YouSaid · the spoken record

Ruth Padel

lines on the record: 34
first: 2009-01-11
most recent: 2009-01-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“be an agonizing choice, but in the end I think I would take Cosi Fantuti because it is all about humanity, and that's what I think music is about.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, this is Melina. Melina McCurry had the most wonderful hoarse whiskery cigarette voice, and this is from the film never on Sunday, and the boys of Pyreus. And she's so vital in that. And it brings Athens to me. Pyreus is the harbour of Athens. And it's the ancient harbour. It somehow collapses for me a lot of sort of what of people I've known who loved ancient Greece and also modern Greece. It's the sea, it's the boats. It's, you know, the sexy evening time when the sort of violet shadows fall and the Uzo comes out and the clouds are rolling in over the grey blue sea. I just love this sort of slightly raspy, sexy smile in the voice. It's a wonderful song.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, she maybe I've loaded her with too much music. She was a fabler, she is a fabulous musician, and she played the violin. The next record is going to be the Bach Double Violin Concerto, which she plays beautifully. And I remember one evening when I was rather sad and we were at home. We were on the stairs. Let's just play the Bach double. And I'm a violent player. I'm hopeless on fiddle, but somebody has given us an extra fiddle. So we started off and I can't really do all these high positions. But it was a very healing moment. She was so good at doing that. And it's a wonderful concerto about the relationship of two voices.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of baggage, yeah. I'm not sure whether it's about expectations. I think it's probably about ways of seeing and ways of experiencing. I think that's what I found in Greece, in Crete particularly. There were different ways of feeling the world, which are not knowing the name of the plant, knowing the name of the song, but more immediately. It's interesting you always learn from the next generation when I'm with my daughter and we go to a play or something. She does not want to buy a program. She says I want to feel the play. I don't want to see who's in it and what it's about. I want to feel it myself. And, you know, I honour that.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“always been like that the early archaic poet Pinder is always sort of going on about money. Poets always go on about money because they don't get very much of it.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every poet would recognise that. What so interesting and what's mad but interesting is that the power of poetry isn't commensurate with what happens to it economically.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose it is now because you want people to think well of your work I mean for a long time for twenty years maybe mostly I didn't publish I was slipping around the world between Greece and England as you say but I like it when people say what you wrote mattered to me when somebody said that poem you wrote really spoke to me that's the best thing because then you know what you're doing works I like giving people things”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is from Cosifantuti, which is one of the wickedest and most sexist plots of any opera. I had to have opera, and I've chosen Cosi not because it's necessarily the most sublime of Mozart's operas, but because this little bit of it is all about relationship. And I think for me, that's what music is about, is about relationship. And this is the point at which the man who is orchestrating this terrible scam for these women is laughing at the men, at the young men, because they are going to find out that their girls are going to be unfaithful. I mean, in one level it's horrible, and one level it's terribly human, and I love the way that the counterpoint suggests the division of how the two people are looking. They're all laughing, and they're laughing.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're quite right, Custy, I hadn't occurred to me, yes, it did feel being tied down, and I hadn't felt tied down before I'd been very incoid. I think if I lived it again, I wouldn't have been incoid and nomadic for so long, but I suppose you can't wish bits of your life unlived.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not very good at thinking of myself from outside with titles and roles. I mean, from the inside, it was, you know, there was my husband and there was Gwen and there was work. We also had a dog.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In about nineteen eighty four, you see I never applied for a full time job. I was always too cagey about commitments to administration, as it were. And also a man called John Welch who runs a small poetry press called the Many Press. He'd agreed to publish a pamphlet of my poems called Alibi. And alibi means elsewhere, and it was my alibi, it was my other place, you know, poetry. So I gave up my job and I then went freelance.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was in Greece, a digging for the British archaeologists, you had to keep very, very carefully a trench book of what you found, you know, so what layer you found this bit of this shardin and this shard was very important. But the Cretent Diggers were a lot of them quite old men and they knew this wonderful mantinalas which a little rhyming songs which can be spontaneously done they used to be able to go on for hours just about what's happening to you there you are cursed with your blonde hair and what's happening to you while your eyes look like that you know I meant another singer would sit down and sing it just like that the archaeologists found all these sort of men that scribbled all over their dig books and I loved all that and I loved this song and this singer he was born in 1923 Caloridis he's an old master of the lure and of the Mountanada.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah. It's a great privilege. Sometimes it's a barrier because other people, it's been lost now and other people don't have it. And it annoys my daughter when I say but that word comes from so and so but to English it can seem upper class which I'm not”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of physical things. When you actually find somebody using the words that have been important to you or when what was on the page becomes real, it is magic.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was my other country. I mean my father taught me Greek, and then I did Greek at Oxford and so on, and I was by then doing a sort of PhD. And I went to Athens, then the archaeologists at the British School of Athens said we need students in Crete because we're excavating a trench and we need helpers. So they sent me off to Knossos. And there I met somebody who was working for them. It was a very important friend of mine the rest of my life. He was Cretan, he was digging for them. He didn't know English. I loved his language. I mean, I would stumble my way in Greek and say, are you afraid of something for Vassa? He said, No, I respect something, sever me, and that would be a word that actually came in Aeschylus in all the came from texts I'd studied. And there's this very, very magical thing when something that's been so important to you, if you're somebody like me who is obsessed with language, and who lives through language, and for whom words are.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is partly comes out of, you know, being in late sixties Oxford, dancing all the time to satisfaction to the stones. When I was at Oxford, I was doing a lot of singing and playing chamber music. But of course in life I was dancing. But then later on I wrote a book called I'm a Man Sex Gods and Rock and Roll. And where did that come from? That was masculine and it came from very, very masculine blues like muddy waters.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this poem is called Tiger Drinking at Forest Pool. Water, moonlight, danger, dream bronze urn angled on a tree root, one slash of light then garn a red moon seen through clouds all almost seen Treasure found but lost flirting between the worlds of lust and found an unjust law repealed a wish come true a lifelong sadness healed Haven in the mind for anyone hurt by littleness a prayer for the moment saved treachery forgiven flame of the crackle glazed tangle amber reflected in grey milk jade an old song remembered long debt paid a painting on silk which may faith.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that she'd brushed past and we realised we were at her back door this was her path. and a tigress, you know, the Siberians are the biggest. They're as big as a sofa. And here was her fur, you know. We stopped, andre was going on in this mailway, saying, I think she's over there. And yes, I think we're a quarter of a kilometre now. And I said, don't you think that's far enough? And the girls said, yes, and we were sort of now, it was up to our shoulders in this vegetation. And she said, and this is a tick, she said, showing on her finger a little. She said, I think I want to go back now. And when the girl who the daughter of a famous tigazologist said she'd like to go back, I thought I'd like to go back to.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they knew this tigress had young cubs, and they wanted to find out where she was, so I was with a young Russian called Andre, who didn't speak in the English, but his girlfriend did, and she was the daughter of a famous tiger biologist. The scary thing in that forest it was September, in dense, dense forest. It had ticks that carried Japanese encephalitis. They looked like little black spiders. They're quite scary. So they were there. But there was also the tiger, and we went up, and it was very, very rocky underfoot, and every now and then we passed a little, a little stream. And dense trees either side us. And it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It was early September, so it was just on the turn, fantastic forest. We were getting closer, and Andre had this GPS, and he knew that this tigress was getting closer. And we didn't want to spook her or upset her. We saw then these tall, sort of frothy purple flowers, and they'd been broken, and then we saw a bit of her fur on the tree.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found a world, many worlds, and also rhythm. We had a lot of books, and my mother was wonderful at reading to us when we were very little, and my father took over and read a lot of books together. I remember him reading me all of David Copperfield, for instance. There were also I had a book called A Thousand and One Poems, and I used to know those as well, that was always by my bed. I used to like the animal poems in that. I didn't think of myself as a human being, I don't think, for a long day.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“singing down by the Sallygon's a poem by Yates, Kathleen Verrier actually was the first record I ever had, and I treasured it. I didn't find it strange then that here's this immensely fruity voice singing these actually quite light songs. I just loved the music. As the leaves grown”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love walking the dog, yes, walking the dog is still very important. I actually learn poems when I'm walking the dog. Something about the rhythm, you walk along and you can get the rhythm of the words into you as you walk along. There was a poem I learnt by Emily Dickinson when I was on that damn kayak in Laos and I was so scared. I just realise what Emily Dickinson's dashes are all about. You can say a little phrase and then you go down a bit more and you wait for the next rapid that's going to kill you, and you just gather yourself, and then you know the next phrase is coming and the next phrase. And actually that's what poetry is. It's sort of going forward in this sort of dangerous environment life and finding connection in it, finding a rhythm in it, finding meaning in it.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he was away my early childhood because he used to be a classics teacher. He used to teach Greek and Latin, and then when I was about three he decided to be a psychoanalyst, but he had to do the proper training, so first of all he had to do whatever the equivalent was available then, and then he had to go and do an internship. So yes, it was very busy for my mother. She couldn't work.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in a way it's the task of a poet to get the reader to understand something clearly for themselves. A poem can be something that accompanies you. You learn it with any luck, you learn it early, and then you grow with it. People talk technically about poetry as a line of poetry. It's got feet in it. It's made of one foot after the other. And Versus means a turning. It's the turn at the end of the plough when the farmer comes back when he's ploughing, so that it's a turning and a going forward at the same time, which is probably what life is anyway.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very interesting thing and I'm very, very grateful that it was the viola that my father chose for me to play. He got us playing all playing stringed instruments. And it's this smoky, unheard voice. I mean, Viola is inside and it's like standing in the middle of a forest. I don't know why forests are so important to me they are, and listening to all the other things around you.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, one of these sort of kernels of all our upbringing was the string quartet. My father was a cellist, and actually my parents met at music camp, my mother was a clarinetist. This is my most favourite string quartet of all. This is Beethoven up one hundred thirty two. My father, when he was a psychoanalyst, used to say that he thought that you could deduce everything really from the relations of a string quartet, the two fiddles, the viola, and the cello, and I was a viola player, so I knew all these things from the inside.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A black one, a black panther. A black panther. That was because my favourite character was Bagira in the jungle book. You know, he's wonderful. Kipling is such a beguiling, seductive writer. Baguira has a skin-like watered silk and voice like wild honey dripping off the trees. And, you know, I wanted to be Bagira. And then a little later, I wanted to marry Bagira. That was a”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what it felt like. I mean, you know the beginning of the Lion, the Witch, and the wardrobe when the children have to go out of London to this house and this sort of magical house. That's what it felt like to me.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, she was wonderful the house that she and my grandfather lived in Boswell's was a very was my sort of paradise, it was my image of. I don't know, of jungle of wildness, of excitement. And it was in the Buckinghamshire. The house itself was magical. There was a sort of schoolroom and wonderful books in it and Chinese pottery, there was beautiful tang horse, great big tang horse scratching his bottom. It was a rough, rough ceramic in the dining room. But the garden was the great thing, and there was a gypsy caravan where I used to play for hours. I used to take their dog for a walk in the woods surrounding Boswell's, and there were sort of maisy sort of ew hedges all shaggy and overgrown and a great house tree. I loved it.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you say it was the attic. I think it was, but she, as a biologist, she thinks that I have a propensity to over-emanticise and over poeticize. And as she puts it, exaggerate. But they were living at the top, in the attic-y bit. And I used to sort of drop things down on the heads of all these people coming into the consulting rooms at the bottom of it.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is the Recordare from Veris Requiem. This is a piece that I've loved in lots of ways. I learned to sing in choirs at school and I continued in Oxford. And I love this piece. And actually, some mad reason, when I drove to Turkey once with a boyfriend in the little car that was made of fiberglass, and the top fell off on the way to Dover, so we did not have a top for this damn thing. And the clutch fell out in Bulgaria. Anyway, we got ourselves to Turkey on no clutch. And then we had to go into a garage to have it fixed. But while it was there, somebody whisked us off to a Turkish nightclub and had heard me singing in the car and I'd been singing this piece, the Recordari. So they suddenly said, Ruth, you're going to sing in this nightclub. And there was a poor Turkish accordionist who stumbled through trying to accompany me with Verdi's key changes on the recordari for Verdi's requiem.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in the good bits when there weren't rapids and things, I looked at this forest going by in the Lyanas and the green and the sparkles, and I kept expecting to see golden leopard cats in the trees, of course I didn't. And then I realised that, you know, he, my great grandfather, one hundred and fifty years ago, had gone on this sort of sea voyage, learning to understand how species came to be, and here I was, tragically in a way, one hundred and fifty years later, understanding learning to understand how they were disappearing, because that's what I was seeing. There were no leopard cats or birds in that forest, the people who lived there had eaten them.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very much and it was actually during that tiger journey that I began to feel most kinship with Darwin. Because, you know, I remember feeling it on the way down in some terrible kayak in Laos. I'm not a water person. I'm not a sporty person. And I didn't realize that I was going to have to go in a kayak for three days down these little tributaries to get to the Mekong River.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, I suppose the biggest one is the tiger journey. In two thousand two I started to go to India and Bhutan and Nepal and Sumatra and Laos to find what was happening to wild tigers. I grew up with Santis, so I'm at ease with scientists and I like the way they think. And so I went into the forests in the far east of Russia or up volcanoes in Sumatra with brilliant field zoologists looking for what was happening, for the signs of tiger, for hair here, a footprint there, a scratch, or a sort of marking on a tree, and I was trying to understand what was happening.”
2009-01-11 · Desert Island Discs · Ruth Padel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source