Turning Tides

'…from within the perception of Welsh readers generally, if I exist at all, I am simply a tadpole in the corner of the pond, absolutely marginal.'

This is how Robert Maynard Jones (Bobi Jones, 1929-) described himself in 2003, during an interview with the magazine, Poetry Wales. On the face of it, it is a bizarre assertion. For it is possible to consider Bobi Jones as the most important contemporary literary figure in the Welsh language. His output has been prodigious. As well as a constant stream of poetry collections, Bobi Jones has published literary criticism, linguistic studies, short stories and novels - in his adopted language of Welsh, a language he learned as a teenager in Cardiff in the 1940s. All of that writing is profoundly influenced by his evangelical Calvinism.

It is tempting to see Hunllef Arthur (Arthur’s Nightmare, 1986), a 21,000 line ‘anti-epic’ as his greatest achievement. The poem has been described as a European masterwork. It is a work so long and difficult that few Welsh readers are acquainted with it. As Bobi Jones himself states: ‘I write for a tight band. That is my simple aim in publishing, though not in writing. My potential audience is miniscule, though I vainly hope the potential equipment is at any rate versatile and the subject somehow universal.’

According to the poet, the structure of Hunllef Arthur ‘is very simple’. Arthur, the semi-mythical British king, who is asleep in his cave, ‘has a nightmare which is simply the history of Wales’. However, the poet adds that ‘Hunllef Arthur is merely one part of a tripartite project. For me the complex experience of Wales (and every nation) must be time working through a unit of space via people. Hunllef Arthur is first of all the experience of Welsh time. A second long poem, ‘Chwythu Plwc’ (Giving Up) … conveys the experience of Welsh space. The third part of the programme consists of ‘Portreadau’ (Portraits)’.

The author estimates there are well over one hundred of these ‘Portraits’. Certainly they are the best introduction to this writer’s work, together with his host of shorter poems. But these too pose problems. No-one has ever written Welsh in the way that Bobi Jones does. Thus it is best to see the frequent difficulty of his writing as fruit of both intellectual playfulness and experimentation, and to be grateful for the wit involved.

Some tadpole. But for Bobi Jones that pond is of oceanic proportions. Indeed, this poet’s ambition is Homeric. Whether it is a delusion or not is irrelevant. What is important is that it exists. And Bobi Jones is a realist when it comes to Welsh. He knows a firewall cannot be built around the language. For him its future lies not ‘in one-sided protest culture and conservation politics’ but in ‘a popular movement of conscious positive revival amongst adults’.

‘Getting hold of the language itself’, the poet says, ‘is a positive transforming task. Our own just heritage opens out, the country itself becomes more complete, old suppressed wounds are healed, new wonders and relationships are uncovered, and a more sensitive comprehension of internationalism in a more complete and enriching world is opened up.’

How to sum up this writer’s poetry? I can think of nothing better than Basil Bunting’s homage to Ezra Pound’s Cantos. This, conceivably, might be applied by a modern Welsh poet to Bobi Jones’s work:

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?

They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,

jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,

et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et léger.

Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

‘On the Fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, Complete Poems (2003)

In terms of industry, ambition and intellectual drive, it is possible to compare the younger writer, Alan Llwyd (1948-) with Bobi Jones. A formidably prolific poet who combines free verse with traditional metres and cynghanedd, even greater has been his contribution to Welsh literature as publisher, editor and anthologist, producing a stream of publications over the last thirty years.

The National Eisteddfod, one of Europe’s greatest cultural festivals, takes place in Wales during the first week of August ever year. Alan Llwyd has been a dominating figure there, twice winning both its two most high profile prizes – the Crown, awarded for a long poem in the free metres, and the Chair, awarded for a long poem in the strict metres – in the same year. More recently he has had international success, writing the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated Welsh language film, Hedd Wyn, about a poet who died in the First World War.

Alan Llwyd also edits the Welsh-language magazine Barddas, reputed to be the second highest selling poetry journal in Britain and Ireland – an astonishing achievement for a journal with a potential audience of only half a million people. The Barddas line is simple. What makes Wales unique is its Welsh language. And for many, the most distinctive part of that language is cerdd dafod or poetic craft, and especially cynghanedd. This is a highly sophisticated poetic system of assonance, internal rhyme and ‘sprung rhythm’ governed by rules that can be traced back in part to the first extant Welsh language poetry, towards the end of the sixth century.

Although ancient, there is a renaissance in the writing of cynghanedd, with a lively performance scene that attracts new poets. Cynghanedd is not only a system of poetry, a unique linkage of sound and sense that provides entry into an extraordinarily rich sonic world. It is a way of thought and indeed a kind of philosophy. Many doubt whether it is translatable. Indeed, it is important for many that cynghanedd is not translated, as it presents Welsh people with access to a dimension into which the English language, whatever its other powers, simply cannot follow. This provides it with massive significance.

Twm Morys (1961-), an iconic rock singer and musician as well as one of Wales’s foremost writers of cynghanedd, now mostly forbids attempted translations of his work. The working traditions of the Welsh strict- metre poet, he writes, are at least ‘three quarters as old as Christ. His craft has become another language yet again within the language. His words have a comet-tail of reference and nuance’. For Twm Morys, English versions of such poems ‘lose so much in translation as to make the effort almost worthless, like passing round a bottle of non-alcoholic wine. Whenever I’ve seen pieces of mine in English, I’ve only dimly recognised them, like friends who’ve been in some terrible accident’.

This is a trenchant stand. Twm Morys’s manifesto might well be adopted by others. He concludes: ‘I feel that poetry is a discourse, sometimes with oneself, sometimes with others. When I have occasionally wanted to reach an audience that doesn’t speak Welsh, I’ve written in English. Otherwise I write in Welsh because I’m speaking with other Welsh-speaking people. If others would like to join in, well they can bloody well learn the language! The vast English-speaking world will be none the poorer for not being able to read the cywyddau of Twm Morys. But the little Welsh world, in my opinion, keeps a little more of its integrity if one or two of us elect to live out on the Graig Lwyd with Llywelyn ap y Moel.’

This is where romanticism and realism combine. But the concepts of the ‘last stand’ and the ‘last bastion’ are hardly new in Welsh literature.

Emyr Lewis (1957-), is another cynghanedd master. His work ranges from elegies in strict metres for local citizens – thus performing a historic bardic role – to modern evocations of city life and our televised wars:

yn gudyll ifanc uwch Argoed Llwyfaint

profais ddyfodol y byd,

  hogiau’n marw drwy drais a damwain

llygaid dall a gwefusau mud,

ffroenais eu braw ar yr awel filain,

tafodais eu gwaed ar y gwynt o’r dwyrain

a gwelais drwy’r oesoedd lawer celain,

brodyr a brodyr ynghyd.

from ‘Taliesin’ (Chwarae Mig, Hide and Seek, 1995)

A sparrowhawk, soaring, I saw

Argoed’s English auguries

and so predicted an army of days,

suns’ pale faces above shields’ black rims,

an empire built of empty eyes and mouths,

and I felt a wind cold as the corpse-skin

of our brotherhood.

From the translation of ‘Taliesin’ by Robert Minhinnick
(The Adulterer’s Tongue, 2003)

Emyr Lewis agrees with the assertion that this poetry is untranslatable. But he sees the value of attempts at English poetry based on his originals; poems that have grown from the Welsh yet have an individual resonance. Here he’s in agreement with Iwan Llwyd (1957-), another musician, who views interpretations of his Welsh poetry as healthy and natural. Translation to these writers does not have to lead to colonisation or appropriation. ‘Why shouldn’t one poem ‘seed’ another?’, he asks.  This happens in music, with its improvisational possibilities, all the time. Of the same generation, Gwyneth Lewis (1959-), unusually, has made her mark as a poet writing in Welsh and in English. She has also translated her own work, and sometimes creates new poems on the same subject in the process. Her latest volume, Keeping Mum (2003) includes poems, for example, which are essentially new poems in English inspired by her original Welsh language poems in Y Llofrudd Iaith (The Language Murderer, 1999).

Until recently cynghanedd was almost entirely a male preserve. Indeed, for certain critics, it was not so much a craft that required years of apprenticeship, a value system, an unassailable cultural redoubt, as another Welsh sacred cow, linguistic Lego, trainspotterish enthusiasm for men in clubs and competitions. Then, in 2001, Mererid Hopwood (1964-) became the first woman winner of the Chair at the National Eisteddfod with a poem that showed her own mastery of cynghanedd.

Renewal of interest in the ancient (and modern) sonic possibilities of Welsh language poetry is certain to continue. For the poet Bobi Jones, understanding cynghanedd ensures a taste ‘of the full reading process as a relationship between signs and significance’. To him it is a tragedy ‘that so many Welsh people miss out on it, suffering not only because of cultural deprivation […] which is criminal, but from not enjoying the thrill of being in the middle of a revival of our culture’.

No-one interested in the glories of European culture should be ignorant of cynghanedd’s existence. For those who wish to know more of what this astonishing poetry might sound like, my advice is to attend any of the numerous readings in Wales by Mererid Hopwood, Twm Morys, Emyr Lewis, Iwan Llwyd,  Myrddin ap Dafydd and many others, especially at the National Eisteddfod, which takes place in the first week of August every year. Several of these writers also perform their work at festivals in Europe and beyond.

In this intense literary milieu, Menna Elfyn takes an independent line. Certainly she does not like stereotypes. This is why she refuses to behave like a writer whose language is spoken by only half a million people. Since the 1980s her poems have considered our shrinking world. For instance, the poet’s chance acquaintance with a New York taxi driver, a Hanoi translator, and friends of a murdered Sri Lankan author testify to her own part in the globalisation process. One of the poems in her most recent book, Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss (2001) is ‘Bloeddier i Bobloedd y Byd’ (Let the Peoples of the World Shout):

…bydded i bob un o genhedloedd byd

ddysgu iaith esgymun ei gymydog.

…let each of the world’s peoples learn

the excommunicated language of its neighbour.

‘Bloeddier i Bobloedd y Byd’, Cusan Dyn Dall /
Blind Man’s Kiss (2001), trans. Joseph Clancy

Critics will point out that the problems of Menna Elfyn’s own native language stem from the processes of globalisation, and that few of the world’s peoples will care what happens in Wales. The fact that she publishes her original Welsh with facing-page English translations, and that some of her books come from an English publisher, are seen by some as an inevitable contribution to language decline. For a few, it is a form of heresy. Or betrayal.

Menna Elfyn is primarily a poet, but she also writes drama, libretti, novels and polemics. She has been described by one of her translators, Anthony Conran, as the first Welsh language poet for fifteen hundred years to make a serious attempt at getting her work known outside Wales. Indeed, with her bilingual volumes Eucalyptus, Cell Angel and Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss, the latter two published by Bloodaxe in England, she has set a daring and highly controversial precedent for making her poems simultaneously available in both Welsh and English.

Such a development was almost inevitable. A first language Welsh speaker, Menna Elfyn’s material from the onset included the political and international. She was politicised by the Welsh language itself. Causes she espoused included women’s rights, apartheid in South Africa and nuclear disarmament. In 2003 she published the children’s novel Rana Rebel (Rana the Rebel) about the life of a fifteen year-old girl, ‘a rebel to the core’, living a soldier’s life. Proceeds from the book go to an aid project for Palestinian children.

In the last decade, Menna Elfyn has become the most widely travelled of all Welsh writers, visiting and writing about Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Mexico, North America and most European countries. She has worked for the Disney Corporation in New York, collaborating with modern classical composers. In all of this she has proved a role model for other writers, especially women. It is not fanciful to suggest that women might have been seen as a threat to a naturally perpetuating, overwhelmingly male Welsh literary establishment. Menna Elfyn was perceived to be writing about subjects that had rarely been addressed by poets in Welsh. Rules were being broken. This role, and characterisation, might not displease the poet.

Her best work is found in the Bloodaxe volumes mentioned above, and in newer pieces in which wry and private meditations on subjects such as her daughter’s choice of jewellery are expanded to become poems on time and the inevitability of change. These poems are skilful combinations of light and dark, where points of serious irony are never far away. They might be compared to etchings that include high-definition realistic detail against sometimes sombrely shaded backgrounds.

Yet undeniably grounding her poetry is a sense of continuity with the past, and an acute awareness of modern life in pressurised Welsh-speaking communities. There is also an almost unwilling, sometimes idiosyncratic religious faith. For instance, she describes her father’s miniature communion vessels which he used when visiting sick parishioners. As a child, the poet toyed with these like a dolls’ house tea set. This is a typical Menna Elfyn image, one that courts criticism, whilst being simultaneously spiritually playful and self deprecating.