Stuart Hood

Stuart Hood (born December 17, 1915 in Edzell , Scotland , † January 31, 2011 ) was a British writer, translator and television maker.

Life

Stuart Clink Hood was born into a family of teachers, began learning foreign languages ​​as a child, studied English literature at Edinburgh University, and then went on to train as a teacher. During his studies he got involved with the young communists of the British Communist Party. In 1940 he enlisted in the British Army, first becoming a driver and then an intelligence officer because of his language skills. Hood fought in Abyssinia, Iraq and North Africa, among other things, verified information that the English had obtained by deciphering German communications with the help of the Enigma machine . In 1943 he was captured by Italian troops in a tank battle and taken to a POW camp in northern Italy. In 1943, after Mussolini's temporary removal, the Italian guards around the camp suddenly disappeared and 400 British officers found themselves in a precarious freedom. Hood decided to cross the Apennines with a colleague, hoping to encounter Allied troops advancing from the south. After a winter that he spent half as a refugee, half as a day laborer, he joined the Italian partisans in Tuscany in spring 1944 and fought against fascist militias and German troops. He has written an impressive autobiographical report on his war experiences ( Pebbles from my Skull , 1963, revised under the title Carlino 1985, German Carlino , 2002); and he has also reflected on the late fame that he had as partisan leader Carlino in Italy, with various political currents trying to win him over. After the liberation of Italy, he returned to England, crossed the Rhine with the advancing British troops and then worked as an intelligence officer in defeated Germany. He also visited Ernst Jünger , who was banned from publication and whose book On the Marble Cliffs he translated as a source for describing totalitarian rule.

In England he worked as a journalist after the World War, first with the German and then with the Italian service of the BBC , which he took over as director. He was appointed Deputy Head of News at the BBC's Domestic Service by then Director General of the BBC, Hugh Carleton Greene , and in 1959 as Program Manager for the newly formed BBC Television. As such, he encouraged directors like David Mercer and Ken Loach to make early television films and initiated the first realistic police series, Z-Cars , which aired in 667 episodes between 1962 and 1978. He was also responsible for the groundbreaking satirical program That Was The Week That Was . In 1964 Hood switched to a private broadcaster at short notice and then worked as an independent filmmaker. In 1974 he was appointed professor of film and media at the Royal College of Art in London, where he initiated debates about committed filmmaking. At the same time he published and edited various books on the new mass media. "Hood has made a unique contribution to the media sector through the diversity of his interests and skills." (Robert Ferguson)

Hood, despite his disappointment with Stalinist communism, always saw himself as an "unrepentant socialist" and therefore came into conflict with the superior authorities at both the BBC and the Royal College of Art. In the mid-1970s he was a brief member of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party , best known for the membership of the world star Vanessa Redgrave . He also served as Vice President of ACTT (Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians), the union of the media.

Hood had already published two fiction books in the 1950s, which he later viewed as unsuccessful. In 1963 the autobiographical report Pebbles from my Skull appeared on his experiences in partisan combat. In the late 1970s, Hood turned more and more to translation. In the immediate post-war period he had already met Erich Fried, who emigrated to London in 1938 ; now he transferred his works, such as the love poems . He also edited plays by Dario Fo and worked as a simultaneous translator in theater productions in England.

In the mid-1980s, at the age of 70, the literarily most productive phase of Hood's life began. He revised his autobiographical report, wrote five novels and two volumes for the series … for Beginners within a decade and translated books by Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others . The novels address central political conflicts in the short 20th century. The Upper Hand (1987) deals with the Cold War and the conflict of the systems; The Book of Judith (1995) links the examination of the Spanish civil war with the end of Franco's rule; The Brutal Heart (1987), recently published in German under the title Das verrohte Herz , deals with the German terrorism of the Red Army Faction . It is based on authentic encounters with German student politicians at Erich Fried and confronts the question of sliding into violence among the Western European urban guerrillas with the experiences of anti-fascist resistance in World War II.

Until 2005, Hood still wrote occasional articles and interfered with current political debates, for example on torture in Iraq, with letters to the editor. Since then he has lived in Brighton, withdrawn from the public eye.

Non-fiction

• Pebbles from my skull . London: Hutchinson 1963, London: Quartet Books 1973. New edition under the title Carlino . Manchester: Carcanet 1985. German translation: Carlino . From the English and with an afterword by Stefan Howald. Zurich: edition 8, 2002. ISBN 3-85990-039-0 .
• A Survey of Television . London: Heinemann 1967.
• The Mass Media . London: Macmillan 1972.
• Radio and Television . Newton Abbot / UK; North Pomfret, Vermont / USA: David and Charles, 1975.
• (with Thalia Tabary-Petterssen) On Television . London / Chicago: Pluto Press 1980. 4th revised edition 1997.
• (with Garret O'Leary) Questions of Broadcasting . London: Methuen 1990.
• (with Litza Jansz) Fascism for Beginners . Cambridge: Icon Books 1993. under the title Introducing Facism . Kitchener / Can: Totem Books 1994.
• (with Haim Bresheeth and Litza Jansz): Introducing the Holocaust . Kitchener / Can: Totem Books 1994
• (Editor) Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Broadcasting in the 1990s . London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994.
• Marquis de Sade for Beginners . Cambridge: Icon Books 1999.

Novels

• The Circle of the Minotaur; The Fisherman's Daughter . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1950.
• Since the fall . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1955.
• In and Out the Windows . London: Davis-Poynter 1974.
• A Storm from Paradise . Manchester: Carcanet 1985.
• The Upper Hand . Manchester: Carcanet 1987.
• The Brutal Heart . Manchester: Carcanet 1989. German translation: Das verrohte Herz . From the English and with an afterword by Stefan Howald. Zurich: edition 8, 2008. ISBN 978-3-85990-137-7 .
• A Den of Foxes . London: Methuen 1991.
• The Book of Judith . Manchester: Carcanet 1995.

Translations

• Ernst Jünger: On the Marble Cliffs . London: John Lehmann 1947. New edition, with an introduction by George Steiner. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970.
• Ernst Jünger: The Peace . Hinsdale / USA: Henry Regnery Company 1948.
• Ernst Jünger: African Diversions . London: John Lehmann 1954.
• Theodor Plivier: Moscow . St Albans: Mayflower 1976.
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Raids and Reconstructions. Essays on Politics, Crime and Culture . London: Pluto Press 1976.
• Erich Fried: One Hundred Poems without a Country . London: Calder 1978.
• (Edited and with an introduction) Dario Fo: Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman . Translated by Gillian Hanna. London: Methuen 1987
• (Edited and provided with an introduction) Dario Fo: Mistero buffo. Comic mysteries . Translated by Ed Emery. London: Methuen 1988.
• Erich Fried: Love Poems . London: Calder 1991.
• Pier Paolo Pasolini: Theorem . London: Quartet Books 1992.
• Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Letters . London: Quartet Books 1992.
• Gianni Celati: Appearances . New York: Serpent's Tail 1992.
• Aldo Busi: Sodomies in Eleven-Point . Winchester / USA: Faber 1993
• Enrico Palandri: The Way Back . New York: Serpent's Tail 1994.

literature

• Elizabeth Wenning: Stuart Hood. In: Contemporary Authors. Volume 152. Detroit 1997, 236-241.
• The Devil's Audience with Stuart Hood. In: The Printer's Devil. Issue N. London 2000, 11-37.
• Stefan Howald: pebbles of the skull. A portrait of the writer, filmmaker and translator Stuart Hood. In: Stuart Hood: Carlino. Zurich: edition 8, 2002, 175–205.

Web links

• Literature by and about Stuart Hood in the catalog of the German National Library
• Stuart Hood in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• http://www.stefanhowald.ch/pdf/uebersetzungen/Lesung_Hood.pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stuart Hood obituary . The Guardian . December 22, 2011. Retrieved December 24, 2011.
2. ^ Stuart Hood: Partisan Memories. History Today. London, August 2001, pp. 9-15
3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , download February 24, 2009. 
4. ^ Asa Briggs: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume V. Oxford 1995, pp. 385-387 and 427-430
5. ↑ http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/H/htmlH/hoodstuart/hoodstuart.htm , download February 24, 2009.
6. ↑ The triumph of hope. Andrew Bllen meets Stuart Hood. London: The Observer, April 18, 1993, p. 63.
7. ↑ Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography. London 1991, pp. 163-166.