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.

Iwan Llwyd : Aneirin

In a comment on my earlier post on the death of Iwan Llwyd, Hilaire asked about the poem below and subsequently sent me a copy of the Welsh text suggesting I translate it. So here is an initial attempt. Aneirin was the author of the ‘Goddodin’, a series of elegies for Brythonic warriors killed at the Battle of Catraeth in the Sixth Century.

Aneirin

With your camera and your helmet
you jumped down from the helicopter
a bare mile from the battle,

then escaped it squatting
in the nearest refuge while missiles
exploded in bits all around you:

past the burning skeletons of tanks
and the ashes of empty bodies, wounded soldiers
and the raw flesh which fed the crows,

you stumbled and fell through the mud
getting up from time to time to take a picture
in colour of a man killing:

in black and white
in Catraeth, Kampuchea,
the Somme and the Six Counties

you nurtured the magic of a familiar story
gathering the boys to answer your questions
their eyes following the lens’s prophecy:

you gave them fame to survive the battle
a glimpse of eternity
from the unbiased muse of a journalist.

The Philosopher and the Wolf

In his book The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands presents a mixture of popular philosophy and personal memoir from a time when he shared his life with a wolf. This leads him to speculate on the different ways that simians and lupines experience time. He concludes that while humans and, he asserts, other apes think in a linear way and experience time as something passing, so that they live as much in the past and in the future as they do in the present, his wolf, and he suggests other dogs, look at rather than through the moment.

 He concludes that we have much to learn from the wolf in this respect, that our superiority in being able to think about the past and plan for the future is bought at the cost of our inferiority in not being able to fully inhabit significant moments of the present. The moment of the present, as he points out in one of his philosophical asides, is an abstract concept that can never be captured as it is always passing. We may follow Husserl and see the present as an experience composed of the immediate past and the anticipated future (if I raise a glass of wine to my lips, I remember what was poured into the glass and anticipate the taste before beginning to drink). Even a wolf must experience the present in this way, but the wolf is better equipped than humans to take such moments for what they are rather than looking past them and so never seeing them clearly.

 It struck me that what Rowlands defines as a quality that makes wolves superior to humans is pretty much what religious thinkers and poets such as R.S. Thomas and Waldo Williams have defined as the supreme transcendent experience of humans, though he does not mention these writers. R.S Thomas’ “we have no business here but to disprove certainties the clock knows” is a major theme in his work:

…..  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, not hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to the brightness
that seemed as transistory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

'The Bright Field'

 This theme recurs again and again in his poems as well as his occasional prose. But of course he has to worry about it (or at it) as the wolf never would. And Rowland’s point is that, for the wolf, ‘eternity’ is now. It is also Thomas’s point in some expressions of the idea, but framing it in the context of the Christian expectation of eternal life rather takes it into the realm of what Rowlands calls the human tendency to live on hope rather than immediate experience.

 What might come nearer to Rowlands’ living in, and looking at, the moment is Waldo Williams’ poem in Welsh ‘Yr Eiliad’:

Gwyddom gan ddyfod yr Eiliad
Ein geni i’r Awr

We know when the moment comes
We are born to the hour

If the book is a vehicle for such musings on the meaning of life for different species, its main attraction has undoubtedly been the account of a relationship between a man and a wolf. This is interesting in itself and at times quite moving, though I didn’t always share the total identification with Rowlands’ narrative that it has elicited from some reviewers. Clearly, developing a relationship with a wolf takes some commitment (he used to take it into the lecture room with him when on the staff of the Philosophy departments of Alabama and Cork universities) and he claims that it was the intensity of his relationship with his ‘brother’ that led him to various philosophical conclusions about animals and humans (he also wrote Animal Rights : A Philosophical Defence). Could he have come to the same conclusions by owning an ordinary dog or even a cat? Probably. But he wouldn’t have sold so many books.

Labyrinthine Duplicity

Iolo Morganwg is often credited with single-handedly creating many of the institutions of Welsh culture, in particular the ceremonies of the Gorsedd of Bards and the ethos of the National Eisteddfod. At least some of the sources he cited to support the results of his antiquarian research were genuine, but where there were gaps he filled them with convincing inventions based on what his intuition told him ought to be there. For many years after his death in 1826 he was regarded by some as a valuable remembrancer of lost cultural artefacts (though others had their doubts even then), but the more stringent scholarly atmosphere of the twentieth century unmasked him as a forger on a spectacular scale.

Many have been troubled by the lack of consistency of a man who was both a champion of ‘the truth against the world’, a rationalist in religion and politics, yet a romantic dreamer in his creation of celticism and revived bardic lore. But why expect consistency? As a cultural historian he has been found wanting – or, rather, found out. But it seems that we are now at sufficient historical remove from his times to begin to regard him as a part of the history that he dealt in. He can now be set in his own context as a contributor to a process of cultural reclamation rather than a lone fantasist imagining the return of the Druids. He was, after all, as Prys Morgan points out, as much the heir as the creator of the revival of interest in Welsh antiquity.

His own very real achievements both in antiquarian research and in original creation were many. The initial credibility of his forgeries of Dafydd ap Gwilym and other early poets indicates that he was, himself, not only well-read in the style and techniques of strict-metre poetry but also a talented poet in his own right. Ceri Lewis suggests that his productions – whether forged or not – are “among the most splendid creations of the Welsh muse in the eighteenth century”. Lewis relates the development of the urge to forge from early impulses to ‘polish’ or complete early poems that he had collected. Later his wish to promote theories of bardic lore and the virtues of his native Glamorgan led him to invent examples that he thought ‘ought’ to be extant to illustrate his arguments.

His relationships with Owain Myfyr (who financed the publication of The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales), with William Owen Pughe (his unwitting associate) and with Edward ‘Celtic’ Davies (his rival) all indicate a man who was both infuriating to work with and ungrateful to those who helped him. But the fact that each of these men at points of strain had doubts about the authenticity of the early material that Iolo had ‘discovered’ only points to the fact that, when he was telling them what they wanted to hear, they were only too ready to put the doubts on one side and were therefore to some extent complicit in his deceptions.

If the very multiplicity (not to mention duplicity) of his dubious activities are seen as a distraction from the recognition of his own considerable talents as a poet, he is now being rediscovered as a free metre poet in his own right. By the time he had composed the first drafts of his Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain while in a debtors’ prison in Cardiff, in spite of representing himself simply as ‘a journeyman mason’, he also wished to be regarded as an accomplished poet. Whiling away the time in that debtors prison, Iolo had turned his thoughts to a poet called Edward Dafydd, who had lived a hundred years earlier. Then he went on to place the real poet in a fictional eisteddfod of 1681 at which a metrical system called the ‘Dosbarth Morgannwg’ was codified. He claimed this had been in existence before the 24 ‘Cerdd Dafod’ metres codified by Dafydd Edmwnd in 1453. Iolo’s ‘cyfrinach’ (mystery) was a metrical system that included accentual as well as syllabic methods of composition. Such ‘free metres’ accorded with his own practice as a poet when he was not imitating strict metre verse.

Iolo’s extended stay in London in the 1790s was intended to promote a collection of English poems and establish his reputation as the ‘Bard of Liberty’.  Poems Lyric and Pastoral (1794) reflect new influences during his time in London. Many of the poems were revised from earlier drafts, and not always to the good, while he awaited publication in London. It seems that even his own original compositions suffered from the ‘improving’ instinct. During this period of his life Iolo rubbed shoulders with many of the emerging literary and political figures of the time. He certainly knew Coleridge and it is likely that he was at least known to Worsdsworth.

Iolo Morganwg’s labyrinth of other interests (and they ranged from agricultural theory to architecture) is exhaustively covered in the 500 pages of A Rattleskull Genius : The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg  edited by Geraint H. Jenkins  University of Wales Press  (2005) on which the above comments are based. The book is part of a series on his life and work which reflects the desire to re-claim Iolo as a national treasure. And why not?

Dic Jones

' ... yr hen iaith,
yn nillad gwaith ei hafiaith cartrefol'

' ... the old language,
its homely zest in work clothes'

Dic Jones

Dic Jones, the archdruid of the Gorsedd of Bards died today. He was a farmer all his life and said in an interview featured on a BBC tribute

HERE

"I farm for bread and butter; I write for some jam on it". He farmed all his life and composed cynghanedd while sitting on his tractor. Nothing epitomises the unpretentious nature of literary culture in Welsh better than this.

Waldo’s Fields

“Yr oedd yr heliwr distaw yn bwrw ei rwyd amdanom”
(Waldo Williams)

Those fields – I’ve walked across them - they are
Extraordinary fields, though inaccessible to the seeker
After transcendence this is no loss for the page
Holds them in view and they extend into the margins
Between field hedges and the nets of the Hunter

In many places and times where time
Is arrested and held captive by a tether
Of stillness long enough to feel chastened by silence.
Sunlight touches a wall on a summer afternoon,
Shadows enclose a moment which passes from forever

To forever: Such blessings are felt to be precious.
But hearing beyond them voices calling in a common
Tongue of work and worship echoing through centuries,
And knowing that they witness this moment
When all is still, so that being alone

Is to be with them, resonates beyond solitude.
Voices heard in the echoes of whistling lapwings
Tremble to life over empty meadows; each hand,
Each tongue unique in the passing of time yet fused
In a moment making one of many things.

The ELEGY for Llywelyn

Following the discussion in the previous entry about David Jones’ inscription commemorating the death of Llywelyn in 1282, here is my translation of the Elegy for Llywelyn written by his court bard Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch . Some people in Wales still wear an ivy leaf to remember this occasion on 11th December each year. People also gather annually at the memorial stone (above) at Cilmeri near Llanfair ym Muallt (Builth Wells) where he was killed. There are good line-by-line translations of the Elegy, notably Gwyn Williams’ parallel text (Welsh facing English) in The Burning Tree (Faber 1956 - not currently in print) and Tony Conran in Welsh Verse- see here: http://www.gwales.com/bibliographic/?isbn=9781854110817


My free translation - revisted now from 20 years ago - does not follow the original line by line but does remain true to the narrative development in spite of contracting many lines from two or three to one and slightly altering the exact order of the lines in places. Although I worked closely from the original when I did the translation, looking at it now with the benefit of hindsight there are some things that I could have done differently. I tried to produce a readable and accessible version of the poem which conveys something of the power as well as the narrative of the original. So I concentrated on creating something that worked in English. The poem opens like this:

Oer gallon dan vron o vraw allwynin
(Cold heart under breast of fear sad)

am vrenin, derwin ddôr, Aberffraw
(For a king, oak door, Aberffraw)

Gwyn Williams renders the final “allwynin” as “pitiful”. Tony Conran uses “grieved” and maintains the use of the dash between ‘vraw’ and ‘allwynin’(a device used in some Welsh editions of the text to maintain the end-rhyme “-aw” which occurs throughout the poem). I abandoned the word together with the literal rendering of the king as the oak door for the idea of the heart of oak lying cold behind the door, though keeping the idea ‘strength is vanquished’. The “cold heart” reference also occurs later in the poem:

Oeruelawc callon dan vronn o vraw
(cold heart under a breast of fear)

rewydd val crinwyd yssyn crinaw
(lustiness like dried sticks which have shrivelled)

Pony welwch chwi hynt y gwynt a’r glaw?
(do you not see the course of the wind and the rain)

Pony welwch chwi’r deri yn ymdaraw?
(do you not see the oaks clashing?)

Pony welwch chwi’r môr yn merwinaw yr tir?
(do you not sea the sea irritating the land?)

Here the translation of the word ‘merwinaw’ was an issue. The dictionary gives this is meaning ‘grate (on)’, ‘cause pain to’ or ‘itch’. “Stinging” is chosen by both Tony Conran and Gwyn Williams while I preferred “scouring”. But it is the series of lines that begin with the phrase “Pony welwch chwi …” and other sections of the poem where repetition of a phrase is employed for several consecutive lines, that now seems significantly absent in my version. I chose instead to force it onto to a culminating “Do you not see?” in order to use English rhymes to emphasise the main verbs and used some repetition elsewhere to convey the effect. While a direct translation would have to replicate this, the attempt to create a new version has to make its own decisions about what works in the new language. Any translation is a matter of balance but the balance here is more towards what I felt worked in English than providing an exact but possibly awkward version of the Welsh. There is, for example, another section where the word ‘arglwydd’ (lord) is the first word for several lines, sometime followed by an adjective which would have to come first in English. I also departed from the first person singular of Gruffudd’s original after the first stanza to convey the wider social gloom which overtook the Welsh followers of Llywelyn at this time. The event signalled the end of Wales as an independent nation and preceded a period of intense castle building by Edward I who had his son invested as Prince of Wales in the newly built castle at Caernarfon.


*

The heart of oak is cold
behind the gates of Aberffraw.
The hand that gave gold
is still now – I cannot wear it,
the apparel he put about me.
This grief for my lord is a cloud on my soul
This grief for the fate that his wounds brought us
confounds the red spear of Cadwalader’s keeping.

For us now the darkness,
the hatred of Saxons
A time of lamenting
in the life left to us
A time now to praise him
to think of his glory
to reproach even God
who has left us without him;
For him life eternal.

What now for us left
with a full load of weeping?
The dark hand that felled him
haunts his kingdom; his hall now the grave.
A long vista of fear stretches before us.

Lord Christ deliver him
for the sake of our sorrow,
Heavy the sword blows that struck him to earth
Heir of brave princes, his flame
burned brightly: strong Lion of Gwynedd
Great was the need of the strength of his throne
All Britain was struck down with Nantcoel’s defender.

Tears running on maiden’s cheeks
Blood flowing from warriors gashes
and trodden into the mire of our land.
Widows keening with hearts broken
and sons without fathers, their homes
-charred ruins – fired and looted.
Not since Camlann has there been such weeping
Gone is our mainstay, his golden hair
stained with a death blow O Llywelyn!
My mind cannot grasp it.

Hearts chilled by a pall of fear
Our life-will withers like weeds in Winter
as the wind dashes the rains upon us
and the oaks clash
and the sea’s crash scours the land:
Do you not see?
The Sun falls and the stars are shrinking!
Can you not believe our world is ending?
O God, why does the sea not rush over the shore?
Why should this life trouble us more?
Wretched we are and clasped in fear
with no-where to turn and terror’s grip tightening
and only life’s shackles to loosen our burden.

All his followers now cast down,
his lords and his servants,
the weak and the strong, all of us suffer
Why should we value a head on our shoulders
when he is without one?

His head has fallen and with it our pride
Fear and surrender are all we have left
His head has fallen – a dragon’s head
Noble it was , fierce to our foes
His head is stuck with an iron pole
The searing pain of it runs through my soul,
This land is empty – our spirit cut down.
His head had honour in nine hundred lands
Proud king, swift hawk, fierce wolf
True Lord of Aberffraw
His only refuge

the Kingdom of Heaven.

First published in AGENDA (Vol 26, No. 3) and reprinted together with the original and the translations of Gwyn Williams and Tony Conran in Materion Dwyieithog/Bilingual Matters (1989).