All That is Wales
Page 31
Norris’s translations began to appear in the wake of Tony Conran’s collection of translations, The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, a watershed 1967 publication that excited some of the English-language poets of post-war Wales into a cultural self-revaluation resulting in a creative realignment of their work. No academic scholar, Conran was a remarkably innovative late-modernist poet, already beginning to develop into a major writer, and buried in the brilliant introduction to his volume (which covered all of Welsh poetry from the sixth to the twentieth century) was a practising poet’s manifesto. His particular fascination was with the way in which the defining values of a unique high Welsh ‘civilisation’, emerging in the sixth century, were thereafter inscribed for almost a thousand years in the rhythm, sound and imagery of its strict-metre poetry.
Conran was later to admit that behind his translation project lay a pressing desire to connect, as an Anglophone Welsh poet, with an ancient and modern Wales from which he felt painfully excluded as a monoglot English-speaker. He conceived of himself and his (and Norris’s) generation of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poets as internal exiles:
Threatened by both the ruling-class English intelligentsia we were trained [by the anglicised and Anglocentric system] to serve, and by the native Welsh culture that we felt we had the birthright, we tried to make room for ourselves. We wrote elegies for lost Wales. We proclaimed that the Dragon has two tongues. We translated Welsh poetry.4
To translate from the Welsh was, for him, not merely to serve a technical apprenticeship, as an aspiring Welsh modernist poet, in a variety of strange, imaginatively stimulating, forms and metres. It was to have his eyes permanently opened to a conception of the poet’s role, and practice, fundamentally different from that deeply embedded in the English poetic tradition. He was excited by his discovery of
the special relationship the poet has with his public in Wales, which is very different from the minority audience he expects to find in England. The Welsh poet is still a leader in his community, a national figure who appears at public functions and is constantly called upon to give his opinions on questions of the day.5
All this reinforced his budding resolution to write a culturally committed poetry. It should, he felt, be a poetry answerable, however covertly and obliquely, to the pressing needs of a contemporary Wales where a young generation of writers, intellectuals and political leaders was beginning to respond militantly to their country’s long politico-cultural subordination to England, forming in the process a common front between the long-divided Welsh-language and English-language cultures of Wales. Conran conceived of his Welsh–English translations in part as a contribution to this process, while they also enabled his own development into a meaningfully Welsh poet writing through the medium of English.
But what has all this to do with Leslie Norris? What relation does Conran’s example bear to Norris’s own poetic stance and practice, particularly as intermittent translator from the Welsh? Crudely put, Conran was the kind of committedly Welsh anglophone poet that Norris was both implicitly and explicitly concerned to define himself against. Nowhere is their polarised relationship more evident than in Conran’s outraged response to Norris’s ‘The Dead’, a translation of Gwenallt’s ‘Y Meirwon’. It was natural for a poet like Norris, who had, as an adult, so mournfully lived in his brooding imagination through the slow post-industrial decline of his boyhood Merthyr (a world-leader in the development of nineteenth-century industrial society), to feel magnetically drawn to Gwenallt’s mid-twentieth-century elegy for his own remarkable Welsh-speaking industrial community in a neighbouring south Wales valley, a few dozen miles to the west. So, given such deep instinctive affinities, what was it in Norris’s translation that had so offended Conran?
For answer, one need only set Conran’s version of a crucial passage from ‘Y Meirwon’ next to Norris’s. It forms the conclusion of a poem full of anger at the ‘explosion and flood’ that ‘changed us often into savages/ Fighting catastrophic and devilish powers’, an early experience that taught Gwenallt ‘Collects of red revolt and litanies of wrong’ (Penguin Book, 252). Such are the feelings aroused in him as he recalls the obscenely violent exploitation of a decent, God-fearing working class by the predatory world of savage industrial capitalism. The human suffering etched indelibly into his young consciousness was instanced by the plight of his neighbours, who were called ‘the Martyrs// Because they came from Merthyr Tydfil, the Town of furnaces’.6 In Norris’s version, Gwenallt’s poem then ends pianissimo, on a modestly personal note:
Here on Flower Sunday, in a soiled
Acre of graves, I lay down my gasping roses
And lilies pale as ice as one who knows
Nothing certain, nothing; unless it is
My own small place and people, agony and sacrifice.
Implicated in such a significantly modified ending is a ‘betrayal’ of the original that Conran finds unforgivable. His own version of the same passage faithfully conveys, by contrast, the authentic, unsubduable communal voice of ‘Y Meirwon’, with its principled refusal to be reconciled to the injustices of its past:
Between the premature stones and the curb yet unripened,
We gather the old blasphemings, curses of funerals past.
Our Utopia vanished from the top of Gellionnen,
Our abstract humanity’s classless, defrontiered reign,
And today nothing is left at the deep root of the mind
Save family and neighbourhood, man’s sacrifice and pain.
(Penguin Book, 252)
And once alerted to the textual modifications of which Norris is ‘guilty’, what becomes evident is how extensive and radical they are, and how they all tend in the same direction – rendering the original unaccommodated text more acceptable in polite company, domesticating its discursive political wildness, draining off the raw energy of its social outrage: in short, ‘sivilizing’ it to perdition, as Huck Finn might have put it. There is no mention in Norris’s version of ‘the leopard of industry’; of ‘the hootering death: the dusty, smokeful, drunken death’; of ‘Mute and brave women with a fistful of blood-money,/ With a bucketful of death, forever the rankling loss’ (Penguin Book, 252). Moreover, for Gwenallt’s movingly accusatory gesture of placing ‘on their graves a bunch/ Of silicotic roses and lilies pale as gas’ (Penguin Book, 252), Norris substitutes the altogether blander, and reassuringly ‘poetic’, ‘gasping roses/ And lilies pale as ice’ – which is more reminiscent of the set of La Traviata than of the terrible industrial squalor of the lower Swansea valley. When rather euphemistically mentioning ‘Death brutally invoked’ he even describes it as ‘death from the factory’: factory! – Norris very well knew that Gwenallt’s world was that of the terrible fiery floor of the tinplate works where his father had been burned to a cinder by the spillage from an overhead ladle brimful of molten metal. In that community, the mines had filled the lungs of his childhood friends either with immediately deadly gas or with the dust that so slowly and cruelly stifled breath. Conran, by contrast, faithfully records how ‘We crept in the Bibled parlours, and peeped with awe/ At cinders of flesh in the coffin, and ashes of wrong’ (Penguin Book, 252).
These modifications are worth highlighting, along with their implications, not only for themselves but because they point up one limitation consistently to be found in Norris’s faultlessly temperate poetry: its perpetual anxiety not to offend, not to raise its voice, not to be caught out in any infelicities of expression or discordances of discourse, not to disturb the carefully preserved decorum of its persona. Norris’s poetry seems to have its psychic thermostat always set to the same even temperature, possibly – one might sympathetically speculate – because he was a little afraid of otherwise losing self-control. A late poem such as ‘The Ballad of Self and Self’ certainly hints at disturbing inner divisions of the kind explored in Edward Thomas’s ‘The Other’. But whereas the movingly precarious equilibrium of Thomas’s poetry is that of a lost soul, otherwise unbalanced by its t
errible, disorientating struggles with depression, Norris’s poems never venture inwards (or outwards) any deeper than can be reached by a pleasing, controllable melancholy: the very conventionality of their structure and the predictable evenness of their tone seems to signify a determination (if not an anxiety) to stay within the reassuring bounds of the familiar.
As for Conran’s critical response to Norris’s translation of ‘the Dead’, it highlights another feature central to all his poetry.
Norris gives us personal sadness and protest that seems as much directed at the human condition as at deplorable economic exploitation [… his translation] tabulates the cost of fashioning for himself an uncommitted ‘voice’ in the English manner. The detachment of exile or ‘Britishness’ is one option for an Anglo-Welsh writer; but, just as much as any other option in Wales, to choose it means a self-wounding limitation on the power to see life clearly and see it whole.7
Setting aside the political animus (characteristic of its period) and a rival poet’s self-interest vested in these remarks, they still offer a shrewd insight into Norris’s chosen stance, and chosen persona, as a poet.
Shortly before his death, he responded, with characteristic kindness and modesty, to a series of questions put to him by a student of mine at Swansea, Linda Evans. These responses are very revealing. ‘My work and my life’, he informed her, ‘are recognizably lived at the edge of affairs, so the owl [in his poem ‘Bath’] and I are one, aware of our vulnerability and our position as sufferers and onlookers’ (Recollections, 23). He identifies here the passively receptive relation to his subjects in which he chooses to stand in his many poems about places, people, living creatures and the natural world. Like the Words-worth of ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (a lyric with which he felt an instinctive affinity), and indeed like the reaper herself who works ‘single in the field’, he was, for all his extraordinary talent for sociability, a loner at heart, his boon companions being his dogs. Deeply disinclined to be a ‘joiner’, he also no doubt felt his gifts as a poet could be developed only through careful protection of his status as solitary, ruminative and meditative observer. Therefore, as a poet, he felt primarily drawn to other poets (such as Edward Thomas and Norris’s close friend in West Sussex, Ted Walker) who had developed a subtle poetic style and language suitable for the expression of such a sensibility. Conran was accordingly right to draw attention to Norris’s overwhelming debts to a characteristically English tradition of writing, and Norris himself quite properly made no apologies for them and took no trouble to conceal them.
He was moreover fully aware of how unrepresentative he was in these regards of the Merthyr to which he nevertheless remained so inalienably attached in nostalgic memory. ‘The men and women of Merthyr have been fighting for years’, he informed Linda Evans, ‘against political injustice, against the rain, against poverty so complete that the only defence was to band together to jeer at it’ (Recollections, 20). Then, distinctively positioning his own immediate family outside the highly politicised world of Merthyr proletarian society (‘I am the child of farmers and gardeners’), he indicates not only that he would never wish to retire there, but that such had never been his ambition, even when he was a young man. His dream had ever been to live ‘on some small holding at the outskirts of the town, with some animals – sheep, perhaps – and a pack of terriers’. These comments should be connected to others he made in like spirit. When he emphasises that ‘I never felt like a Welsh poet in exile’ (Recollections, 28), he could almost be distancing himself directly from Conran’s remarks about the different forms of exile endured by ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poets of his generation. According to Conran, this had engendered a traumatic sense of cultural and personal displacement remediable only through their use of poetry (including translation) as a means of relocating themselves within their communities and within the ancient continuities of their culture. In his responses to Evans, Norris quite explicitly rejects this socialised sense of place and personal identity. ‘The poems I write may be placed anywhere I have been’, he informs her: ‘Place is important to me … but as manifestations of the living world. I am not aware of visible, tangible boundaries’ (Recollections, 28–9).
And yet, as his subtle late poem ‘Borders’ indicates, the creative conditions out of which he wrote were significantly more complex and conflicted than that. While still imaging himself as an inveterate crosser of boundaries, he now recognises that it is not a process similar to the easy flow of water he had noticed, as a boy, under the bridge separating Glamorgan from Breconshire:
Beneath,
the river’s neutral water
moved on
to other boundaries
By stepping the lines he points up the contrast between the troubled flow of the human mind and the river’s smooth one-way progression. As is made clear elsewhere in the poem, any human crossing of boundaries promotes a counter-movement (of memory – the essence, of course, of Norris’s poetry); a reflex action of the imagination in acknowledgement of what can never be really left behind – of what, indeed, paradoxically acquires a new immediacy in our lives by virtue of no longer being present. But whereas Conran specifically images a boundary as a place of (d)ejection, of internal and external rupture, a point of entry into painful ‘exile’ from the ‘true’ home of one’s selfhood, Norris instead conceives of the act of crossing a border in terms that emphasise the paradox of a ‘wholeness’ actually constituted by division:
I was whole
But felt an unseen line
Divide me …
I have always lived that way,
Crossed borders resolutely
While looking over my shoulder. (209)
This double movement is a fair summary of the trajectory of his imagination, and of his carefully cultivated progress as a socially uncommitted man and poet. And it explains why, of course, he should be concerned to protect himself, through his strategic (mis)translation of ‘The Dead’, from any historically deep and rooted attachments to a specific place and its people.
* * *
‘I did not think I was a Welsh poet’, he admitted to Linda Evans, ‘but a poet and a Welshman’ (Recollections, 28). This throws light on the construction of his mature volumes, where his ‘Sussex’ poems (and later his American poems) are interspersed with his poems about Wales and his Merthyr experiences to make clear his own, decentred and dispersed personality. His remark also helps us understand the nature of his interest in Dafydd ap Gwilym, who served for Norris not as a Welsh national icon, or as a signifier of the importance of the Welsh language, but rather as one valuable source (among many) of poetic reinvigoration. This is made clear in ‘A Message for Dafydd ap Gwilym’, at the heart of which lies a very self-revealing passage. He chooses to approach Dafydd via a recollection of a childhood scene. Invited to read ‘The Solitary Reaper’ aloud in class, so well had he done so that the teacher had mistakenly supposed he had already learnt it by heart ‘to spout at some eisteddfod’. The accusation is a telling one – the authorities’ implicit attempt to ‘place’ Norris’s love of English poetry safely within the contexts of a distinctively Welsh cultural event. Inwardly, the boy indignantly rejects any such culturally confining manoeuvre. What had made him so instantly ‘inward’ with a poem previously unknown to him, he insists, was his instinctive appreciation of its remarkable way with language: ‘It’s the words, of course’, he admits to Dafydd, ‘we can’t leave them.’ And as that inclusive use of ‘we’ indicates, he conceives of Dafydd and himself as occupying this same ground; the ground common to all poets. Regardless of their separation by different languages (Dafydd’s Welsh, Norris’s English), it is to the wonder and riches of language itself that both are irresistibly drawn. And there are yet further ties that bind them:
I’ve written, too, of those
Manifestations of the natural world,
Birchtrees, birdsong, the inconvenient
Snow, so often your concern. (182)
By such means, Norr
is detaches Dafydd from his specific cultural contexts, from the language of which he was the supreme poetic master, from his historically specific responses to the natural world, and thus from all those features that ‘place’ him at a distance in his essential foreignness. And in the process he lays down the terms (both enabling and disabling) for his own engagement as translator with Dafydd.
‘Like you, I am from the south’, Norris informs his Dafydd.
like you
I had (in youth) the pale hair
You boast of; in youth
I was slender and thin-faced.
For these dubious affinities, Dafydd,
I tell you – though you have no need to ask –
Dafydd, you are not dead, you will not die. (183)
That last, limp, line has a hang-dog air of embarrassment at its own presumption, as if Norris was very well aware of the dubious propriety of guaranteeing a poet whose genius was inseparable from that of the Welsh language survival in the usurping language of English beyond the life of his native tongue.
Since the political reverberations of this kind of genially appropriative approach to Dafydd ap Gwilym are unlikely to be audible to many outside Wales, it seems sensible to augment them here. By the 1960s the number of Welsh-speakers in Wales had declined from the roughly fifty per cent of the population they had represented at the beginning of the century to around twenty per cent. The situation was evidently critical and in a celebrated radio lecture in 1962, Saunders Lewis, a leading Welsh-language writer and nationalist reader, had stressed the likelihood of the language’s imminent demise, after the best part of two millennia, unless steps were urgently taken to remedy the gross politico-cultural imbalances between it and English.8 In response, a spontaneous ‘resistance’ movement arose amongst young students who formed themselves into the activists of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society). Targeting the fact that, ever since the Act of Union of England and Wales in 1536, the Welsh language had been denied official, legal status in its own country, the youngsters embarked on a peaceful, symbolic, programme of law-breaking (chiefly involving the pulling down of monoglot English road signs), and were duly imprisoned for their pains. In other words, from the 1960s onwards for a decade and more, the whole future of the Welsh language and its culture became a highly fraught issue, in the light of which the anglophone Norris’s untroubled claiming of acquaintance with, and poetic descent from, Dafydd ap Gwilym was liable to assume a controversial political complexion.