How do victims cope with the atrocities that were committed during the Holocaust? What’s more, how do the perpetrators?

This Festival of the Arts panel session on 9 May addressed different elements of how people struggle to remember or forget their experiences of the Holocaust. It was not, as I had expected, about the psychology behind memory loss or recall following traumatic events; rather about how strategies of coping can manifest itself in various forms such as film, literature and discourse.

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, courtesy of Daniel Foster on Flickr

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Would you describe the piece of music below as Romantic, romantic, or both?

> Extracts from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.6 ‘Pathétique’

The answer, as with most model humanities essays, is of course ‘that depends’ – on whether we are talking strictly about the Romantic period within the history of Western classical music, or whether we simply experience the music as inspired and embodied by strong feelings.

Romantic music with a capital ‘R’ – European music composed roughly between 1810 and 1870 – can be fairly easily classified according to a set of musical characteristics, such as heavy use of stringed orchestral instruments, changes of key and unresolved chords – but capturing what makes a piece of music stir us is much harder to identify – and a challenge that Professor Christopher Peacocke set himself in the first musical event of the Festival of the Arts on 8 May.

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As part of UCL’s Festival of the Arts, UCL English demonstrated its contribution to the arts by hosting a lunchtime poetry reading event featuring the work of two alumni, a current PhD student and published author Professor Mark Ford.

Mark Ford, poet and professor, UCL English

Professor Ford opened the readings with his poem ‘Christmas’, published in 2011. It was a sharp contrast to the usual experiences of happiness, warmth and celebrations associated with the festive period. Instead, Ford told a story of a fateful slip on hazardous winter ice.

The character sees his friend fall whilst enjoying a pastrami sandwich in town, but despite scaremongering attempts to raise his friend, his body lies still.
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What does it take for a foreign language playwright to become an ‘honorary British dramatist’? What is the difference between a translation, an adaptation and a version? Theatre-lovers and the generally curious enjoyed the chance to ponder these questions at a talk on translation on the London stage by Dr Geraldine Brodie on 7 May, the first day of UCL’s inaugural Festival of the Arts.
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