge costs of changing all the flags and logos, the relative importance of this matter compared to others such as immigration or Māori representation, and the different options for the flags supposedly being to be too logo-like. In the end, they decided to keep the original flag.

To sum up, we can see that this is a symbol that is deeply rooted in the New Zealand culture, that it has transcended the country and that it is representative of the nation abroad.  

Lucía Domínguez Villar

Sources:

-WIXON, Karl ; The history of our national symbol 

https://www.nzstory.govt.nz/blog/the-history-of-our-national-symbol/  [29/03/19]

- KEENAN, Danny ; Why is the Silver Fern New Zealand’s Symbol ? [29/03/19]

https://www.silverfernflag.org/press/why-is-the-silver-fern-new-zealands-symbol [30/03/19]

-  The silver fern 

https://kiwianatown.co.nz/kiwiana-displays/the-silver-fern/ [1/04/19]

- The significance of the silver fern

https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/discover-collections/read-watch-play/maori/significance-silver-fern[2/04/19]

- Cyathea dealbata

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyathea_dealbata  [2/04/19]

- An illustration has become a symbol of resilience after the Christchurch terror attack [2/04/19]

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/20/asia/christchurch-shooting-cartoon-tribute-victims-trnd/index.html

- Maori people [2/04/19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māori_people

- Koru

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koru[2/04/19]

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver was an American poet who was born on September 10, 1935 in Ohio and who died recently, on January 17, 2019. Mary started writing poetry at the age of fourteen. She studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College without completing a degree. Nature had always been her inspiration, that is what she stated in the Christian Science Monitor in 1992:

I don't know why I felt such an affinity with the natural world except that it was available to me, that's the first thing. It was right there. And for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world.¹

Walking in the woods was her absolute favourite thing. Her notebook and her pen were always taken with her and when a thought came to her mind, she wrote it down. Then she progressively entered more personal realms as her memories of Ohio and New England. Her poetry was a new kind of Romanticism.

Her first collection of poems is called No Voyage and Other Poems was published when she was twenty-eight. Between 1963 and 2017 Mary published 33 collections of poems, A Poetry Handbook which is a guide to understand and to write poetry, Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse and two essays. Even if Mary Oliver was a very famous writer in the Anglophone culture, only one of her pieces of work was translated in Catalan in 2018 which is called Ocell Roig.

In 1970 she won her first award, which is the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America. Only American poets considered as genius and essential receive this award. Then between 1970 and 2012 she won twelve awards and honours; one of those was the National Book Award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems, awarded to American writers whose work was widely deemed brilliant. She was also reward with her fifth collection, American Primitive, with the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984. In her career Mary Oliver taught at several universities. 

The New-York Times described Mary Oliver as the best-selling poet in the United-States of America in 2007. In an article released on January 2017 by The New-Yorker, she was considered to be the most appreciated poet in America as well as a distinguished and important poet. In the beginning of her career, critics did not believe in her because of her main poetry themes, considered as old-fashioned. David Orr, a working poetry columnist for the New-York Times, laughed at her because of her belief that poetry could work as self-help. Diane Bond, who is a feminist writer, declared that:

 
   
    Few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain sceptical that identification with nature can empower women.²

However, numerous critics do appreciate her work, Alicia Ostriker is one of them. This American poet affirmed that Oliver “can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.”

              Thanks to her poems Mary Oliver is considered to be a brilliant writer who left her mark on the Anglophone poetry world.

Lola Jensens, Elise Schafer and Emilie Vilain.

---

¹Source :  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Oliver

²Source : https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/what-mary-olivers-critics-dont-understand?fbclid=IwAR1S3cAMzN-NnbsLLW7_zraUn1x788YVJoX5ei_71UgKtM-sMv8TriMf77Q

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a writer born on the 18th of November 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is the second child of a forest-entomologist father, and a former-dietician mother.

Atwood showed a passion for writing at an early age and she was sixteen years old when she began to study at the University of Toronto. She then took her Master’s degree in English literature at Cambridge. She is an internationally-known novelist and poet. She is especially known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective. Her texts have been translated into many different languages and adapted into different films.

In addition to writing, Atwood has held positions as an English lecturer or writer-in-residence at various universities. She was also the President of the Writers’ Union of Canada in the 1980’s.

Atwood now lives in Toronto with her second husband, Graeme Gibson, and their daughter.

Her most famous works and awards

Margaret Atwood is best known for her novels, but she has also written short-stories, poetry, critical studies and even children’s books. Some of her most famous short-stories include “Dancing Girls,” published in 1977, “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983) and the collection of short-stories Stone Mattress from 2014.

She has won more than fifty-five literary prizes, including two Governor Generals’ Awards. She won the first one for the poetry collection The Circle Game, and the second for the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which was published in 1985 and tells the story of a woman struggling to break free from her obligation to bear children. This futuristic novel was performed as an opera, and was also adapted as a very successful TV series in 2017. Other award-winning novels by Atwood include Alias Grace, published in 1996, which tells the story of a woman convicted for her involvement in two murders, and The Blind Assassin (2000), which centres on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman.

Her literary style

Quality and quantity are two words that describe well Atwood’s work. She often uses ‘role reversal’ and ‘new beginnings’ as themes in her novels, most of them based on women managing their relationship to the world and every person around them. Consequently, she especially considers human behaviour and nature. Science is also an important theme in her works, certainly due to her father’s occupation. She represents her feelings in her poems with an everyday speech, and a few rhymes. The novels, by contrast, show more social-realist situations.

The typical character of her stories is a modern woman who is writer or artist with social-professional commitment.  She is considered as a feminist writer because of her many texts about ‘issues of concern to feminists from the 70s up to today’.

Atwood is a very generous and committed author. For instance, she gave her $47,000 Booker Prize award (the highest literary award in Great Britain) to environmental and literary causes.

To conclude, the woman who is considered as one of the best Canadian writers is bound to continue to represent an essential character in international literature for a long time to come. 

Ina Lentzen, Chloé Rutten, Léa Varet 

SOURCES

- GradeSaver, “Margaret Atwood Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays.”, Atwood Margaret,  www.gradesaver.com/author/margaret-atwood.

- Biography.com Editors, “Margaret Atwood.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 27 Feb. 2018, www.biography.com/people/margaret-atwood-9191928.

- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Margaret Atwood.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 4 Feb. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Atwood.

- British Council. “Margaret Atwood.” Literature, 1 Jan. 1970, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/margaret-atwood.

- Encyclopedia of World Biography. “Margaret Atwood Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, www.notablebiographies.com/An-Ba/Atwood-Margaret.html.

-  Margaret Atwood, Biography.” Margaret Atwood, margaretatwood.ca/biography/

Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet, who was born on twenty-first October in 1904, in County Monaghan, which is located in Ireland. He was the fourth of ten children whose parents are James Kavanagh and Bridget Quinn.
From 1909 to 1916, Patrick Kavanagh studied at the local national school, which he left at the age of 13 years old and then he largely taught himself about literature.
Thereafter, he worked for a while with the company of his father as a shoemaker and then he labored on the family farm.

As mentioned above, Patrick Kavanagh was, above all, a poet. He began his career in the last years of the Irish Literary Renaissance, as Irish nationalism grew.
In 1936, his first collection of poems, “Ploughman and Other Poems”, was published as he still worked on the farm.
This is when Kavanagh decided to move to Dublin that he became a full-time writer. Indeed, in Dublin, he wrote fiction, autobiography, numerous, articles and poems, among which his longest poem is "The Great Hunger,” which was published in 1942, and has a major importance. This poem describes the sad and awful life of an Irish peasant-farmer and depicts the part of the human experience whose feeling frustrated is unavoided.

Two years after his first collection was published, Patrick Kavanagh was not very well-known yet and he was described by The Times Literary Supplement as: “a young Irish poet of promise rather than of achievement” whose lyrics were regular but not good enough to be remembered.

From 1942 to 1944, Kavanagh worked as a journalist. He has his own page in an Irish newspaper. He wrote poems and novels including the poem "On Raglan Road,", about a love story in which he had a great relationship with a woman who is younger than him. It was published in The Irish Press in 1946. In 1947, Kavanagh published his first major collection; “A Soul of Sale”.

After the war of Ireland in 1948, he published the novel "Tarry Flynn", a semi-autobiographical novel and a fictional text about his life in the countryside. In the 50s, Kavanagh and his brother published “The Kavanagh’s weekly”, a British newspaper, but it did not work. Kavanagh’s works were described as emotional, creative and he is well known for his poetry. However, his prose is an interesting piece of evidence to a way of life that does not exist anymore.


In 1954, he was involved in a court case. He sued the magazine "The Leader" for publishing a picture of him as an alcoholic. However, he lost the fight and the magazine won. Shortly after that event, the doctors discovered that he had a pneumonia which is a lung cancer and his health began to fail. In 1965, he married Katherine Malony and on 30th November in 1967 in Dublin. Patrick Kavanagh was and still is considered one of the leading poets of the 20th century

W.S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin is an American poet who was born in 1927, in New York. He lived there until 1936, and he then moved to Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister, for whom Merwin wrote hymns during his youth. In the 1940s, Merwin attended Princeton University, where he discovered his love for literature. He graduated in 1946, but pursued his studies by learning Romance languages for a few more years. After his studies, Merwin met and married his first wife and went to the island of Majorca, where he tutored the son of the British poet Robert Graves for a few months. During this time, Merwin was influenced by Graves’s work and started translating old medieval poetry. He wrote the collection of poems A mask for Janus, which earned him his first award in 1952.

Later, Merwin went to live in Europe for a few years. He divorced his wife and married Dido Milroy, whom he had met while in Majorca.

In 1956, Merwin received a fellowship from the Poets’ Theater in Massachusetts, and moved to Boston. During his time at the Theater, Merwin started shifting his style, moving from a more formalist style to a more irregular approach, without any punctuation and with a freer style. This can be seen in The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), which shows a newfound interest in American values and themes: this is because when he was at the Theater, he was influenced by poets like Robert Lowell.In 1962, Merwin started translating poetry from many languages from all around the world. He would later go back to live in Europe with his wife.

In 1967, he wrote The Lice as a violent reaction against the Vietnam War, but would later admit in an interview to having changed his viewpoint on the matter. Some years later, in 1970, he would write The Carriers of Ladders, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize. It is also good to note that he went back to Europe in the 1960s with his second wife Dido, but they would get divorced in 1968, and he went back to New York.

In 1976, he moved to Hawaii and studied with Robert Aitken (a Buddhist master). There he also met and married in 1983 his third and last wife: Paula Dunaway Schwartz. He then settled in Maui and began helping to restore the tropical forest. The Buddhism and environmentalism he lived in greatly influenced his works: they started to have a much more ecologist/Buddhist perspective. 

Near the end of his life, Merwin founded, with the help of his wife, The Merwin Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on the preservation of their property in Haiku, which was changed from its former barren state to a modern “Noah’s Ark”, containing many of the different palm trees existing around the world. His last book, Garden Time (2016) was written by his wife because Merwin was losing his eyesight.

We can consider Merwin as one of the greatest poets/writers of his time: throughout his entire life, he wrote twenty-nine poetry books, four books of prose, three plays, twenty translations and he edited two books. He also won twenty-nine literary prizes for his works.

Louis Marlier, Maximilien Somme

SOURCES:

- https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/book/lice 

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin

- https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/w-s-merwin

- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-s-merwin

- https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/winter/feature/over-career-spanning-six-decades-american-poet-w-s-merwin-transformed-anger-art

- https://merwinconservancy.org/about-w-s-merwin/