All That is Wales
Page 32
In such a context, to remain politically uncommitted could itself seem tantamount to taking a political stand. And Norris’s implicit supposition, as translator, that Dafydd ap Gwilym could be comfortably ‘normalised’ – that is, rendered into English without any undue disturbance to any of the prevailing conventions of English writing – could seem like an act of linguistic colonisation. Here, again, Norris’s concept of Welsh–English translation contrasts sharply with that of Conran. In a remarkable poem prefacing the second edition of his collection of translations, he styled himself ‘The Good Thief’, and insisted that ‘to translate a poem’ was not ‘treason’, but ‘to walk in its [foreign] land’.9 He was underlining the point he’d made decades earlier; that through the act of translation, English had to be made foreign to itself before it could begin to mediate the different world view inscribed in the Welsh-language literary tradition at its greatest. It is, of course, the kind of point that would not have been lost on Pound.
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But before turning to Norris’s translations of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s cywyddau, it would be useful first to consider his version of ‘The Old Age of Llywarch Hen’, because, like ‘The Dead’, it instances how ready he was to adjust his Welsh sources to bring them into line with his own poetic needs, talents and concerns. Llywarch, an old ‘crook-backed’ warrior, has sent each of his sons in turn to his death in a vain attempt to regain the family’s lost kingdom, and now, in a lament laced with anger, frustration, resentment and self-contempt, reflects on his own impotence. His heavily monosyllabic, and correspondingly strongly accentuated, song, its limiting, inexorably recurrent rhymes mirroring Llywarch’s restricted circumstances, conveys the bleakness of his world and situation:
Wyf hen; wyf unig, wyf annelwig oer
Gwedi gwely ceinmyg,
Wyf truan, wyf tri dyblyg.10
Something of this harshness is captured by the distinguished American translator, Joseph Clancy:
Wind brisk; white the fringe of the trees,
Stag bold; hillside hard.
Frail the old man, rouses slowly.11
The imagistic terseness of this conducts us into a world irreducibly remote yet familiar. Norris, in contrast, produces a modern, bourgeois, domesticated version of what was a heroic world:
I see in the evening the fire-smoke climb
And the earlier dusk send the children home
To their cool beds, their milk, their mothers’ warm
Love in the hospitable room of youth. (14)
A poetry relaxing, sometimes all too readily, into the reassuring comfort of nostalgia: this is a staple characteristic of Norris’s writing. His instinct when translating Llywarch Hen is, therefore, to let his verse expand into sentiments totally foreign to the old warrior but congenial to Norris himself.
Crutch there, do you hear the loud winter?
Young men go to the inn, singing as they enter,
But here in my room is the world’s lonely centre
Where the voices of the young are the voices
of ghosts
Norris’s capture of the imprisoning couplet that concludes each of Llywarch’s stanzas is unfailingly deft, but in his hands its effect is to suggest the soft folds of sad memory, and by using enjambement Norris allows his verse to escape into the freedom of wistful recollection. The overall impression is of a Hemingway who has suddenly metamorphosed into a soft-core Proust.
* * *
And so to Dafydd ap Gwilym. According to Rob Buchert, ‘at one time [Leslie] intended to make a complete translation of the ap Gwilym oeuvre, but abandoned the idea, deciding that some of the originals weren’t worth the effort’.12 It’s an intriguing thought. It would have been easier to believe that he found the whole of Dafydd (including his cywydd to his penis) altogether too much to handle. One must accept, of course, that Norris could never have hoped to capture in his translations those unruly and unpredictable energies of Dafydd’s verse that are generated by the nuclear fission of vowels and consonants made possible only by cynghanedd. That granted, there remains the question of what kind of Dafydd ap Gwilym we encounter in Norris’s versions; and the answer is a Dafydd created very much in Norris’s own image.13
However, his poetic relationship to Dafydd is interestingly different from his relationship to Llywarch. Whereas he comfortably assimilates the latter to the familiar norms of his customary style, Dafydd’s poetry licenses and releases in him modes of feeling and expression nowhere else to be found in his poetry. This results in some notably attractive writing, as in the following example from ‘The Thrush Singing’:
Brook-clear, carol-call, day-bright,
Music lucid as light
He sang again and again,
Of happiness without pain. (100)
Although in that last line one feels the gravitational pull towards the depressive that is omnipresent in Norris’s poetry and wholly absent from Dafydd’s, the first two lines, in particular, convey an unguarded rapture one does not readily associate with Norris. The effect is created not only by the compound words but also by the way he here modifies the cywydd couplet (seven-syllable lines grouped into pairs in which the final, rhyming syllables alternate between the masculine and feminine in accentuation). Norris is notably dexterous at handling this unusual form in English, but here he deliberately shortens the second line to six syllables as well as substituting for the densely accented, and primarily spondaic, previous line an altogether lighter, prevailingly trochaic rhythm. The effect is like the clearing of the air to which ‘lucid’ alludes. There is no hint here of the elegiac anapaests of which Norris tends otherwise to be over-fond – Dafydd ap Gwilym’s vision and poetic doesn’t allow of that.
A different kind of lightness also enters Norris’s verse – the lightness of wit. It surfaces, for instance, in Dafydd’s poem to the fox:
the curse of our kennel,
A sly fox, red animal,
Sitting there on his haunches
As tame as a tortoise. (155)
Later in the poem this humour turns comic, as Dafydd indulges in one of his favourite devices – self-mocking invective:
Then my fury at that fox,
That marauder of meek-ducks,
That harrier of fat hens,
That glutton of goose-pens! (156)
There is for Norris an unwonted gusto in this writing, and it is quickly succeeded by an equally uncharacteristic turn of his verse towards the grotesque, as he tracks Dafydd’s quicksilver movements and captures his shape-shifting poetic persona:
He glows against the gravel.
Ape-faced he flits the furrows,
Stalking like a stupid goose. (156)
One of Dafydd’s most virtuosic features is his ability to turn barddas, classic strict-metre poetry with the strictest and most complex body of required poetic devices, into a medium for apparently unfettered spontaneity and improvisation. Whereas Norris cannot, of course, convey this productive tension, he is at times able to capture the brio of Dafydd’s response to the natural world, as in the following stanza from his version of ‘The Fox’:
Scaring crows at the hill’s rim,
Acre-leaper, red as flame,
Observed by the birds’ high eyes,
A dragon from old stories,
A tumult among feathers,
A red pelt, a torch of furs,
Traveller in earth’s hollow
Red glow at a closed window,
A copper-box with quick tread,
Bloody pincers in his head. (156)
He has even managed to convey something of the exhilarating changes of direction of the original by mixing obediently perfect rhyme (‘tread/ head’) with a range of deliberately imperfect, or off-centre, rhymes (‘rim/flame’; ‘eyes/stories’; ‘feathers/furs’). In thus suggesting the elusiveness of the creature, the way it eludes full capture even by the imagination, he is able to register the completely untameable ‘otherness’ of the natural world better, perhaps, than an
ywhere else in his poetry.
In his reply to Linda Evans’s questions, Norris confessed that he had been
consistent in writing elegies, not only for friends, but also for the passing of the natural world. I am by temperament a man for whom life is the great miracle, and the possibility, but not the inevitability, of eternity exists in the visibility and the sensuous recognition of the living principle. So in my small, individual way I make sure that I honour it in what words I have. (Recollections, 19)
He attributed this elegiac, cautiously mystical turn in his approach to nature to the early influence of Wordsworth. Reading his translations of Dafydd ap Gwilym, one wonders what sort of poet he might have become had his earliest, most formative, encounters been with Dafydd’s poetry instead. Dafydd’s world is a wild one in constant motion. It never stays still long enough for him to ponder it at his leisure. It is no place for leisurely reflection and rumination. To enter that emotionally and linguistically mobile world, however briefly, seems to me to have been both a lesson and a tonic for Norris.
By adopting the persona of Dafydd ap Gwilym, Norris was able also to free himself not only from old, and otherwise ingrained, poetic habits but from certain inhibitions. His poem ‘The Owl’, he confided to Linda Evans, was a ‘hidden love poem, since I am not capable of writing such a poem openly, for anyone to read’ (Recollections, 23). By contrast, Dafydd ap Gwilym was as great a love poet as may be found in any language, and wholly up-front about it. It’s intriguing, therefore, that Norris should have chosen to translate such a poem as ‘The Spear’, a brilliantly idiosyncratic, typically tongue-in-cheek, improvisation on the courtly love convention of the fatal wounding of the lover by his mistress’s beauty. In Norris’s version, it opens as follows:
I saw her there, her fair hair
Pale as foam, as white water,
From to head to toe perfection
More radiant than day-dawn. (157)
There are at least the glimmerings, in those opening two lines, of a sensuous, and indeed erotic, response entirely foreign to Norris’s usual poetic sensibility, as the supple, cupping, phrasing seems to enact (‘there…hair; her… hair; fair…foam’) a sonic moulding of the girl’s physical beauty. And with like unexpected effect, and perhaps for the same instinctively self-liberating reason, Norris turns to one of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s genuinely devout religious poems:
Sanguis Christi, salva me.
Christ’s blood, lest for wildness – I am sent
Into the wilderness,
Then rise, light of God’s praise,
And keep me from drunkenness. (162)
In its way, this is quite a tour de force, as it approximates, at least in skeletal form (minus the internal sonic texture), to an englyn, one of the classic forms of barddas (classical strict-metre poetry). Whereas the first line is taken from the Latin mass, the next four constitute the englyn itself. This consists of four lines that are expected to be roughly ten, six and seven syllables in length respectively. The first line is split into two unequal parts, the rhyming word (‘wildness’) occurring at the end of the first part, while the second part is treated as the effective beginning of the second line. In the englyn proper, it is required that this physically ‘split’ line be sonically united by a single approved pattern of recurrent sounds. While retaining some, at least, of these definitive features of the englyn, Norris has also managed to construct a genuinely affecting English poem of intense spiritual petition.
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These, then, are some of the notable consequences for Norris of his adoption of Dafydd ap Gwilym as his persona and of Dafydd’s poetry as his model. Not that he was by any means alone among poets of his post-war generation to be interested in Dafydd, Harri Webb and Dannie Abse, for example, being others with the same enthusiasm. But of greatest significant in the present context is the use made of Dafydd ap Gwilym by Glyn Jones, one of Norris’s very closest friends. Born in Merthyr, educated at the Cyfarthfa Castle School, a lifelong devotee of his childhood locality, Jones – poet, novelist, short-story writer and occasional essayist and critic – was Norris’s Welsh alter ego. Born in 1905, and therefore sixteen years older than Norris, Jones had been drawn, in the early 1930s, into briefly close friendship with Dylan Thomas through their common passion – exotic by the standards of industrial and puritan south Wales – for outré forms of art and of writing. Unlike the bohemian and cosmopolitan Thomas, however, Jones remained all his life undemonstratively conventional in conduct, extremely modest about his own substantial talents, and invariably loyal and generous in his many friendships with others. In his enigmatic person he blended a violent imagination with a great courtesy, considerateness and gentleness of personal bearing. Several of his short stories remain neglected classics of the comic grotesque, and he was also a restlessly innovative poet of considerable imaginative daring. Unlike Norris, he remained firmly Wales-based and Wales-committed throughout his long life and troubled to relearn Welsh in his twenties in order to gain access to a body of literature he regarded as of primary importance, not only within the European tradition, but also specifically for modern anglophone Welsh writers such as himself.
In 1973 Norris published an attractive brief study of his friend’s life and work. It is studded with generalisations about ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers that, while questionable in themselves, amount to an oblique self-portrait of Norris. Thus he claims that ‘a passion for the visible is an Anglo-Welsh characteristic’, resulting in Jones’s case in a poetry that is ‘at once lyrical and precise, highly individual yet immediate and immensely accurate’.14 ‘The Welsh’, he elsewhere asserts, ‘have often been slow developers as poets; or rather, however good they have been in their youth, retain the capacity for growth and change and development even into old age, a marvellous faculty, forbidden to most English poets’ (Glyn Jones, 83). And he appreciates how Jones ‘relies on a largely intuitive approach, feeling and realising the texture of his sentences as if they were woven and coloured’ (Glyn Jones, 29). But while Norris thus seems implicitly to identify himself, too, as an ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poet, there are places where he is evidently concerned to place a distance between himself and the culture in which his friend seemed to him perhaps over-securely embedded.
Certainly [Glyn Jones] is the very personification of the Anglo-Welsh writer, for he draws upon the traditions of both literatures, he can use both languages; and he is truly a Welshman writing in English of men and matters which are wholly Welsh. As he says of himself, ‘While using cheerfully enough the English language, I have never written in it a word about any country other than Wales or any people other than the Welsh people.’ (Glyn Jones, 11)
As a young, belatedly modernist writer in the early 1930s, Glyn Jones had been galvanised by his discovery in Dafydd ap Gwilym’s writing of a kind of Welsh proto-modernist style. This discovery was to prove of long-lasting consequence for the development of his own aesthetic as a writer. But while thus feeling the deepest creative affinity with Dafydd, he also felt considerable guilt about such an association. Dafydd had been an aristocrat serving a highly hierarchical society, whereas Jones was a committed socialist; and whereas Dafydd’s language had been Welsh, that of Jones was English, the very language that threatened to relegate Dafydd and his whole culture to oblivion. His relation to Dafydd ap Gwilym was, therefore, in its tense ambivalence, opposite in character to that of Norris. The deep mixture of his feelings is captured in his splendid poem, ‘Henffych [Ave], Ddafydd’, which begins with a cautious indictment of him for failing to notice ‘the taeog’s [serf’s] toiling’.15 Ever an ‘indifferent agitator’, Dafydd wilfully ignored ‘Culture’s brutal nourishing’.
But then the tone changes as the poet confesses how awe-struck, not to say love-struck, he is by Dafydd’s prowess:
I first read your words dazzled,
Heart’s skin suddenly too small,
Merthyr’s hair shirt forgotten
And that blade through my rib-cage.
; In ecstasy, despairing,
A seablue road through Dyfed
I walked, the wind’s current bed. (75)
In Dafydd ap Gwilym, Glyn Jones recognises a
spinther, maker, more,
Rain-finery’s fisherman,
Netter of downpour’s glitter.
‘Spinther’ is one of those glitteringly exotic words Jones (like his friend Dylan Thomas) so delighted in seizing, like a poetic magpie, to decorate his own textual nest. It is a term, so rare that it’s not even included in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, from Gnostic writings, meaning a splinter, or spark, of divine light emanating from the Perfect Man and entering a human consciousness. In using it Jones not only brilliantly acknowledges Dafydd as the divine source of his own imaginative insights but also proves Dafydd’s influence upon him by demonstrating the very same passion for the jewelled qualities of words that is a hallmark of Dafydd’s own writing. And the sense of creative affinity between them was all the stronger for Jones’s appreciation of the way in which the constant changes of register and virtuosic play with vocabulary in Dafydd’s poetry suggested a multilingual world not far removed from the hybrid society he, too, had known from his Merthyr childhood, when his friends had included boys whose origins were variously Welsh, English, Irish, Maltese and Jewish. In such a setting, the ludic liquefactions of language were foregrounded. It was in these, Jones accurately detected, that Dafydd ap Gwilym had so incomparably revelled and it was these same linguistic features that he, too, was perfectly equipped (by his Merthyr background) to deploy in his translations of Dafydd’s work. Hence the spirited opening of his translation of ‘Le Jaloux’: ‘Daily I feel down, doleful,/ A girl calls my love-talk bull!’ (Collected Poems, 53). And hence, too, his cheekily demotic rendering of the opening lines of that most celebrated of Dafydd’s cywyddau, ‘The Girls of Llanbadarn’: