Devil's Blackberries

The idea that blackberries are not to be eaten after Michaelmas Day (29^th September) is linked in legend to the story that the Archangel Michael cast Satan out of heaven on that day and he landed in some brambles and so cursed the berries which ever since have been regarded as not to be eaten after this date. The alternative date of 11^th October is explained by the fact that this was Michaelmas Day in the old calendar.

The legend was put, obliquely, to very effective use by the poet Jean Earle who entitled one of her poems ‘Devil’s Blackberries’:

Late pickers – cut off from sunset

In a ditch of brambles –

From earthed heels let fly

Their lengthening shadows

That shoot up the hill behind,

To a view of the sea.

Far from their source,

These poles-with-pinheads

Stripe the glowing slope

Personalities

All their own. Pity they have no eyes,

Since they are here, to watch

The passionate tide blooding the coast.

The sun goes down, the gatherers creep

Out from the thorns,

Their shadows come to heel.

No one has put the sunset

To any use. Over the hill

The group bedraggles home

Shadows that go before them,

Berries. And worms.

These ‘late pickers’ inhabit the darkness while their shadows, elongated to the top of the slope, could if they had eyes, watch the sunset. Only when the sun has set do they emerge from the ditch, their shadows coming to heel to lead them now home with their wormy berries.

I find this ingenious. The striking imagery conveys a strong visual sense of the scene and the rather spooky dominance of the shadows. An ironic subtext lies behind the simplicity of the surface presentation: the pickers as lost souls inhabiting the darkness, their shadows guarding them against the ‘passionate tide’ created by the sunset (but with ‘blooded’ and ‘passionate’ suggesting further layers of reference) and leading them home with their wormy pickings cursed by the Devil, forbidden fruit indeed! Michael’s role as guardian against the darkness is subverted here and, as often in Jean Earles’ poetry, the dark and the light are construed ambiguously as contrary influences which we live with constantly and of which our unconscious daily activities usually make us unaware.

ENGLYN

Often in Welsh poetry an englyn from a longer awdl may be anthologised as a self-contained verse in its own right. Here's one from Gwallter Mechain (1761-1849) that often appears in anthologies on its own:

Cyfnos

Y nos dywell yn distewi - caddug
Yn cuddio Eryri,
Yr haul yng ngwely'r heli,
A'r lloer yn ariannu'r lli.

And here is my translation:

Nightfall

Night's gloom silently gathering - Snowdon
Slips into the gloaming,
The sun bedded in ocean,
Sea in the moonlight silvering.

J R Jones and the Welsh Language

In 1967 J.R. Jones, then Professor of Philosphy at Swansea University, gave a lecture in Welsh with the title ‘A Oes Rhaid i‘r Iaith Ein Gwahanu’ (‘Must the Language Divide Us?). It polemically re-stated some of the ideas put forward in his book Prydeindod which analysed the destructive power of the ideology of ‘Britishness’ for Welsh identity. One thing he asserts in his lecture is the idea that the Welsh language is an essential component of Welshness. But, significantly, he doesn’t assert alongside this that someone who doesn’t speak Welsh cannot therefore claim Welsh identity. Embedded in his argument is a crucial insight into the nature of language as a structural component of cultural identity rather than simply a functional medium of communication. Here is part of what he had to say in this respect:

One of the mistakes which has contributed most to our conditioning to restrict the language and its significance to the functional level is our idea that language is nothing more than a means or technique of communication. This idea arises from ignoring the dimension of a past in a language – the way in which it becomes, after being spoken over the generations by the inhabitants of the same region, a vessel to collect and store their past, and through that a means to form them into a People. This misapprehension causes language to be confined to the present. […..]

[…..] in the present alone, language is a technique of communication and nothing else, and either one can speak it or one cannot. And it is exactly there that language cuts cruelly through the bowels of the nation.

So what he calls for is not a functional solution, or even political action in the sense of politics being ‘the art of the possible’. What he in fact calls for is something which he acknowledges as, in this sense, ‘impossible’. Culture and language here are not means to an end but ends in themselves. Articulations of identity that can be made also by those who do not speak the language which defines that identity do seem to be logically impossible. But to some extent this has happened since Jones gave the lecture over 40 years ago. Many who don’t speak the language are eager for their children to learn it and acknowledge its historical importance in Jones’ sense even if they don’t consciously articulate the knowledge in this way.  That is not to say that Welsh is safe. Were it just to fulfil the role of the ‘Soul of Wales’ without having a body to inhabit it would soon become a ghost.

So maybe it doesn’t matter if the language is divisive. Better that than a bringing together for no significant purpose. But the insight of the historical importance of language (any language) in forming the structure of identity is surely one that needs to be kept sight of in our functional age.

Translating Gerallt Lloyd Owen (2)

Constructing the translation of a poem on-line seems, so far, to be a venture worth pursuing. Having all the mis-takes and bad drafts 'on the record' and giving others the chance to comment, certainly provides a new focus on the process of literary translation. Here, anyway, is my revised draft of the opening section of 'Cilmeri'. While not necessarily final, I do feel that enough has been done here to move on to the next section, with only a little indecision as to whether the first line should read 'Fearfully close' or 'Fearfully near'.

Fearfully close on a tree
As cold as death I see
White eye of a moon bleakly

Re-awakening the pain
Of life in his face again
Sallow-hued like a bad dream.

Presenting a wretched gape
Over the forest landscape
Hollow, despised, no escape.

I feel it in all my veins
His woe to the sky’s margins
And that his old wound remains

Even though the grave’s fingers
Can stitch flesh back together
Memory is forever.

Translating Gerallt Lloyd Owen

Translating poetry from one language into another is always a difficult undertaking. Clichés such as ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’ and the observation that has been made that the Italian word for ‘translator’ is very close to the word for ‘traitor’ indicate some sort of consensus that it can never be a completely successful process.

Add to these considerations the problem of translating poetry written in forms such as cynghanedd in Welsh, where these reflect the deep life of a particular language, and the prospects look even less good if both form and meaning are to be conveyed in the new language. The poet and accomplished translator Tony Conran undertook a translation of the whole of the work of the Welsh poet Waldo Williams. His volume The Peacemakers is a testament to the success of the venture. But he pronounced himself unable to translate the long awdl ‘Tŷ Ddewi’and the volume contains instead a prose translation by Dafydd Johnson.

Having myself had a go at translating some of the shorter poems of Gerallt Lloyd Owen, I have recently been trying my hand at his celebrated awdl ‘Cilmeri’ with which he won a chair at the National Eisteddfod. My translation of an earlier short poem with the same title appears HERE

Below I consider the initial difficulties of approaching the longer poem and report on ‘work in progress’. The first full stop of the poem comes at the end of the second stanza so the first two need to be taken together:

Yn fraw agos ar frigyn
Gwelaf leuad llygadwyn
Mor oer â marw ei hun

A diddiffodd ddioddef
Y byw yn ei wyneb ef
Yn felynllwyd fel hunllef.

The seven syllable lines are tightly packed with imagery locked into the patterning of cynghanedd. The main verb or the first stanza ‘Gwelaf’ (‘I see’) is delayed until the second line and is preceded by a hanging adverbial phrase: ‘Braw’ means ‘terror’ , ‘agos’ mean ‘close’. ‘ar frigyn’ literally means ‘on a twig’ but perhaps should be expanded to ‘tree’. The ‘I see a white-eyed moon’ of the second line is straight forward enough as is the third line ‘as cold as death itself’. In the second stanza the meanings are ‘And suffering was unextinguished/The life in his face/Yellow-grey like a nightmare.’

Should a translation attempt to maintain the syllabic form of the original, make any attempt at cynghanedd, and keep the rhyme scheme whereby each of the opening five stanzas of the poem maintain a common rhyme, only one of the three in each stanza being a single stressed syllable? To do all of these scarcely seems possible while also maintaining meaning and making a poem that works in English. Keeping just to getting something that might work in English I came up with :

I see, close, light
Of a white-eyed moon
Death-cold on a twig

Re-awakening pain
The life in his face
Yellow-grey like a nightmare.

But that’s not quite right. And I really would like to get some of the verse structure of the original in there. So how about

Terrified, so near, I see
As cold as death, in a tree
White eye of a moon, bleakly

Re-awakening the pain
Of life in his face again
Yellow-grey like a bad dream.

This perhaps gets formally closer, but am I trying to get closer to the feel of the Welsh or working on something that will be effective in English? It’s a balancing act. Because the original was driven by the patterning and soundscape of cynghanedd, and that meaning in Welsh is woven tightly into it, this a daunting task as the difficulty of attempting anything like cynghanedd makes an effective reflection of it in English seem impossible. Here are the next three stanzas of the opening followed by a draft translation:

Wyneb y diwedd unig,
Druan rhwth, uwch dyrnau’r wig
Yn geudod dirmygedig.

Hyd eithaf y ffurfafen
Y teimlaf ei anaf hen
A’i wae ym mhob gwythïen.

Er bod bysedd y beddau
Yn deilwriaid doluriau,
Cnawd yn y co’ nid yw’n cau.

* * *

Looking with a wretched gape
Over the forest landscape
Hollow, despised, no escape.

To the sky’s limit I feel
That old wound open, unseal
Woe in my veins to reveal

Even though the grave’s fingers
Can stitch flesh back together
Mind opens it forever.

These stanzas still need some work on them. The rhyme word ‘reveal’ needs further consideration. Attempting to follow the formal pattern of the original has wrenched the natural flow of English out of its course, but has this resulted in something nearer to Welsh? And what of the subject matter? Anyone reading this in Welsh would not need to be told that the subject of the poem is Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, last native Prince of Wales, who was killed by English soldiers in 1282. This poem looks back to other poems including the Marwnad by Llywelyn’s bard Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch. What is transparent in Welsh may not be to the reader of the translation. And what about that last stanza? The original has the line ‘Yn deilwriaid doluriau’. This literally means ‘tailors of wounds’ and utilises the effect of cynghanedd to present what is a startling image: ‘the fingers of the graves are tailors of wounds but, in memory, the flesh does not close’. Does ‘mind’ instead of ‘memory’ (to keep the seven syllable line) work? Much still needs to be done.

And this is only the start. The next section of the poem moves to a series of four-line englynion, and beyond that there are different structural principles employed to make up the series of recognised forms of the ‘strict metres’ over the poem’s 250 or so lines. It could be a long journey to the end and I have not yet completed the beginning.