From the Archives: Whose coat is that jacket? Whose hat is that cap?
By Gwyneth Lewis
If you’re truly bilingual it’s not that there are two languages in your world, but that not everybody understands the whole of your own personal speech. Welsh is my first language. I was born to a Welsh-speaking family living in predominantly English-speaking Cardiff. I remember not being able to understand the children I wanted to play with on the street. I know exactly when I acquired English, as my father taught it to me when my mother went into hospital to have my sister. I was two and a quarter. A section of my poem “Welsh Espionage” is a version of that event:
“Welsh was the mother tongue, English was his. He taught her the body by fetishist quiz, father and daughter on the bottom stair: ‘Dy benelin yw elbow, dy wallt di yw hair, chin yw dy en di, head yw dy ben.’ She promptly forgot, made him do it again. Then he folded her dwrn and, calling it fist, held it to show her knuckles and wrist. ‘Let’s keep it from Mam, as a special surprise. Lips are gwefusau, llygaid are eyes.’ Each part he touched in their secret game thrilled as she whispered its English name. The mother was livid when she was told. ‘We agreed, no English till four years old!’ She listened upstairs, her head in a whirl. Was it such a bad thing to be Daddy’s girl?”
The details of sitting on the bottom of the stairs and of learning the parts of the body are true. Later, of course, this made me think of the scenes in Shakespeare’s King Henry V when the French Princess learns English, using the Lewis technique. The suggestion of child abuse in the poem is not drawn from my own experience, although it seemed very important to the piece. I suspect that this sinister suggestion was a way for me to explore the discomfort I felt at being born between two cultures. Early on I had an acute sense of the cultural clash between the social values tied up in both languages. I suppose that, in some way, I still feel guilty about being Daddy’s girl and writing in English at all.
Let me give a quick cultural outline. The Welsh language is a Celtic tongue which has, against all the odds, found itself in the modern world, coining words for “television” and “fast reactor fuel rods.” With half a million speakers and numbers in decline-it’s an “all hands on deck” situation. It is a beautiful language, and to speak it is to know the sound of a long, unbearable farewell. It’s the key to a literature which goes back to the sixth century.
Example of Welsh cynghanedd, with analysis, from Plover Love Song.
One of the noteworthy features of this tradition is a system of strict consonontal alliteration codified into twenty four meters and called cynghanedd. Twm Morys, the travel writer Jan Morris’s son, recently wrote a wonderful version of one of these meters in English. Basically, the line gets divided in half and the consonants on each side of the break have to be used in the same order. That is, when the line’s not divided into three and rhyme added to the cocktail. Have a look at this when you’re in cross-word-puzzle mode-it’s good fun. Gerard Manley Hokins used it and Dylan Thomas certainly had the sound of the cynghanedd ring ing in his ears as he wrote in English.
Of course, living in a largely English-speaking city, Welsh was handy as a private language for us. We used it as a family code to avoid the scrutiny of over-bearing sales ladies in the shops. In school-I was educated till the age of eighteen through the medi um of the Welsh-we switched languages mid-sentence when teachers appeared, to avoid punishment for speaking English. People have asked me often am I a different person speaking English and Welsh? I always answer no, but what is different, of course, is the cultural context in which words are spoken. When these political values clash the cultural sensitivities can be acute. For example, until recently Swan matches had the slogan “England’s Glory” written on the side of their boxes. “Got your matches ready?” is an innocent enough sentence in English. But in Welsh, against the background of an arson campaign run by nationalists who’ve been burning down second homes owned by the English in the Welsh heartland, the question “Y di dy fatsys di’n barod?” takes on a totally different tenor. The words are the same, but the meaning totally different.
I had a sense of the cultural traps involved in being bilingual very early on. But I also knew it could lead to excitements that rarely came the way of my monoglot friends. A primary school teacher who taught me at about age six once told us a story about young Tommy who didn’t practice his English reading. One day instead of learning his vocabulary he was wandering around and happened across a rocket. Curious, he made his way in. His eye was immediately attracted by a big red button on the control panel. Under it, written in bold letters was an unfamiliar word: DANGER. “Danger?” he puzzled. “Danger?” Not a Welsh word. So he pressed the button. The doors closed and before he could count to ten, he was propelled into space. The moral Miss Rees intended is clear: your life depends on your being able to read English. The unconscious moral-and the one by which I’m still fascinated-was that unfamiliar words lead to huge adventures. Little Tommy might have died a lonely death in space, but think of the wonders he must have seen before his oxygen ran out.
I have a linguistic equivalent. For some reason I was talking to a friend who had been conscripted into the Israeli army about T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” We got to the lines
“For I have known them all already, known them all
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
My friend said that he could never hear that last line without thinking of a sergeant in the Israeli army whose favourite punishment for transgressions was making you fill your water bottle (for desert warfare) a teaspoonful at a time. In the light of this Eliot’s line takes on a felicitous, if unintended new meaning, making the time and tedium involved in both activities starkly vivid. Words change according to the background against which you place them. This is the kind of cross-cultural rocket trip translation can lead to. Never mind if the voyage is authorized or not, it’s bound to be fertile.
Before I had enough confidence to write in English I spent a long time translating my own Welsh poems. I’ve been thinking about translation for a long time and it seems to me that it’s treated, unjustifiably, as a secondary process in literary life. I’m one of those who believes that not only is translation possible, it’s an essential element in every nation’s culture. Poetry isn’t only what’s lost in translation-it’s what’s gained. In a culture the desire to translate is always a sign of strength. Only rich cultures are hungry for news of the outside world-paradoxically, voracity is a sign of plenitude. It’s only cultures who want their members to have a limited political view that resist promiscuous translation and the absorption of outside influences. Totalitarian states don’t like translators. Here I take it that the whole point of translation is to introduce a new element-of rhythm or thought-into a literary tradition. The point isn’t to produce a version so culturally smooth that nobody would ever guess it was imported. There has to be something strange, novel and fascinating either about the style or cast of mind of the new piece.
In his poem, “Strange Meeting,” Wilfred Owen took the Welsh half rhyme the proest and used it in English. In this rhyme the final consonants of the word stay the same, while the vowels change, as in “cat” and “kit.”
“It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.”
Having rediscovered the proest in Owen I’ve now been using this rhyme both in English and back in its native Welsh. But, filtered through Owen’s sensibility it’s not the same sound, it’s been revivified and made vital again by translation. This is a form of stylistic translation. But there’s more to this question. Poets working in a tradition are always “translating” the work of their predecessors and moulding it to their modern-day needs. But what to translate? Thom Gunn, for example, in “The Unsettled Motorcyclist’sVision of his Death” uses the metre and philosophical vocabulary of the Metaphysical poets to describe a twentieth-century death. The poem intrigues us because of the initial discrepancy between subject and style-and this in itself becomes part of the subject of the poem, a biker forced to contemplate his own mortality, despite his very modern leathers.
WH. Auden’s “Roman Wall Blues,” on the other hand, mimics the subject of a Roman lyric but without the style-old subject, modern British speech-admittedly, to comic effect:
“Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.”
If so inclined, a writer can easily exploit this latitude in his or her choice of what to translate of a poem. Cynan, a popular twentieth-century Welsh poet, gained a reputation as an original lyricist. I’m told, however, that what he sometimes used to do was translate parts of modern English poems he liked into Welsh, taking the credit for their content himself. One of my poems takes as its starting point an old Welsh folk song which is called “Bugeilio’s Gwenith Gwyn” (“Herding the White Wheat”). I put my own spin on the subject, of course, making my wheat shepherd a reluctant, resentful servant. The rest of the poem was suggested by a line in the Oxford English Dictionary which happened to catch my eye. This smuggling of familiar material from one language into another seemed to me, on reflection, too easy a way of exploiting a Welsh subject matter in English. I wanted to be a full English-language poet when I wrote in English and not just a translator of material which might not work in Welsh.
“The Snow Party
for Louis Asekoff
Basho, coming
To the city of Nagoya,
Is asked to a snow party.
There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.
Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond lrago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.
Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares
Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;
But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of lse.”
Translation is a form of travel. Far from just translating literal rhyme, it can establish new sets of cultural consonances and echoes, which resound at a broader level than the individual poem translated. Derek Mahon’s poem “The Snow Party” is a stylistic tribute to the haiku of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, as well as a story about him.
The poem sets up an unexpected parallel between the etiquette-ridden Japanese society and modern Northern Ireland.
The stunning connection he comes up with is that both societies are linked by the conjunction within them of rigid codes of manners and of unbridled violence. This form of translation uses the differences between two poetic traditions to bring out a profound and fundamental cultural similarity between the societies which gave rise to them. Thus, the conjunction of two literatures in one set of words (the translated text) sets off stunning new echoes in time between them, rhymes which can both shock and delight.
As with most figures essential to the well-being of a society, translators have always been regarded with suspicion. In diplomatic circles scare stories about situations like the mistranslation of “La France demande que…” into the belligerent and inaccurate “France demands that…” testify to the power the traders in linguistic foreign currency are felt to have in our lives. Indeed, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition the very origin of translation is tied up with man’s hubris. Genesis recounts the story of the inhabitants of Shinar who decided to build a tower “with its top in the heavens” in order “to make a name for ourselves.” This, of course, was the Tower of Babel. God’s response to this pride was to “confuse their language, so that they will not understand what they say to one another.” Australian aboriginal myths of linguistic origin, by contrast, don’t have this idea of multiple languages and sin linked together. If linguistic variety is a punishment from God, then, by extension, translators, attempting to repair the broken bowl of language, can be seen as priests trying to repair the effects of an original linguistic sin. Our ambiguous feelings towards the idea of Esperanto, an universal language, shows how we regard the work of the translator as both deeply virtuous (healing the broken relationships between men of different cultures) and as potentially blasphemous (“those whom God has pulled apart, let no man put together”).
I would argue, however, that the translator-who’s always struggling to find the mot Juste, and fighting with the incompleteness of one language to convey ideas from another-actually knows more about our true condition linguistically than the happy monoglot who would never dream of touching the Danger button in a rocket. In this, bilingualism helps. You know that one language will only take you so far along the route of your experiential journey. You know that at some time during your journey on the word bus the driver’s going to call the last stop, and you’ll have to walk the rest of the way with your luggage, up the mountain in the growing gloom, towards the one light left on in the farmhouse ahead. We all reach that moment sooner or later, when language will just not take you any further in your experience. But having made frequent changes of vehicle before means that the sight of the bus departing noisily down the hill is nowhere near as shocking or desolating an event as it might be. Indeed, it’s even to be welcomed.
In this sense, being part of a dying culture is, paradoxically, of great value to a poet, if you’re interested in ultimate questions about language and the nature of reality. It was Lenny Bruce who said that comedy’s not just a matter of telling jokes, it’s about telling the truth. Similarly, poetry isn’t about being poetical, it’s about telling things as they are. In Wales, we may soon be facing the end of a fertile coal seam of language. Having taken for granted the warmth of prehistoric forests and the patterns of ferns and insects in our buckets, our shovels will soon be hitting against useless shale. Some Welsh poets look to England, with its confident, viable culture-or even to America, which is even more so-with envy. But the truth is that this is always the situation of language in the face of eternity-the prospect of utter annihiliation. Cultural success can only serve to disguise this. The challenge in all cases is to sing as true as possible a song out into the dark before that final extinction of shimmering consciousness, before the brightness falls from the air.
In this context nationalism seems to me like a distraction for a poet. My poem “Welsh Espionage” is based on the language of spy novels. What amused me was the idea that anybody would send a spy to Wales, where nothing much happens. Nothing is, I now know, of course, a great deal. But at the end of the poem I imagined the death of the last speaker of Welsh, as a way of asking myself what my responsibility as a poet was in that situation.
“So this is the man you dreamt I had betrayed.
I couldn’t have saved him if I’d stayed.
He’s old as his language. On his bony knees
his hands are buckled like wind-blown trees
that were straight in his youth. His eyes are dim,
brimming with water. If you talk to him
he’ll mention people whom you never knew,
all in their graves. He hasn’t a clue
who you are, or what it is you want
on your duty visits to Talybont.
This is how languages die–the tongue
forgetting what it knew by heart, the young
not understanding what, by rights, they should.
And vital intelligence is gone for good.”
I suppose my heretical conclusion was that languages, like people whose lives are over, should be allowed to go, not kept technically and artificially alive by machine or government policy. It’s not the poet’s primary job to supervise the life-support machine, but to sing the song of tribute at the funeral. And the great gift is knowing, fully, that no language, however prosperous or imperial, is going to be able to put off the day when the decision has to be made about the life-support machine of each and every one of its speakers. Translators know that the shapes and outlines of experience are far more beautiful and real than the drapes of words which we put over them. Most of us spend our lives admiring the lovely colors and the material of the drapes. Translators know that such weak material crumples to nothing without the eternal forms behind them.
I’ve defined the nature of translation very broadly, arguing that cultures survive because of internal translation by their poets and by sucking in of new air from foreign literatures. I want to take the idea even further and argue that the very nature of our lives depends on how good we are as translators. Joseph Brodsky has written that “Poetry, after all, in itself is a translation.” By this, I understand him to mean that verse is a version of nerve-end responses to the world, filtered throughout the logarithm of Ianguage into a construct which is an equivalent, in some way, to that original experience. In Buddhist philosophy, it’s only by under standing the true nature of the mind that reality can be seen accurately. The “I”-that is, me as a person-is a fiction produced by the mind, a non-existent entity which leads us to misread our selves and the world around us. The virtuous life, therefore, is one which perceives and acts most accurately on the nature of reality. The price of mistranslating in this realm isn’t a bad grade in mid terms, but misery and delusion. Our lives themselves and not just our art, therefore, can be said to depend on being good translators.
If I’ve been able to convey one thing here I hope it’s my conviction that translation isn’t just a matter of choosing the right words in English to convey, say, Virgil’s hexameters or how to make one word cover the twenty Innuit nouns for snow. It permeates the whole range of our dealings with language. Translation doesn’t just happen between languages-it’s sometimes needed within one. In the U.K. a movement for Plain English has been campaigning to remove the gobbledygook from official documents so that people can participate in the social contracts which bind them. This isn’t just a matter of simplifying the vocabulary of these papers; it’s part of changing society from one dominated by the latinate complexity of an imperial power, in which people don’t need to know how they’re governed, into a democracy where all the participants-even the least educated understand the structures which protect and bind them together. Translation is not just a matter of words. It’s far more important.
Which brings me to the title of this essay. The Welsh enjoy their words and play with them often. This may not always be in the sphere of high culture. I once heard about a train announcement in Llanelli which was “translated” from official British Rail-speak into West Walain. It went “Ladies and Gentlemen, There’s been a change of platform. Ev’ryone over b’ ere come over b’ there and ev’ryone over b’there, come over b’ere.” Not the Queen’s English, but nobody missed their train. “Whose coat is that jacket? Whose hat is that cap?” is another South Walian joke. It shows our fascination for the slightly different angles at which we see the world, according to which word we use to describe it. “Coat” and “jacket” refer to the same object, but seen slightly differently. We’re very fortunate in English that its rich diversity of elements-the Latinate, French and Anglo-Saxon allows us to perform these “tracking shots” on even the most simple objects. In Shakespeare’s play, the guilty Macbeth asks:
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”
His exploitation of the different skeins in English here is the same kind of attempt to make language stretch to convey a reality which always, in the end, exceeds its reach. The more languages you have, the more you can track around the object in question. The trilingual Jorie Graham captures this very well in her poem “I Was Taught Three.” Here, she argues that the three words she knows for “chestnut” reveal three different aspects of the tree in front of her window.
“Castagno took itself to heart, its pods
like urchins clung to where they landed
claiming every bit of shadow
at the hem. Chassagne, on windier days,
nervous in taffeta gowns,
whispering, on the verge of being
anarchic, though well-bred.
And then chestnut, whipped pale and clean
by all the inner reservoirs
called upon to do their even share of work.”
Using this full range of language’s expressiveness, by whatever means, against the ultimate silence is, in the end, what poetry is all about. But, in a way, bi- and tri-lingualism only postpone the inevitable frustration of being defeated. But with translators we can hope to go that much further before we have to fall quiet and to see the world for a moment, not in the 2-D of one self-satisfied culture, but in glorious 3-D before the system crashes and our cognitive screens go blank.
About the author
Gwyneth is a Welsh poet who was the inaugural National Poet of Wales in 2005. She wrote the text that appears over the Wales Millennium Centre.
