Translating Culhwch and Olwen.

 

The Lunt Roman fort at Bagington. 

Translating Culhwch and Olwen.

First time

 

There’s a first time for everything.

But I don’t know 

when I first read 

or heard this story. Or why,

of all the things that it contains

the porter and his words

were what remained. 

 

I read the Jones and Jones translation.

My yellowed copy still provides 

the necessary gloss when 

ny bo namyn iawn iawn 

turns to alphabet spaghetti in my head. 

 

Perhaps, the creaking wooden gatehouse

of the reconstructed Lunt at Bagington. 

Imperial Rome’s repressive architecture 

to keep the beaten Britkins in their place.

The structure shaking in the wind,

I stood upon the shifting platform,

and could imagine Great Grey Mighty Grasp

looking down on stroppy Culhwch

with his horse and dogs. 

 

And the sound of Stival’s harp,

borrowed from the record library, 

(I liked the cover) 

weather and wild landscape. 

blowing through the speakers.

 

In a storm of cliches. 

I heard grey tide on the gravel beach

saw sunshine off the cliffs, heard wind and rain

smacking the slate in the green hills

and watched the grey rock changing colour as it dried.

I saw men in cloaks, with swords, 

standing on a cliff edge

looking at a longship rocking out beyond the surf. 

Renassiance De La Harp Celtique. 

But as I read, the cliches were replaced. 

Now the porter’s scene’s in shadow,

it’s raining, and the sound of harp and drum

comes softly from the distant, well-lit hall.

 

The Poetry Voice Podcast is 100!

Who would have thought we'd get this far?

And so to celebrate, two readings, both from Lady Godiva and Me as shameless self-promotion.
In the first voices from the modern city. Clicking on the link will take you to the reading

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/12/19/from-lady-godiva-and-me-the-modern-city



In the second Peeping Tom speaks.

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/12/19/peeping-tom-speaks-from-lady-godiva-and-me

A second edition of Lady Godiva and Me is available from Amazon, the Book Depository, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com 

Lady Godiva and Me is back in print

The naked lady rides again, with an accompanying cast of earls, churls, ranting preachers, shop girls migrants, factory workers skinheads and schoolboys.

A lightly revised second edition, available from Lulu, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

Are you English?

Are you English?
I used to claim that nationality was an accident not a definition.
Yes, but are you English?
When I first came to Australia I was surprised by the culturally institutionalised racism an answer to that question invoked.
It’s there in the jokes I didn’t understand:
Where does an English man keep his money?
Under the soap?
How can you tell a plane has come from England?
The whining continues after the engines are shut off.
It’s there in the assumption that any criticism however well informed or essential is “whinging” and the product of being English rather than being concerned or frustrated with an obvious problem.
I never liked that: My country right or wrong. Love it or leave it alone.
One of the things I loved about home was the willingness to be critical, to scrutinise; what I probably romanticise as a European habit of talk, of willingness to indulge in argument as currency of friendship. The things you cared about were the things you talked about. As Heaney says: what use the held line that cannot be assailed for reassurance?
Yes, but Are you English?
It’s the baggage that comes with “yes” I don’t like. To be a Welsh or Scottish nationalist is cool, radical, acceptable. To be an English nationalist is to feel the terrifying drag of the black hole of the national front, skinheads, racist bigotry, mindless intolerance: To find oneself in the company of the brutal, the stupid and the braindead.
Are you English?
So do you want me to apologise for what some of my ancestors did to yours? Well, do you mind if I point out that the English half of the family were rural poor, or in service, and if they ever went abroad to fight it was because they were press ganged or fleeing from poverty or rejoicing in the choice between the gallows and the uniform. If my ancestors fought yours they were flogged to it, probably shitting themselves in a steamy red tunic.
Infact, it’s quite probable mum’s ancestors were taking pot shots of one sort or another at dad’s, who were doing their best to carve, cut, shoot or flay them, not realising of course that one day their genes would be combined in me.
Are you English?
I’m not proud of British Imperialism. The thought of men flogged into battle so some rich twerp could get richer doesn’t appeal to me at all. And for the dwellers in the slums, for the industrial poor, for the rural workers, I don’t see much to sing about. The arrogant assumption that there was some type of “civilising mission” involved is even less appealing.
But show me a country that didn’t try and expand its borders? Show me a tribe that didn’t fight for extra space? Do Dutch people have these problems?
Are you English?
My Mum would say yes. But when I addressed a letter to her and put West Midlands, England on the envelope the man in the post office said there was no such address. Every time I give him a package and say: England..he says Uk as he puts it on the scales. According to the Concise Britannica England does not exist as a political or administrative unit. There ain’t no such place.
We all know that’s what “Utopia” means so “England” is a Utopian ideal…a place of the mind…but who’s mind?
I like the idea of being Mercian. A people of the marches, of the borders, liminal interstitial. Penda’s folk. The middle kingdom. The middle ground. But that’s always been the most dangerous place to stand.
(And then I suppose I had better feel guilty about Haethfelth, but I am free to resent those imperialistic buggers from Wessex who conquered my country????)
Are you English?
No, like the badge says: Made in Coventry.

Raceclassgender

Derrida talks about those moments of rupture when it’s suddenly possible to think about the unthought or the unthinkable… those moments when an issue becomes visible.

For me Race was invisible when I was growing up but I can pinpoint the moment when it suddenly reared its ugly head. I grew up surrounded by Irish voices. At home, at school, at mass. I knew I wasn’t Irish. I don’t even think it occurred to me as odd that my parents were paying taxes to a government that was using their money to pay soldiers to go hassle their relatives in Belfast.

But sometime in the seventies there was talk of “Sending the Irish Home”. I don’t remember if some tub thumping politician seriously suggested this or it was just one of those stories that circulate, prefixed with “they say…” But I do remember one evening my dad mentioning it. He was dismissive, it was obviously a stupid idea. (One of the great beauties of England is that ethnic cleansing is an obviously stupid idea. It wouldn’t be long before such ideas were touted in other countries, about other ethnic groups, and the stupidity of the idea was lost in the actual barbarity of its attempt.)

And that was the point of rupture.

I grew up in Coventry, I was born there. Home was a specific house beside a very specific park. When I wasn’t thinking I spoke with a west midlands accent. But if they sent my dad “home”, would my mum (who is English) be allowed to go with him? And if she didn’t (as if she wouldn’t) what would happen to my sister and me? If we went to Ireland we’d be foreigners, but then if they were sending “foreigners and their children” “home” were we actually native to England…????? Where exactly , if anywhere, did we belong?

The rumour died away. The question remains.

And it drives "Talking Nothing to the Stone", the second poem in Lady Godiva and Me. The answer offered there:

I know this place but wouldn't call it mine
Mine is the space between the rising and the falling foot.

works on a good day.

My Place

Row after row of terraced houses, obdurate, patient. The little gardens attempt the personal, resist the rubbish, the graffiti, the drunken louts who rip the heads off roses and leave them where they fall.

Chinchua Achebe tells a story about how, while studying English literature in Nigeria, one of his class mates suddenly jacked up and objected to the savages in the book they were reading. It was not, he argued, an accurate picture of him or his relatives. Achebe realises that the funny tribal savages in the book who he doesn't find funny, are supposed to be his people. And he knows they aren’t.

I’ve just had a similar reaction doing my homework and reading up on Marxist criticism. I suddenly realized “the working classes” and “the masses” weren’t theoretical abstractions but those men who used to drink tea and smoke in the front room. The patient bemused faces in the smoke watching Liam Groves and I attempt a world record for the time it took to clear one frame off a snooker table at the Chrysler Working Men’s club, those same men and women who worked hard and scrambled to save, whose best ideal was a two week break at Bognor bloody Regis, deck chair on the beach, kids playing in the sand and if you were really lucky, it didn’t rain…(my Dad’s version of this heaven was a deck chair, shade and a book). The annual trip to the Blackpool lights. Skeggy, Brighton. Coach trips to...

And the theorist talking about what’s good for the working classes. What they should be reading. How they should be addressed.

Bollocks.
Like those educators preaching a hermeneutics of suspicion.

I’m so glad I grew up before people worried too much about ideology in education. At school no one said: you are mostly the sons of working class migrants, derided and distrusted ethnic minorities, marked by religious beliefs that cut you off from the powerbrokers. You have no need for art because it might infect you with values that are not yours.
Go home to your little working class fox hole and when you get to fifteen you can leave school and tighten wheel nuts on the production line. Or we’ll pay you to go “interact” with your relatives in Northern Ireland as part of a three year stint in the infantry.

Bollocks.
They said: here it is, the past and all its treasures, the literature of the world, (well, English mostly but this is England and we are offering you what we have, not what we stole). It’s yours for the taking;if you want to work for it.

The books revealed that not everyone thought and felt the same way as the people around me. That was liberating thought number one. Liberating thought number two, the books suggested there was a world beyond the city limits and it was waiting to be explored: straight out of Coventry and all the way to Samarkand, via America, Europe, Australia, Indonesia… theorise that one.

Naked woman rides round city! (Shock! Horror! Sensation!)

If I read a newspaper from 1942 which says “’plane Crash in Laytown” chances are there was a plane crash in Laytown. I have no reason to doubt it. I know ‘planes crash, and they are dangerous both for their crews and the people on the ground. I know there is a Laytown (I’ve been there but even so, I can look it up on a map) and I suspect that there was a man called Sam Farrell and he died. I could import all the paraphernalia of the “Critical Literacy” I’m supposed to inflict on my students but the fact remains I have no reason to doubt that at 6.45 or thereabouts on Wednesday July 1st 1942 a ‘plane crashed in Laytown.
(And I did just check that July 1st was a wednesday in 1942

When I read..

Then the countess, beloved of God, accompanied by two soldiers, as it is said, mounting her horse naked, loosed her hair from its bands, so veiling the whole of her body, and thus passing through the market place she was seen by nobody (a nemine visa) except for her very white legs.

I immediately doubt the story.

But I do so because there was no academic discipline of history writing in the Middle Ages, and the chroniclers tend to record both what we might consider fact, and what we might think of as pure fantasy. By the time Lawman is translating Wace who was translating Geofrey the line between Romance and Chronicle is almost impossible to draw. But before we dismiss them as childish, there’s two things to keep in mind.

1) The writers lived in a world where miracles and wonders were everyday events. Miracles were the outward, public proof of an invisible reality. When Saint Augustine argues with the British Bishops over Easter, he proves his argument is better than theirs by performing a miracle. And when they refuse to change their practice, they are struck down as a sign of divine displeasure. Part of learning to be Christian and literate involved learning to “read” the world as a manifestation of divine love. To see through or beyond. One of the educational uses for Anglo-Saxon riddles. If you live in such a world, it’s difficult to switch off and say ”could never happen”.
2) Elvis isn’t dead. Lennon was assassinated by the CIA. The Twin Towers was a FBI plot. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays. You’ve only got to scan the internet to see that a willingness to believe in the totally improbable is not confined to people living before 1499.

However, that doesn’t explain why this story. The idea, delivered ex cathedra at the book launch by someone I’d never met before, was that this is a folk tale tacked on to an historical personage. That doesn’t work because there’s no independent evidence for the folk tale, nor does it explain why that tale and this character? And the idea that it was a pagan ritual being performed by one of the country’s most visible women almost five hundred years after the conversion, seems equally unbelievable.
Roger of Wendover probably believed the story as he wrote it down. But I doubt he checked his sources. How or why it was initially generated remains an unknowable but entertaining question.

Reflecting on reflections.

Watching Richard’s film: wondering who is this guy wearing my coat? I’ve never watched myself before. Well, I’ve watched footage of kayaking, but that’s automatically critical: head position, boat edge, hands, paddle shaft…is the roll still boat body head…and more often than not..what was I thinking taking that line?

But here, how strange to be both speaker and audience, to be a critical observer of one's own actions. Maybe technology makes talking to oneself acceptable.

The camera hands me a version of myself. Perhaps I recognize it. Perhaps, like the way it seems to distort the size of the cathedral ruins, the length of a cobbled lane, it gives back a version that is one of many.

This happens when someone reads what you’ve written. The text invents a version of the writer that the writer may not want to own or recognise. So I’m waiting for the local paper to review the book, wondering what version it will put in the public space.

Home seen through a stereoscope.

In the Herbert there’s a Victorian Stereoscope. You look through the eye piece at two almost identical pictures and the lens moves them together so that you see the scene in three d.

For anyone who either grows up in a migrant community or migrates, Home is always an odd word. We could get the bus home from the library and my father would tell me stories about home which were about a totally different place.

So the slide labeled “home” is not two identical scenes that can be transposed over each other to give an illusion of depth, but two completely different pictures linked by the accidents of biography. The place I came from, personalized with my own life stories, by the fact that experiences happen somewhere and memories of that place are coloured by the memory of the experience. Coventry my not be the most beautiful city on the planet but a lot of good things happened there. "Home" where I grew up, forever “back” in past tense.

And home. Where I live now.

When I look through the eye piece at the slide labeled Home, instead of one three d picture, I see a strange imposition of one scene over the other, so neither can be seen entirely clearly. I used to think this was a bad thing.

Now I think it's an interesting perspective.

(The picture of the stereo scope I found at: http://cnx.org/content/m13784/latest/

The Old English “Wanderer”.

The Old English “Wanderer”.

Coming home, after only two years. Top of the Humber hill, and I’m seeing what I expect to see, except what I expect to see is no longer there. There’s a small roundabout at the bottom of the hill and the factory has gone. The latter is almsot impossible to take in.

The end of The Wanderer starts chiming in my head.

Eald enta geweorc idlu stodon

Earlier in the year I had reviewed two books of Old English translations, and though it doesn’t appear in the reviews, I went line by line through the two translations of the wanderer, comparing them with the original. Which is probably why random bits of the poem are stuck in my head.

In the poem the speaker has encountered his worst nightmare…his lord is dead, his kin are gone, and alone, he travels across a hostile landscape in search of a new Lord. For an Anglo-Saxon in the heroic age, this is as bad as it gets. There’s nothing remotely romantic about his isolation. He is lost and vulnerable. He reflects on a ruin, on the transience of life, and he laments its passing.

Both the translations are what could be described as formal equivalence. They transfer the Old English into Modern English by finding the nearest equivalent word in Modern English. And while I may be critical of the occasional choices, I have nothing but respect for anyone who can translate and keep to the original metrical patterns.

There’s another type of translation, called Dynamic Equivalence. In which the translator attempts to create in the target audience the same effect the original had on the original audience.

I don’t have a lot of time for the idea that works like The Wanderer need to be rewritten or revisioned for the modern age… that it has to be “made relevant” by importing modern paraphernalia. A) This pseudo intellectual waffle assumes the modern reader is too stupid to see the relevance in the original metaphor (as though someone had to point out to the original audience that this is a meditation on life from a Christian perspective as well as a dramatically realised incident) and b) it usually leads to a diminishing of the original text.

But if you were going to do a dynamic equivalence, then imagine a speaker with a solid fulfilling career and a good relationship with his or her boss. Imagine the boss moves on…the company “down sizes’..suddenly unemployed the speaker can’t pay off debts, the flat is repossessed. Packing personal possessions in the car, he or she sets off for new accommodation, hoping to find a new job soemwhere else, driving past the factory: it has changed names enough time in my life time…the Humber, Roots, Chrysler, Talbot, Peugeot. Gone. A locked gate that protects nothing, a broken façade facing the road, a vast muddy space behind railings speckled with fat sea gulls and silent mechanical diggers discarded as the light fails:

The Maker of men hath so marred this dwelling
That human laughter is not heard about it
And idle stand these old giant works…

The Launch

24 hours in a droning tin can...now there's a challenge, find something poetic in international air flights.

We launched Lady G in the Herbert Art Gallery. In a space between the new Godiva gallery and George Eliot's piano. Mat Merrit was kind enough to turn up and read some poems to get the thing rolling. Then half an hour of Lady g, stories, some questions and it was all done.

The refurbished Herbert is a beautiful building. Given the amount of ugly post war buildings in Coventry there's a certain amount of suprise in that statement. More of that later.

Before the reading Chris and I walked down to see the Old Cathedral. It's illuminated at night and the way its broken walls and spires shape the darkness around it, adding shade and colour to a cloudless night sky was worth freezing for.