HAP & Academic Enrichment
“Poetry is what is lost in translation.” By Henry Ferguson
The often-quoted, often-misunderstood phrase 'Poetry is what is lost in translation' is largely attributed to the American poet Robert Frost. Likewise, the great Peruvian writer César Vallejo said that 'everyone knows that poetry is translatable', but in his translation diary Catching Fire, Daniel Hahn comes to a different and useful conclusion, saying that his new novel 'won't have any of the same words as the old one', but that he was hoping 'it will otherwise be the same book'.
While what is lost in translation is admittedly significant, to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to fundamentally misrepresent both what poetry is and what translation is, and Jakobson’s pronouncement that “poetry by definition is untranslatable” in fact hinges on definitions of poetry and of translation that are both unreasonably narrow.
The popular lists of 'untranslatable words' found on the internet reflects the tendency to think of translation as direct and equivalent. To say words such as the Italian ‘culaccino’ (a word used to describe the mark left on a table by a moist glass) or the Russian ‘pochemuchka’ (for a person who asks too many questions) are untranslatable only means that no single English word offers a direct and perfect equivalent. Rather, it simply means that we must use more than one word to translate another.
Russian linguist Roman Jakobson coined the term 'creative transposition' when describing translation, asserting that rather than literally translating a text word by word, the aim was rather to try and achieve the same effect as the original work in the added context of a different language.
We too often think of translation as loss, while Jakobson claims it is a transformation. Just as Yo-Yo Ma is not Bach himself but rather a performer bringing his own rhythm and tone to a work. The translator fulfils this role in poetry.
Perhaps Frost was right - that something is lost in translation: the texture, the sound, the immediate pulse of the original. But perhaps, as linguists and poets such as Jakobson attest, poetry is also what is found in translation.
Within that beautiful, complex, imperfect and inescapably human crossing between languages, poetry lives.
Pecha Kucha ‘Soul’
One of the distinctive features of the Lower School HAP programme is the opportunity for pupils to engage in Pecha Kucha presentations. Originating in Japan, the term Pecha Kucha (ペチャクチャ) loosely translates as “intelligent chit-chat”. The format challenges speakers to communicate complex ideas with clarity, precision, and creativity through a sequence of carefully selected images rather than text-heavy slides. Designed to encourage concise, engaging storytelling and intellectual exploration, it has become a widely used presentation format in business, government and public speaking.
In the Michaelmas term we held a Pecha Kucha session in response to the single-word prompt, ‘Soul’. The range of contributions was wonderful, spanning Biology, History, Philosophy, Music, Psychology, and more. One particularly memorable presentation considered the role of Soul Music in the 1960s US civil rights movement, while another considered artistic representations of the soul through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and another looked at the different ways that world religions understand the soul.
One of the highlights was undoubtedly Hector W who used the lens of blockchain economics to ask the wonderfully provocative question: “How do we value a soul?” Drawing together ideas from economics, philosophy, psychology, history, and technology, Hector's presentation explored some of the potential limitations of economic thinking when confronted with questions of human consciousness, morality, creativity, love, trauma, and meaning.
The Value of a Soul: Blockchain Economics and Humanity
By Hector Walker
We live in a world that runs on valuation. We can assign a market price to gold, to a company, to a house. Humans are materialistic in nature, thus everything is quantifiable. But how do we value the person looking at the gold? What is the value for consciousness? For a life? For a soul? This is the fundamental limit of rational economics, and this is what I would like to speak about today.
Before I begin, I want to consider the Atlantic slave trade. At this time humanity attempted to price a human being. This is the horrific outcome of treating a soul as an asset with a price tag. The slave trade reveals the profound ethical problems of valuing a soul and if we should be considering this at all.
Firstly, some might say that the stock market is driven by fear, pride, shame and greed. These emotions are only found in humans – perhaps, therefore, these could be described as the most universal emotional expressions of a soul? Many people make money predicting these in the day trading business. It is sometimes said of trading that if you bet on people following their lowest, most self-serving instincts, you will probably win eventually. Yet nobody to date has been able to accurately identify the source of these emotions. Could it be described as the soul?
However, some believe we can geolocate the soul’s value in its interaction with intellect in the formulation of ideas. Ideas have immense economic value. Yet who can value the spark of genius? Think Thomas Edison, whose ideas literally and metaphorically illuminated the world. Humanity’s capacity to imagine is wholly priceless, yet available to every single one of us.
Furthermore, our ability or tendency to devote ourselves to unpaid, often unmeasured labour further adds to the question of the soul. This unpaid unmeasured labour generates no GDP, yet there is a discrete economic value activated by comfort, by community, by generosity, by love. The cost of having children. The cost of having a vacation. As we already know our emotions are infinite, yet absent from almost all indicators of economic value or significance. Some believe we must take this into account when we value a soul.
Additionally, negative emotions have to be considered as well. Like a crack in a stain-glass window, trauma can damage the soul. We know PTSD causes permanent alteration to the brain chemistry and to a person’s psychological profile. There is a cost of healing - therapy, lost productivity – that is measurable, but if we try to find out the cost of damage to our soul, we become stuck. Many believe, therefore, that it must be immeasurable.
How can we capture the idea that the soul increases in value through a person’s life? It is possible to calculate the cost of cutting down a forest or the estimated value of Earth’s total natural resources (about 33 quadrillion dollars). Though, when an astronaut sees the whole earth for the first time, they say something inside them changes forever. Something about realising our place within the vast cosmic context changes us – and impacts our soul. Some are certain this causes a positive appreciation in value.
Ultimately, attempting to consider a soul's value creates a paradox. Trying to price it would only serve to instantly devalue it. The soul’s worth is created by the fact that it is the one thing we cannot and should not trade. The value of the soul lies in its omnipresence; it is the one thing each and every human is born with. It is what we are, and yet it is also something that we possess. And it is the one virtue that constantly value as we live out our lives life.
The Young Walter Scott Prize
The Young Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is a prestigious national writing award that challenges young people to offer a fresh perspective on a significant moment from history – perhaps a key scientific innovation, or a moment of profound cultural, geopolitical or social significance. Together with thousands of young people across the UK, fifteen of our Fourth and Fifth Form HAP pupils submitted entries back in the Michaelmas term.
Hugh F was placed among only six shortlisted entries in the 16–19 age category. This is an outstanding achievement.
Hugh brought his twin passions for History and Economics together and wrote about Black Thursday - the dramatic 1929 moment when financial markets in the United States collapsed - presenting the event through the perspective of a Wall Street trader.
‘Black Thursday’ By Hugh Ferrier
Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, marks the beginning of the Wall Street Crash that heralded the Great Depression. On that morning, panic swept through the New York Stock Exchange as millions of shares were frantically sold, causing prices to plummet. Banks and financiers tried to stabilize the market by buying large blocks of stock, briefly halting the fall, but confidence was shattered. Within days, the collapse deepened into Black Monday and Black Tuesday, wiping out fortunes, bankrupting investors, and rippling across the world. It was not merely a financial catastrophe but the end of an age of hopeful exuberance - a moment when the optimism of the 1920s gave way to hardship, unemployment, and economic despair.
For most of us on Wall Street, our devotion to this career is overlooked. Most Americans don’t understand us. Like my father before me, I feel a need to push this family to be bright American dream chasers. I strive for my children to look up to their father as I looked up to mine. I want to deserve their respect and esteem.
A broker’s day should start no later than 5.30am. We might slip out of bed and roll into work with a cup of coffee. My days begin in preparation for the white picket buzz of the trading floor. Every morning, same time, same place, same people, we loaf our way down to the train station. But we represent more than just those hard-working kinds, or those sacrificial male commuters; we are the backbone of the American economy, and we know it. We refuse to be perceived as anything other than that. We commuters even call ourselves ‘The brothers of hustle’. I love the train; it’s an isolated dimension of my day. Unlike anywhere else, the brothers speak freely. We make outrageous takes on famous people, and we compete to see who is the most successful. We argue against the condition and brand of each other’s suits, who has the best office, the highest job title and anything remotely respectful or manly.
There is only a handful of us; we all come from completely different backgrounds, but we all share one goal: to raise a healthy family, so they don’t need to struggle like we do. We constantly rib each other. We make sly comments, who is the most attractive women in the workplace? We say things that would make our wives blush. There was this one time a few years back, a young broker apprentice cropped up, he joined the brothers for a couple weeks before moving on. He was called Fred and he offered an insight into the years of American culture we have overlooked. Only then did we realise just how alienated and excluded we truly are, raising a family while balancing work, at times it feels like two separate lives.
Knowing to be at the right place at the right time is the art of being a broker. Lend your boss cash for a taxi, buy him a coffee, literally anything to put you on their radar. I used to eagerly hawk down my boss’s routine and snipe him with gestures of kindness. Having tallied up more than a decade at a desk on Wall Street, I understand the nature of the hustle back to front. We offer our knowledge and insight into stocks in exchange for the people’s trust and, of course, investment. From farmers to cleaners, every backing is a win. But the day of a broker is not just desk rotting; it has certain patterns and routines. What I mean by this is that I find myself in the exact same instances, at the same time even. Same coffee stand, same elevator, client meetings saying the same lines, same lot at the train station after the market closes. A good routine can be your best friend; this part of broking comes with more time spent on Wall Street. Having witnessed thousands of graphs, completed hours of analysis, no broker can quite gauge the fragility and predictability of a stock. No broker is better than the stock, but the most successful brokers follow a consistent, time sensitive plan to gain the most amount of trust from the people. If you want to give the best shot at bringing it home for their client, analysis is only going to go so far. You’ve got to trust your instinct.
That was all before.
For twelve and a half smooth years persuading Americans to lay their trust in me, my career as a broker was addictive. I did everything by the book. I climbed my way up the ladder, stayed consistent to my clients, and contributed to the firm. I remember on one occasion in my early days as a broker, I signed seven clients in a single day. I travelled the whole way home with a smug smile on my face, and my wife and I celebrated with a victorious glass of the good champagne. But it meant more to me than just a win; knowing people were willing to put their trust in me was thrilling, empowering. Only rarely did any issues crop up. We never had to be problem solvers or think outside the box. The money was sweet, and that is what gets most people up in the morning. Only the minority did it for the sense of authority and approval that comes with broking.
For a while I had my balance sorted; work and family, work and family, thinking ahead to the future. Two boys and a loving wife, a four-bedroom house; I had it all. My family’s future was bright and that was all that mattered. With the foundation of the many years built up on Wall Street, I started to feel it giving way under my feet. The wins just weren’t coming in.
Even brokers with the most rigid, disciplined routine or supreme understanding of the market need to put something away for a rainy day. But every cent to my name was locked up in the market; my life and soul depended on the hypnotic spikes and lulls of the stocks. Little did I know the scale of the shock that was coming, and the dark cloud that was gathering. None of us did.
When the nightmare struck, it struck hard. The sheet of paper before my eyes suddenly became worthless. The rampage stirred around me. Numbers and accounting ledgers were desolate; they carried no value and no meaning. They betrayed a whole nation; it was an absolute truth that nobody could avoid. Numbers: they don’t lie. They offer us the rawest truth. A thick, uncertain air blew through Wall Street. The unthinkable had happened. Despair and confusion reigned; my colleagues’ faces were frozen in shock. We were all outcasts in an instant. The great brokers of belief were done. Many years of experience died in their arms, clutching only what was left of their pure graft in spreadsheets and paperwork. The soul of Wall Street had expired.
A time to forget. A time where one can only drift down the high street like a ghost drifting on a breeze, no choice but to surrender to the eerie clouded atmosphere of Wall Street. Alienated, we have no place to retreat to. Every back in America has been stabbed, but they don’t know it yet. A deadly ripple of fate will be broadcast to the whole of America; this virus will consume an entire nation. This deadly ripple will reach Boston soon enough.
But who is to blame? An invisible finger points to the fellas in fancy suits and shiny shoes. A switch has been flicked in America. A thick uncertainty has been born on Wall Street. This day will forever be known as Black Thursday.
The air on Wall Street was thick with panic, and I could feel my future slipping through my fingers. Only months ago, we were told that prosperity would last forever, yet now the market had collapsed before my eyes. Shares were worthless, banks were failing, and desperate men whispered of ruin. Every second, I saw colleagues trembling, some even vanished to escape debts they could never dream of repaying. Families went hungry, dreams were broken.
The American Dream felt like a cruel nightmare and a shallow lie. Black Thursday was a day I could never forget.
Sherborne Schools Literary Society
Tragedy and Comedy: Joy and Sadness in the theatrical works of William Shakespeare
‘The Dance of Shadows in Hamlet’ by Sebbie Kunzer
Pause, for a moment, in the flickering light of Elsinore – the great castle of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Listen. Can you hear it? What is that low music that trembles beneath Hamlet’s grief? Beneath Norway’s disintegration? Beneath Shakespeare’s tragedy? Is it laughter?!
In Shakespeare’s plays, laughter and lament are hostile conspirators. Tragedy, Shakespeare shows us over and over again, depends on comedy. The jest sharpens the sorrow, and the sorrow heightens the hilarity. Tears of envy. Tears of joy. The result for the audience is a theatrical experience that better reflects the complexity of what the 20th century German American writer Hannah Arendt might have called ‘the human condition’.
In Hamlet, this paradox sings with its most compelling harmony. The young prince, half philosopher, half fool, walks a razor’s edge between the absurd and the profound. He mocks death even as he courts it:
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”
This is a line that begins in wry exclamation and ends in the void of melancholy retrospection. The skull is both a prop for a joke and a mirror for mortality.
And what of the gravediggers? Their crude humour arrives at the threshold of the play’s bloodiest act. As they toss bones and sing of love’s decay, we are forced to laugh, even as we flinch. We laugh through tensed jaw and clenched teeth. That is Shakespeare’s magic: his theatrical works teach us to revel in complex emotions. To resist reductive oversimplification of the human experience. Comedy, here, is no reprieve from death. Oh no. It prepares us for it. The laughter disarms us, and the blow of tragedy lands deeper.
Aristotle told us that in Tragedy, pathos - pity and fear - is purged - catharsis. But Shakespeare adds something else: irony. We laugh, and in that laughter, we are made complicit. Hamlet’s wit draws us in, with his wild intelligence and his self-defeating poetic sensibilities - and then, he betrays us. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” he says, as if smiling at the gods who are already writing his imminent death scene.
And this interplay isn’t unique to Hamlet.
Consider Macbeth - the drunken porter’s scene, that crude interruption after Duncan’s murder. “Here’s a knocking indeed!” he slurs - a moment of farce amidst the horror. The porter is the idiot savant, who unknowingly and therefore ironically knows. Yet the laughter, brief and uneasy, amplifies the creeping dread. The porter speaks of “hell-gate,” and we realize that Macbeth’s castle is hell itself. The joke is a kind of theatrical drumroll before the final deadly downfall of the tragedy.
In Shakespeare, then, comedy and tragedy are one face seen under different light. The clownish porter’s grin and the prince’s existential despair are reflections in the same mirror. Shakespeare’s plays remind us that life itself oscillates between laughter and tears, that the sublime and the ridiculous are eternal companions. And this is part of it’s beautiful complexity. As I mentioned earlier, it is this that makes us who we actually are. How do we rationalise our human capacity for both kindness and cruelty?
Perhaps that is why Shakespeare’s work still lives and breathes on stages across the world? His plays feel alive with humanity. When Hamlet quips to Polonius that he’ll “lug the guts into the neighbour room,” it is grotesque, it’s absurd, and yet, somewhere beneath, there lies a solemn truth. So, Shakespeare’s stage is never purely tragic, never purely comic. It is a reflection of our own fragile, dynamic humanity - laughing through the tears, crying through the laughter. The tragedy of Hamlet is not only that he dies - it is that, until the very bitter end, he laughs.
And we, poor players watching, we laugh with him.
“To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”
That is Shakespeare’s magic trick. And in that mirror, we see the multi-dimensionality of comedy and tragedy, together apart, in the same haunted mirror.
Sherborne Schools Literary Society
A Psychogeography of Fictional Places by Arthur Burton
Good evening.
Let me begin with a confession, and it’s a confession to which I hope you will all relate. At various points in my life, I have wanted to live inside the places described in books. The kitchen in The Tiger that came to Tea. The dark island in Lord of the Flies. As far as the books I’ve studied in English, I have wanted to wander through Milton’s Eden, I’ve wanted to hang out in Shakespeare’s Verona, or chillax in Jez Butterworth’s forest clearing in his crazy contemporary play, Jerusalem.
But then again, I’ve also wanted to absolutely avoid at all costs the dystopian South that Cormac MacCarthy describes in his novel, The Road. And TS Elliot’s Wasteland doesn’t sound like that much fun either.
Fictional places exert a curious pull over us. We long for some; we dread others. And that instinct tells us something important: in literature, setting is never just scenery. It’s never purely decorative. What if setting is doing something far more intimate and important?
The first modern psychological theory was the theory of introspection, looking into the dark recesses of the conscious mind. What if the fictional environments we create are better understood as maps of intellectual, cognitive or even emotional anxieties? Spaces where private fears, cultural pressures, and philosophical questions become evident.
If that is the case, then applying psychology and geography to literature becomes a strange kind of travel. So this evening, I’d like to be your tour guide through a sequence of psychogeographies. Together, we will move through Verona, Denmark, modern London, and a ruined American landscape, but what we are really exploring is the psychological terrain of the authors who built them. Before we depart, I think there is one important fact to get clear. Even a quote unquote real place becomes unavoidably fictionalised when it is rendered in language.
Shakespeare is always a good place to start. In his tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, the action takes place far from the green and pleasant lands of England, in an Italian city called Verona. The play begins with a violent street fight. The civil unrest erupts almost instinctively, because honour in this world is public and governed by public space – the town square. Reputation exists in the street, under the gaze of others. For an Elizabethan audience, Italy carried romanticised associations of passion and vendetta. Shakespeare uses that cultural idea to construct a city that heightens emotion and accelerates action, becoming a kind of theatrical catalyst. Romeo and Juliet’s love survives only in hidden spaces - a balcony, a walled garden, a bedroom, a friar’s cell - because the public city is structured around hostility. Therefore, Shakespeare’s city of Verona can be understood as a machine producing passion and turning private feeling into inevitable public tragedy.
Shakespeare constructs a very different psychological space in his other tragedy, Hamlet. Elsinore castle in Denmark is a world of interlocking corridors, hidden observers, and overheard conversations. Characters constantly spy, conceal themselves, or watch others from behind curtains. This architecture of Elsinore castle creates a culture of surveillance, suspicion and of superstition. Action is dangerous because nothing is ever truly private. Hamlet’s famous introspection - “to be or not to be” - begins to look like the inevitable psychological effect of growing up and living in a space where every move may be observed, and every word or action is scrutinised. It’s a bit like being on TikTok. Written during a period of political espionage and succession anxiety in England, Denmark is Shakespeare’s exploration of power and paranoia, and the interaction between the home and the state. The castle location helps to manufacture suspicion and heighten the audience’s sense of creeping dread.
By the twentieth century, the relationship between setting and psychology has started to become more unstable. In his epic modern poem, The Waste Land, Eliot presents London as the “Unreal City” - a place where crowds move together yet remain spiritually isolated and dissolute. The geography fractures, just like TS Elliot’s language. London dissolves into desert landscapes and fragments of myth. This instability reflects the cultural trauma of the early twentieth century, when the First World War shattered belief in progress and coherence. Eliot turns that psychosocial crisis into a landscape. The wasteland becomes the mental psychoeography of a civilisation that has lost its organising beliefs.
Finally, in Cormac McCarthy’s late 20th century dystopian novel, The Road, the post-apocalyptic landscape is almost completely erased. Cities have collapsed, ecosystems have died, and the world has been reduced to ash and empty road. This emptiness creates a different psychological condition. Without civilisation to guide behaviour, meaning must be carried internally. The father and son move through a landscape that offers no structure except the moral choices they themselves make.
So, let me return to this evening’s theme. A Psychogeography of Fictional Places. Across these works, setting is a kind of psychological architecture. By encountering these places, we entering environments shaped by the hopes and fears of their creators. Literature, in that sense, allows us to wander through landscapes that exist nowhere on earth and yet reveal, with remarkable clarity, the inner psychogeography of the minds that imagined them. Perhaps also, they offer us a place from which to consider the kind of world we, the readers and audiences, would like to create.
