Welsh Poems and Ballads

by Unknown

INTRODUCTION.

In a collection of unedited odds and ends from Borrow’s 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 Borrow’s 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 bundle—folded small for the pocket—are 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 Brontë sisters in their earliest attempts. Its 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 poet’s 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 Chapter 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 Borrow’s 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 Iolo’s 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 for 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. Patrick’s 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 rendering—“muster 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 mixture—a decidedly heady liquor, one gathers, when it was kept awhile.

Iolo Goch, like the greater—indeed 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 Rhys 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 Dafydd’s lines, which Borrow has translated (see page [59]), upon the mist. In Welsh they run:

“Och! it ’niwlen felen-fawr
Na throet ti, na therit awr:
Casul yr awyr ddu-lwyd,
Carthen anniben iawn wyd,
Mwg ellylldan o annwn,
Abid teg ar y byd hwn.
Fal tarth uffern-barth ffwrn-bell;
Mwg y byd yn magu o bell.”

The second and last of these verses well show the use of what is called the “cynghanedd” or consonancy of echoing syllables required in the cywydd metre. Borrow, in getting his own rhyme, rather loses the force of the original. For instance, he omits the “awyr ddu-lwyd” in verse three—the air black-grey—and he spoils in expanding the idea of the verse—“carthen anniben,” etc. Here the Welsh poet suggests that the mist is an endless cloth, woven perpetually in space. The packed lines of the cywydd, and the concreteness of the imagery, set the translator, however, a hard task. Borrow, in the “Wild Wales” version, omits the opening of the poem, whose last lines lead up to the apostrophe; but the MS. has enabled Mr. Wise to complete it in his Bibliography. More literally, the Welsh might be rendered thus:—

“Before I had gone a step of the way,
I no longer saw a place in the land:
Neither birchclad cliff, nor coast;
Neither hill’s-breast, mountain-side, nor sea.”

Then it is he turns in his humorous rage:

“Och! confound thee, great yellow thing,
That neither turns lighter, nor clears a bit;
Black-grey chasuble of the air;
An endless woven clout, thou art!”

Borrow’s difficulty in attacking the Welsh of a poet so rapid and easy and light-footed, was that of a Zeppelin in pursuit of a Farman. He was over-weighted from the start. His early awkwardness in verse, his rhetoric learnt from the artificial style of the generation before him, were in his way. Iolo Goch was much nearer to him, with the admiring inventory of a chieftain’s house, than was the art of the poet of the leaves, the birch-grove and the love-tryst.