Reviews

Precipice Culture

The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry. Twentieth–century Welsh-language Poetry in Translation. Ed. Menna Elfyn and John Rowlands. Newcastle. Bloodaxe. £10.95

The Adulterer’s Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: A Facing-Text Anthology. Translated with an introduction by Robert Minhinnick. Carcanet. £9.95.

These anthologies should help us decide the validity of Anthony Thwaite’s judgment, in a survey of British poetry, that ‘the difficulty of the Welsh language may be hiding from non-Welsh readers the best poetry being written in Wales, but one somehow doubts it’. What other culture today could one dismiss while simultaneously announcing one’s total ignorance of it? The most widely spoken of the Celtic languages, Welsh remains strong enough to challenge English dominance in parts of Wales; still the language of organic communities, it is not dead enough to sentimentalise. For those of us who prefer our cultural struggles thousands of miles away (where they can’t interfere with the second home market), these books make revelatory reading. The same cultures and communities that produce such different bands as Catatonia and the Super Furry Animals also produce poetry, and a great deal of it. That poetry’s potential audience, around 600,000 people, is small; its actual audience is large and engaged: Barddas, a Welsh-language poetry magazine, is outsold in Britain only by Poetry Review, while poetry is not only read but practised right across the spectrum of social classes in Welsh-speaking Wales. Welsh has a continuous literary tradition of 1500 years; the industrial revolution hit it hard, but so did what Raymond Williams called ‘repression, penalty and contempt’. We talk unreflectively about ‘natural’ language death; if what happened to Welsh is natural, then one would hate to see the unnatural. That a language nearly two thousand years old has waited until the end of the twentieth century to gain limited legal status sums it up. For all its vibrancy, a sense of threat, of living on the edge, looms large, and is reflected in both of these anthologies.
 
The first thing to explain to the English-language reader is the unique Welsh tradition of strict metre (cynghanedd) poetry. Forms based around cynghanedd, such as the englyn and the cywydd, are still as inventive and flexible today as in the 14th century. Their busy verbal textures have no equivalent in English – the nearest we have is Hopkins, who studied cynghanedd and tried to reproduce and codify its dense internal sound-patterning in his own work. Many of the poems represented here are in one or other of the strict metre forms, and inevitably some of the translations can be little more than prose glosses – valuable for just being there, but bearing as much relation to the originals as a fossil bears to the supple fleshy creature that came before. A contemporary strict-metre poet, Twm Morys (son of Jan Morris) argues that the ‘comet-tail of reference and nuance’ is what makes the poem but breaks the translation, and likens English versions of his poems to ‘friends who’ve been in some terrible accident’. This adds piquancy to Minhinnick’s comparison of translating poetry with driving without headlights.

Of the Bloodaxe anthology’s clear successes, there is T.H. Parry-Williams (translated by Richard Poole, whose graceful and precise versions have since appeared in a slim, finely-tuned pamphlet, That Fool July, from Shoestring Press) and Saunders Lewis (whose nearest equivalents  in English are David Jones and TS Eliot, not just in modernist pessimism but in cultural conservatism). Politically opposite is the Marxist radical Gwenallt, imprisoned as a conscientious objector, translated in his poem about the blighted industrial homesteads of socialist Wales:

Idleness a sour dog on every street corner,
 Workers tramp shadowless from place to place;
    There has come to the town’s Eldorado this finish:
    Neighbourhood scuttled, and break up of village,
 Roots of the South, a culture, a civilized grace.

Waldo Williams, another radical pacifist, is translated by Rowan Williams, whose version of ‘Die Bibelforscher – for the Protestant martyrs of the Third Reich’ retains its complexity as well as its force:

The earth’s round fullness is not like a parable, where meaning
breaks through, a flash of lightning, in the humid, heavy dusk;
imagination will not conjure into flesh the depths
of fire and crystal sealed under castle walls of wax, but still
they kept their witness pure in Buchenwald,
pure in the crucible of hate penning them in.

Waldo’s ‘What is a Man’ is simple and moving poem, translated beautifully by Emyr Humphreys:

What is living? Finding a great hall
Inside a cell.
What is knowing? One root
To all the branches.

An increasingly urgent theme in the second half of the 20th century is linguistic and cultural ecology. This preoccupation binds the mid-century poets to those writing now, such as Gwyneth Lewis and Menna Elfyn, who have reputations in English as well as Welsh. Menna Elfyn’s ‘Welsh Ice’ is, in Robert Minhinnick’s Carcanet anthology, a real success:

It starts at the pole in a kind of unlocking
and soon we’re a legend beneath a blue level.
They’re becoming the same, Welsh ice and spring frost;
so alike as they leave us, so soon to be lost.

Where Elfyn finds her metaphors of cultural endangerment in nature, others, like Gareth Alban Davies, find theirs in the world of industry: ‘And I listen to a town’s muteness/ After the Welsh that drove its wheel has failed, and rusted on another generation’s axle./ I measure time in dead Welsh.’ Another poet, Alan Llwyd, imagines the language as a rope bridge over the abyss of silence, ‘unravelling, strand by strand’. This is precipice culture: poetry of gnarled, often defiant, endangerment, and of obdurate survival; poetry which, for all its vigour, fights with a sense of perpetual endgame.

It is not all allusive or learned, however. Grahame Davies’s ‘Rough Guide’ is at once witty and serious:

I’m the wandering Welshman.
I’m Jewish everywhere.
Except, of course, in Israel.
There, I’m Palestinian.

The poem ends with a reflection on the risks and freedoms of Welsh marginality: ‘Nice city. Now where’s the ghetto?’. What strikes us from these books is Welsh-language culture’s awareness of the world at large – many of these poems are atttuned to international events and movements. It is often also, and perhaps inevitably, political poetry, or rather poetry that is, often against its own wishes, politicised. Through centuries of marginalisation, oprression and assimilation, Welsh language culture is political just by continuing to be. Some poets embrace this, some are weary of it, others try to avoid it (and in that very avoidance call it back to prominence). Nonetheless, the political and existential conditions of writing in Welsh remain fundamental to the culture in ways an English-language audience cannot comprehend.  The Bloodaxe anthology contains over 400 pages, nearly 100 poets, and 26 translators. The sheer number of poets and translators, while ensuring a variety of tones, makes also for a certain dissipation of effect, despite a strong introduction by John Rowlands. The non-Welsh reader needs a sense of how things fit together, of how the different strands braid together into a literature. Nonetheless, this is a bold, ambitious and  fascinating anthology.

Robert Minhinnick’s approach is different: he has chosen contemporary poets that lend themselves to his voice, and has lent his voice to them. Bobi Jones, Emyr Lewis, Gwyneth Lewis, Iwan Llwyd, Menna Elfyn and Elin ap Hywel constitute a rich and diverse introduction to contemporary Welsh poetry. Bobi Jones, one of the most important modern Welsh poets, is especially well served. His poem about sign language, excellently rendered by JP Clancy, is one of the best in the Bloodaxe anthology, while Minhinnick’s versions take grand sweeping liberties of line and language. Minhinnick’s version of Jones’s ‘Wasp’ (‘Cacynen’) gives a sense of his book’s energy and freedom:

How she disapproves of walls.
She’s a steamsnake that crawls about

the glowering air, doing what she does best,
murdering a mood. Follow her self-important trail

like quotation marks of snakespit under the drapes.
She’s a talon traped and tappping on the glass…

Two poets, Emyr Lewis and Elin ap Hywel, derive inspiration and images from Welsh mythology. Lewis’s ‘Taliesin’ merges mythical past with cataclysmic present in one long continuity of carnage:

Not long ago
I was an albatross, patient above Port Stanley,
Seeing Galtieri’s boys
discover what the end of time feels like.
And now here comes another crowd,
their boots melting on the Baghdad road,
and the whole world watching
through a dodo’s eye.

Elin ap Hywel is represented by two poems from the Rhiannon sequence, based on the Mabinogion. Minhinnick brings out nicely her mix of otherworldy, mythical past and troubling concreteness of effect:

One hundred years passed.
Now I hear horses, the hounds’ music

And time splits like a blade
slashing daylight through a girl’s dress.
But all the stitching cannot stop me: I step
from the picture out into the blazing world.

Of the poets in this book, only Gwyneth Lewis, who writes both in and between Welsh and English, and Menna Elfyn (a Bloodaxe poet with two bilingual collections), are likely to be known to the English-language reader. The other poets are equally fine, and in Minhinnick’s versions retain their singularity and strangeness while adding something to contemporary poetry in English. The Adulterer’s Tongue has an intensity of vision, but also a fruitful doubleness of effect: first, because of the anthology’s smaller scale; second, because of Mihinnick’s own strong voice, able as necessary to step back and let the translation happen and to step in and force things through. There are bound to be purists’ quibbles about where he stops translating and begins adapting. These are of no interest to the reader for whom all this is new and exciting.

These anthologies introduce us to a minority culture that has maintained its radicalism, its nonconformism and above all, its language, against the odds. One function of translation is to open a window onto another world, and this world begins just two hours from London. Minhinnick laments that Welsh culture is ‘at best a rumour, at worst a secret’ in the English view of Britain (not to mention the English view of Wales itself). He’s right - it’s not just that Britain doesn’t look outwards, but that it doesn’t even look inwards in the right ways. Perhaps books like these will go some way towards changing that.

Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness’s won and Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 1998, and in 2003 won the Levinson Prize  for poetry. His first book of poems, The Canals of Mars, is published by Carcanet , and his translation of Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. He is editing Lynettte Roberts’s Collected Poems, also for Carcanet, due to appear in November 2005. He is a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford.