Poems as Stone Circles

​In the Foreword to The Burning Tree, his collection of early Welsh poems and parallel text translations (*), Gwyn Williams  argues that the structural patterns of cynghanedd and other features of Welsh literature are distinguishable from literature in English in the same way that Celtic art forms, with their interwoven patterns, are different from artistic practices based on a clear linear form and consecutive presentation. Where there is no no single centre of focus, but rather a number of juxtaposed focal points, what happens in a corner is as important as what happens between the corners. So any sense of a ‘centre’ is spatially dispersed. Often, themes or images are linked in ways which might appear to be incongruous, but in fact reflect a different way of seeing things in relation to each other. This, Gwyn Williams maintains, “distinguishes Dafydd ap Gwilym from Chaucer, John Donne from Ben Jonson, Dylan Thomas from W H Auden”. It is a distinction that  arises from “a different view of composition” from that usually found in writing in English based on precepts taken from Greek and Latin. But, he says, the early Welsh poets “were not trying to write poems that would read like Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals but, rather, like stone circles or the contour-following rings of the forts from which they fought, with hidden ways slipping from one to another.” 

For a modern example in English he cites the prologue to Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems which is constructed of 52 lines of verse with a returning rhyme scheme radiating backwards and forwards from a rhyming couplet at its centre. Dylan Thomas wrote this apparently spontaneously under a late deadline pressure after failing to meet the publisher’s request for the expected prose prologue.  Gwyn Williams finds the technique to be most consciously adopted in modern practice in English in the work of David Jones (whose long poem The Anathemata can be seen as structured in just that contoured way with ‘hidden’ links between spatially remote sections - see my post on his work HERE). Gwyn Williams also suggests that such effects can be observed in David Jones’ visual art, in which “a dimension is created which is unachievable in the classical convention”.

David Jones : Vexilla Regis, Pencil & Watercolour

As if to return the compliment of this praise for his work, David Jones is known to have used Gwyn Williams’ book in his own studies of early Welsh poetry. His copy of it, now housed with the rest of his books in an archive in The National Library of Wales (**), contains annotations to aid his own interpretation of the medieval Welsh texts, in particular of the Marwnad for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd which David Jones used for his painted inscription beginning Cara Wallia Derelicta:

Discussed HERE

Many years after the publication of that book, Gwyn Williams approached me to ask if I would be interested in publishing an article by him in The Anglo-Welsh Review, a journal of which I was then the editor. The article was entitled ‘The Paganism of Welsh Poetry’ (***) and it in he develops further his view of the distinctiveness of poetry in Welsh, this time in its subject matter rather than its formal structure. It may be a surprising assertion to some, given the amount of religious poetry that exists in Welsh, and the prevalence of the chapel in the social life of Wales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But his contention is that the spirit of Welsh poetry remained essentially pagan through the medieval period and beyond to the present. He cites “the delight in flowers, in birds, in the sea in its many moods, in wine and dancing, in love and sex, in the glory of the world…”. He sees a perceived closeness to Annwn, the Other World, as being more apparent than a perception of Heaven or Hell, and a sense of it being present in the natural world, and of  being able to inhabit it without going to a place of formal worship.  Dafydd ap Gwilym, he reminds us, often uses the language of the Church to celebrate a delight in nature as in his ‘Woodland Mass’. He finds the same emphasis in the urge to transcend time, asserting “what we have been conditioned to think of as past and even future is with us now, in this present redistribution of the human elements and in this marvellous world about us, a world our Welsh poets have spectacularly glorified.”

Like a slip-knot, a diversion in an interlaced design, a hidden corner of a landscape, a diverted path between those contour-following rings, time also slips, stills, falls through a barely-perceived gap, so that past and future are present in Annwn and here with us in the shared insight of the awenydd’s craft of shaping.


§
(*) The Burning Tree : Poems from the First Thousand Years of Welsh Verse, Selected and translated by Gwyn Williams (Faber, 1956)
(**) I spent many days browsing these often annotated books while a post-graduate student working on David Jones.
(***) ‘The Paganism of Welsh Poetry’ by Gwyn Williams The Anglo-Welsh Review No. 75, 1984, pp.70-80.

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.

The Crown and the Chair

The Empty Chair

A oes heddwch? Nac oes! There is is fact some disquiet in bardic circles. The two main prizes awarded for poetry in the National Eisteddfod of Wales are the Crown and the Chair (there are a number of other prizes for short poems). The winner of the Crown this year was Ceri Wyn Jones. Usually the Crown is awarded for a long poem or sequence NOT written in cynghanedd while the Chair is awarded for a poem in full cynghanedd, conforming to the rules of the strict metres. Some of his fellow bards were surprised, therefore, that the winning poem for the Crown was in cynghanedd. A quick check with the exact specifications confirmed that the words "not in full cynghanedd" did not appear. So the poem was within the rules though not, some argue, in the spirit of the competition. The feeling is that poems in cynghanedd should be for the Chair, not the Crown. Twm Morus characteristically contributed a robust version of this objection which played with images of a squirrel among Welsh Black bulls.

All this was compounded at the end of the week when it was revealed that the Chair was not to be awarded as no-one was judged good enough. One of the judges that decided this was Ceri Wyn Jones which was why, he explained, he couldn't enter a poem for the Chair. So disappointment tempered by a feeling that standards are being maintained was the order of the day on Friday. As for the Crown, commentators are predicting that future specifications will ensure that it is spelled out that it is for a poem in the free metres.

G M Hopkins and English Prosody

It is well-known that Gerard Manley Hopkins incorporated Welsh metrical forms into his poems as part of what he considered a radical re-think of how to scan verse in English. His correspondence with the poet Robert Bridges contains a number of references to the possibility of writing something on metrics and many of his explanations of his poems come from his letters to Bridges as instructions on how they are to be read. It is important to realize that, although Hopkins’ practice deviated considerably from the norms of his contemporaries with regard to versification, he was by no means writing any sort of free verse. When Bridges wrote to him comparing the long lines of ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ (from his verse play on St Winefride) with the recently published work of Walt Whitman, Hopkins replied to inform him that he was mistaken. Whitman wrote, says Hopkins, a type of rhythmic prose. Hopkins, on the contrary, produced highly wrought work of some formal complexity. That Bridges, who was for some time his “only audience” could not see this must have been frustrating in the extreme for Hopkins. He regarded the most part of English verse practice to be in a state of extreme laxity as far as versification was concerned. What he wanted was to develop a prosody that would address this lack and he sought to do it by analogy with music. What he eventually wrote for Bridges about metrics was a preface to a possible collection of his poems. There he looked at the metrical foot by analogy with the bar in a passage of musical notation and asserted that we should “take the stress always first, as the accent or the chief accent always comes first in a musical bar”. There should, therefore, be only two types of feet commonly found in English verse: the trochee and the dactyl, (i.e. a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable or by two unstressed syllables). Those brought up on the idea that the iambic pentameter is the standard English metre will no doubt be surprised by this, and in fact Hopkins, in his letter to Bridges about Whitman, concedes that the iambic foot of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable is the way the scanning of English verse is usually conducted. Hopkins is here re-thinking the way we scan verse to accord with his way of writing it, though he also insisted that ‘sprung rhythm’, as he called it, was buried in native practice and would be more obvious if we scanned differently. The imprecision of much English versification (and the lack of comprehension of Bridges and others to whom Hopkins wrote) only underlines the fact that Hopkins’ discovery of a rigorous metric tradition in the Welsh canu caeth, may have drawn him to its possibilities even had the sonorous possibilities of cynghanedd not suggested ways of capturing the instress of things in language.

In spite of the fact that, as Geoffrey Grigson put it, “Hopkins wrote for no public, had no care for publication, and as a Jesuit did not entertain the thought of poetic fame”, his attitude could not have been more professional nor his practice as a versifier less amateurish. His conviction that the chief problem with the poetry of his day was its slackness of form led him to a prosodic practice that was every bit as rigorous as poets writing in the strict metres. The analogy with music is also instructive as more than an attempt to make the process of notation formally coherent. Hopkins told Bridges that his verse needed to be “read with your ears”. The musical analogy is therefore appropriate also because of the extreme musicality of many of his lines:

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night in the white and the walk of the morning
(‘Moonrise’)

which seems as if it ought to be sung rather than recited. But it applies even where his subject is graver

I did say yes

O at lightning and lashed rod;

Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

Thy terror, O Christ, O God

(‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’)

The need to hear the line rather than rather than simply register its images and meanings is clear and the assertion by Hopkins that his expression was to be taken as oratorical rather than reflective is appropriate. Each of the lines quoted have equal weight and a system of indentation is used to indicate this. The further indented a line is, the stronger the stresses it contains. So ‘did’ and ‘yes’ in the first line are heavy with emphasis. The stresses in the second line are still heavy, and reinforced by alliteration. The idea is that the three stressed syllables are in total equal in weight to the two in line one. The next line has four stresses, again to add up to the same total weight so that each one is lighter. Line four returns to three stresses. The pattern for the whole stanza is 2-3-4-3-5-5-4-6 and this is repeated in the following stanzas.

‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ comes closest in formal construction to a long poem written in the strict metres in Welsh. Many of his poems are shorter, supercharged affairs with the sonnet being his favourite form. But in the ‘Deutschland’ he put together a long sequence which, in spite of the fact that it appears to be variable in its rhythms, has overall a tight formal structure. The poem also contains many lines that are correct or nearly correct examples of cynghanedd, such as the often remarked ‘Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey’ (a near perfect cynghanedd draws). If Hopkins’ theory of sprung rhythm, which is also applied here, aims to reproduce in verse the rhythms of speech, his formal innovations , including the use of cynghanedd, seek to reproduce a written language abstracted from speech. It is the tension between this desire to achieve a verse which can respond to all the complexities and changes of speed and direction that occur in natural speech, together with the desire to achieve a musical notation for his verse as constructed artifice, that makes Hopkins such a significant prosodic innovator.