Welsh Poems and Ballads

Welsh Poems and Ballads

In a collection of unedited odds and ends from Borrows papers bearing upon Wales, and dating from various periods of his career, there is one insignificant-looking sheet on whose back some lines are pencilled, beginning The mountain snow. They are reproduced in the text, but deserve notice here because of the evidence they bring of Borrows long-continued Welsh obsession and his long practice as a Welsh translator. Apparently they date from the time when he was writing Lavengro, since the other side of the leaf contains a draft in ink of the preface to that book. Other sheets of blue foolscap in the same bundlefolded small for the pocketare devoted to unnumbered chapters of Wild Wales. Yet another scrap, from a much earlier period, is so closely packed in a microscopic hand that it reminds one at a first glance of the painfully minute script of the Bront sisters in their earliest attempts. p. 10Its matter is only a footnote on the Celts, Gaels and Cymry, and its substance often reappears in later pages; but other items both in the early script of a fine minuscule, and in the later bold, untidy scrawl, serve to carry on the Welsh account, with references to Pwll Cheres and Goronwy Owen; and the upshot of them all goes to show that Borrow, whether he was at Norwich or in London, was not only a stout Celtophile, but much inclined, early and late, to be a Welsh idolater. And since the days when the monks of the Priory at Carmarthen wrote the Black Book in a noble script, I suppose no copyist ever took more pains than Borrow did in his early years in transcribing the lines of the Welsh poets, as the facsimile page given in this volume can tell. Of the bards and rhymers that he attempted in English, he gave most care to translating Iolo Goch, four of whose odes open the present collection. He was tempted to dilate on Iolo, or Edward the Red, because of that poets association with Owen Glendower, a hero in whose exploits he greatly delighted. The tribute to Owen in Wild Wales is, or should be, familiar enough to Borrovians. In p. 11Chapter XXIII. there is an account of the landmark which Borrow calls Mont Glyndwr (though I have never heard it so called in my Welsh wanderings); while in Chapter LXVI. a description of the other mount at Sycharth accompanies a translation of the Ode by Iolo, which in a slightly different earlier text is printed on page eight. It was after repeating these lines, Borrow tells us, that he exclaimed, How much more happy, innocent and holy he was in the days of his boyhood, when he translated the ode, than at the present time. And then, covering his face with his hands, he wept like a child. If one re-reads the ode in the light of this confession, one observes that there is a strong vein of personal feeling about its lines, and a certain pilgrim strain in its opening, which would lend themselves readily to Borrows mood and the idea, never far away from his thoughts, that in his wanderings he too was a bard doing Clera. It need hardly be said that he was wrong in estimating Iolos age as upwards of a hundred years, when the ode was written. In other details of the poem he is more picturesque than literal; but the English copy of the Welsh sketch is in essentials near enough p. 12for all ordinary purposes; and the achievement in a boy of eighteen, living at Norwich, far from Wales, is an extraordinary one. The sort of error that he fell into was a very natural one to occur; for instance, misled by his mere dictionary knowledge, he omits the reference to St. Patricks clock-tower and the cloisters of Westminster. The words Kloystr Wesmestr, only lead in one text to the line, A cloister of festivities, and in the other to the yet freer renderingmuster the merry pleasures all. Again, the original has no mention of Usquebaugh, though the Shrewsbury ale is in order. In medieval Wales, I may add, the bragget mentioned in these lines was made by mixing ale with mead, and spicing the mixturea decidedly heady liquor, one gathers, when it was kept awhile. Iolo Goch, like the greaterindeed one may say the greatest Welsh poet, Dafydd ab Gwilym, used a form of verse in his odes which it is not easy to imitate or follow in English, keeping all its subtle graces and assonances. It is termed the Cywydd, which may be taken to signify a verse in which the words are well knit and finely co-ordinated; or, as Sir John p. 13Rhys puts it, elegantly, artistically put together. The verse, it should be said, is written in couplets, and the lines are required also to follow a definite symphonic pattern. Try for example Dafydds lines, which Borrow has translated (see page 59), upon the mist. In Welsh they run: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 54851
Author: Rhys, Ernest
Release Date: Jun 5, 2017
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Rhys, Ernest, 1859-1946

Translator: Borrow, George, 1803-1881