Episode 3

Available for over a year

How often do we imagine saying sorry to someone or wish they had said sorry to us, particularly if they are no longer with us? Poet Helen Mort continues her journey exploring the complexities and subtexts of apology, drawing on both her own lifelong tendency to over-apologise and on remarkable poetic apologies. She asks whether sometimes we apologise for something superficial or even trivial as a way of saying sorry for a more fundamental gap in understanding – for all the things that can get lost in translation in the messy business of communicating with other people who are different from us. Through Tony Harrison's poem Marked With D, she reflects on how apology can stand in for an unbridgeable gap between people – a failure to understand another human being. Producer Zita Adamson An Overtone Production for BBC Radio 3