Salvador Dalí was a Spanish surrealist artist recognised and remembered for his extravagant and innovative artwork, which spread across film, painting, sculpture, and product and set design. Dalí used Impressionism and the Renaissance masters as stimuli for his work, before growing a strong affinity for Cubism. The 1920s saw the birth of his passion for Surrealism, where he joined a surrealist group in 1929 and produced his most notable artwork – ‘The Persistence of Memory’ – in 1931.
The exhibition showcased Dalí’s masterpieces, alongside contextual information that described events that occurred during the production of his works. There were three floors in the exhibition: a floor comprised of rows of his artworks; a 360° immersive room containing holograms and artificial intelligence; and a virtual reality experience of Dalí’s iconic arts. The consensus from the students was complete enjoyment and shock for the visually stunning graphics in the VR experience; we were in his art pieces, able to interact with different objects painted in the art.
We would like to thank Enca Marza Porcar and Mungo Winkley for organising and hosting such an incredible outing. For those seeking an outing with family and friends, I strongly recommend this exhibition. Regardless of whether one is familiar with the work of Dalí, this experience immerses you in a new world – one where you feel as though you are the artwork.
Sunday 26 September marks the 20th European Day of Languages – a celebration of the linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe – and to mark the occasion, the @bedaleslanguages Instagram account will be running competitions for Bedales students.
Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity is quite remarkable. I still remember the Eurostar opening its first service between Waterloo and Paris when I was in my teens, and it transformed everything. Whereas up until then France had been a faraway place requiring a flight, a lengthy ferry ride, or a hovercraft ride (cancelled at the whim of the weather), you could now get on a train and be surrounded by anothe rlanguage within a couple of hours. From Paris or Brussels you could be surrounded by other languages still, within another hour or two of a connecting train. On a three-day trip from London to Moscow by rail you are exposed to English, French, Flemish, German, Polish, Belorussian and Russian.
In the era of COVID, many of these opportunities for travel have diminished due to the headache-inducing formalities and costs of proving your freedom from infection. Nevertheless, foreign languages are so much closer to us islanders than they used to be. Gone are the days of bringing back VHS tapes from the continent that only played in grainy black and white. Through online streaming platforms to language apps, languages are now fully accessible. Language and culture are so heavily intertwined that to celebrate linguistic diversity is to celebrate cultural diversity. If the whole of Europe spoke English, what would the effect be on European culture? Would we get such visible cultural differences between France and Italy, say? With free movement, the greatest markers of national boundaries are languages.
Brexit, as well as French and German A Level uptake in freefall on a national level, reductions in the numbers of European language undergraduates, and a lack of recognition of the importance of languages all point to a crisis in language learning. Sadly languages are often seen purely as a bonus commodity, a pathway to business opportunities that can be circumnavigated with English – but languages are so much more than that. The Day of European Languages is an opportunity to celebrate the diversity of geographical Europe (not the political Europe), something which a lack of free and easy travel to Europe for pleasure could lead us to forget, were it not for the internet.
This week I had the pleasure of taking Jaw, something I have always enjoyed doing, and talking about my experience of learning languages over the 60+ years I have enjoyed doing it (I include English – we all learn at least one language of some kind, even if we don’t realise we are doing so at the time!) It was interesting to have the opportunity to reflect on this since Latin (and some Greek) have been a part of the ‘Languages’ department – and not just administrately – for the last year and a bit. This also mirrors my own experience as a linguist – I have both learned and taught ancient (dead) and modern (living) languages. They are all languages and there are similarities in the way we get to grips with them (learning) and teach them (passing them on, education) but there are many differences, too.
Doing this Jaw also gave me the challenge of trying to answer the question ‘Why bother with language?’, especially now there is Alexa and Google Translate readily available to help us out. I think there are multiple answers to that question. First, though, I admit that new languages can be a real challenge to us. You have to find ‘traction’ – ‘hooks’ so you find your footing in a new language; and you may find yourself with lots of unfamiliar shapes in the way that the new (to you) language is written. Studying ancient languages can seem very dry and dusty – the experience of the playwright Patrick MacGorain at school was that “the little grudge I bear is directed against those men who taught me the literature of Rome and Greece and England and Ireland as if they were little pieces of intricate machinery… we were so engaged in irregular verbs and peculiar declensions that we never once smelt blood or felt gristle”. He couldn’t see the wood for the trees. This is a familiar experience when you are doing ‘first steps’ in anything – but persevere, and you begin to see a more complete picture. Better still, you begin to ‘feel’ the sense of the original – to taste it, almost. As Lucy Nicholas from the King’s College London Classics department notes, when you start to immerse yourself in an original text, you get more than you can from even the best of translations; writing about Vergil, she says “he plunges us into real life, the lives of the dispossessed, the disoriented, the vanquished, the triumphant, the dying, the lovelorn. His poems don’t offer words, words, words, but blood”.
The poet Robert Frost once said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation” – though a good translation can have a musicality of its own, as Patrick Leigh Fermor found when he got into conversation with a certain Baron Reinhardt von Liphart-Ratshoff, a man of frankly alarming culture (in A Time of Gifts, pp. – the whole book is well worth a read!) Asked if it were true that the German translations of Shakespeare were as good as the original, the Baron said: “Not true at all, but it’s better than any other foreign language. Just listen!” He took down four books and read out Mark Anthony’s speech in Russian, French, Italian and German. The German had a totally different consistency from any other utterance I had heard on this journey: slow, thoughtful, clear and musical, stripped of its harshness and over-emphasis and us; and in those minutes…I understood for the first time how magnificent a language it could be.
As diverse a knowledge as that might be beyond us now – but learning a language means that the knowledge is yours, not Alexa’s or Google Translate’s. You don’t feel at a loss in the world; you know where you are because you have an idea of where you and your language, your culture, have come from. Even more, you can get into another culture ‘from the inside,’ and knowledge and understanding becomes a part of you. The critic and philosopher George Steiner sums it up very neatly: “A sentence always means more. Even a single word… It can, and usually does. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode.” In short, “The polyglot is a freer man”.
Photos by Abby Hilton and Henry Kingsley-Pallant, 6.1
International Day was celebrated across the three schools this year, and over more than one day. Celebrations kicked off last Monday when international 6.2 students led the assembly at Bedales Pre-prep, Dunannie, where they taught the children some words in their native languages, and learnt about the children’s own cultures heritage. At Bedales’ assembly later that evening, we watched a video put together by 6.2 Dons, which included various students and teachers reading poetry and reciting proverbs in different languages.
On Thursday, which was officially International Day, the action started before lunch in the Quad, where Bedales students entertained Dunannie children by writing their names in foreign scripts and other activities, such as making Japanese ‘Kabuto’ Samurai helmets out of newspaper. Afterwards, students shared language and cuisine from around the world, which included everything from Arabic to Chinese, and Tibetan steamed dumplings to ancient Roman food. Mary Wang won the National Dress Competition with her beautiful Chinese dress and we had a Beastie Boys song performed in Arabic by our very own band, the Upstanding Gentlemen.
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