A Review of 'Medieval Welsh Lyrics' Translated by Joseph P. Clancy

I have no idea who recommended this book to me but thanks to whoever it was! ‘Medieval Welsh Lyrics’ has some of the most startling, vivid, awakening and sometimes astonishing verse I have read. It was very unexpected.

(Translated by Joseph P. Clancy and published in 1965, taking from a range of previous books on the subject.)

THE NECESSARY ABOMINATION OF TRANSLATION

I don’t speak Welsh.

The translation of poetry is a necessary abomination. If a perfect poem is a precise, even total, annealing and cross-synthesis of sound and meaning, of the chosen sonic structure of the poem, combined with the perfect representation of meaning within it, and within that, the most precise, perceptive, original and imaginative observation, relation and creation, then the ‘perfect’ or ‘best’ poem, is the one which is most wounded by being translated.

For a perfect ordering, the dis-assemblement and re-creation in some utterly other substance - its like taking apart one of the high points of Greek or roman sculpture, say ‘Lacoon’, and re-making it in Legos You can do it, and it’s awful, but if people can only see Legos and cannot perceive Marble, then that’s what you have to do. It’s bad to lose a lot and to create frankenpoems, but its worse to lose everything, which is what happens if you don’t translate into whatever the dominant medium is

What we lose is probably inestimable, and we should accept that we are dealing with half-poems, or even zombie poems, compared to the originals - the bards would not be happy. But the alternative for me is nothing, so I accept it.

what comes through is the images, descriptions, similes, concepts, arrangements of ideas and general flow of thought

STARTLING THINGS ABOUT WELSH POETRY

What startles is the immediacy and imaginative power of interwoven with vivid, glowing, immediate and intense observations of nature, and added all to this; clearsighted, almost documentary descriptions of real-life events. Though they are given in an elaborate Welsh scansion in a format driven by ritualistic forms and common tropes, these moments ‘POP’

These things are rare and hard to find in time. People do not write like this for long books of history or if they do, it is lost. So the past is monumental, graven, sombre, strange, not because it was as it was lived (though at times it was indeed), but because that is what survives; as in stone, so in verse and prosidy; the big fat masses carry on while the warp and weave of human life are lost.

what I mean is we can awaken into a scene of Daffyd ap Gwilym, lying in bed in some inn or hostelry, in the year 13-something, getting up at night and, in an attempt to sleep with a women he has seen earlier, sneaking about in the dark, knocking things over, getting lost and waking everyone up, before sneaking back into bed and pretending the whole thing never happened, and it feels like a story related from yesterday. ‘The Battle of Waun Gaeseg’ gives us a first-hand view of the experience of a small scale, disastrous, unglamorous battle, and ‘Sheep-Dealing’ the story of an equally disastrous attempt to sell some sheep, while ‘The Ship’ by Iolo Goch shows us this;

“She would rock, faulty creature,

On her side, quivering cold.

God’s wrath to me, seas’ cheeshouse,

Cramped castle, seafarers’s chest.

She’s a thin-staved false-steering

Foul Noah’s ark of a ship.

Sooty oak, sharp her furrow,

Spy old cow, round-walled, pale-clad,

Cart of coal, not a clean court,

Her sail coarse cloth, wide open,

High-nosed hag, scabby-lipped boards,

Wide-nostrilled, rope-reined saddle,

New moon, broad pan for kneading,

She’s clumsy as an old churn,

Swift tower, bulky shadow,

Stiff screen seven cubits high,

Swift-leaping sea-splashing mare,

Bowl unsteadily bouncing,

Scabby crab-bowelled jailhouse,

Broad mare, seen as far as France.

She’s make a face with seaweed,

Sea-cat, teeth under her breast.

More than a mark her rental,

bent basket amidst green cork.

She has filth, oath of Arthur,

In her cracks like stone wall.”

..and such a ship I think you have not seen before, but it comes to mind now strongly, does it not?

DAFYDD AP GWILYM - YOU SON OF A BITCH

there is a Master Poet and a third of the book is His. He is so talented and dominant that some of the other Very Notable poems in this are just laments for Dafydd ap Gwilym by other bards.

He would be thrilled to realise he had a statue, and sickened to discover there weren’t more

Dafyd writes in an even more complex verse form than most of the other poets (they can’t keep up after he is gone). He exemplifies both the tropes and higher qualities of eras verse, either because he ate the soul and speaks it back, or because through his writing he re-writes what Welsh poetry is meant to be, and meant to be about. ‘AD’ in this subculture means “After Dafydd” and ‘BC’ means “Before that Cunt” (he is awful). Everyone after him is to some extent writing in response to him.

Dafydd is an apollonian talent inflicted on a contemptable piece of shit. You don’t start reading Dafydd ap Gwilym hating Dafydd ap Gwilym – it’s hard to hate a genius, but you get there over time . He is like a bright burning portal into another time, carried about by a guy whose main interest is trying to bang another guys wife - this is 90% of Dafydds time and the real slow disenchantment of his character is that he can’t change and, incredibly, for a man who perceives the world through eyes none else can match, he is largely unaware of the poverty of his own character.

As Dafydd gets older, and he writes himself laments about his stumbling entry into middle age, he is still trying to bang Morfudd; gets angry when his married cheating gf commits the indignity of getting pregnant by her husband, is shocked when she shows signs of aging, laments his own loss of looks, and ends up feeling terrible about his life (good).

His poetry will burn through history like a meteor, and the story that it tells will be of a guy who was an utter tool; a sleazy ratbag who never grew up and wasted his whole life on sketchy inherently dishonest relationships. The deep, deep contrast between his immortal talent and shit personality, which, I know, common enough for poets and painters, leaves me flabbergasted. The dissonance between his talent and his soul, combines with vividness which has adhered his memory to me. Like something sticky on the inside of a cup you can’t get off; its Dafydd ap Gwylym.

As an antidote to Dafydd; a fragment of ‘Lament for Sion Y Glyn’ by Lewis Glyn Cothi, in which he mourns his dead son.

“A sweet apple and a bird

The boy loved, and white pebbles,

A bow of thorntree twig,

And swords, wooden and brittle;

Scared of pipes, scared of scarecrows,

Begging mother for a ball,

Singing to all his chanting,

Singing ‘Oo-o’ for a nut.

He would play sweet, and flatter,

And then turn sulky with me,

Make peace for a wooden chip

Or the dice he was fond of.”

OF WHAT USE CAN THIS POSSIBLY BE?

It is a book of vividness and immediacy in line and concept. For those of use settled on bringing imaginary worlds to life, there is not much difference between resurrecting a past world and emblazoning an imaginary one.

For anyone interested in prose, verse, observation and the combination of ideas, this is a great aleph of combinations, which grows more strange and potent, seems more original, remarkable and distinct, the more out of place it feels in its medieval home. In its humanity it seems more a work of the renaissance, in its concrete immediacy it feels modern and in the wild but telling arrangements of simile it feels almost post-modern.

For those who simply care about the past and would like to think more about what it actually felt like to, for instance, be on board a crappy ship in 14-something, or to be part of a vaunted battle which goes horribly wrong, or to hide out in a grove waiting for a ‘maid’ to turn up for a ‘tryst’, or simply to be lost in fog, or to stumble around in the dark, or, in a poem remarkable for its nature, what its like to be a relatively ordinary townsman in a normal town;

“Mine is the heat of houses,

I’m fond of bread, beer, and meat.

A wooden house in lowlands

Brings me health, like a green tree.

And so I make my dwelling

In the March, I’ve wine and mead.

A kind, attractive city,

Most blest in its citizens,

Curtain-walled is the castle,

Best of cities, far as Rome!

Croes Oswalt, friend to Jesus,

Great keep for the conqueror.”

- Wiliam Herbart

Or if you would live for a moment in the mind of a man deeply displeased with his own beard;

“Old roebuck’s hair, where’s your source?

You are a crop of gorse-shoots.

Sharp and strong is every hair,

Sticking a girl, stiff heather,

Resembling, so harsh they grow,

A thousand thistle feathers.

You are like frozen stubble,

Seamless stiff-tipped arrow quills.

Go away! Prevent dishonour,

Chin’s thatch, like a horses mane.”

‘Bard and Beard by Iolo Goch

Or if you want to get involved (sucked into) the extremely spicy, messy, sketchy, slutty and poetically brilliant life of DAFYDD AP GWILYM, whether it is perving on the local girls;

“No Sunday in Llanbadarn

I was not, as some will swear,

Facing a dainty maiden,

The nape of my neck to God.

And when I’ve long been staring

Over my plume at the pews,

Says one maiden, clear and bright,

To her shrewd, pretty neighbour:

‘That lad, palefaced as a flirt,

Wearing his sisters tresses,

Adulterous of the slanting

Glances of his eye : he’s bad!’”

Obsessing over his own fading looks;

“I’d not dreamed, burdensome bane,

My face not fine and handsome,

Till I lifted, lucid thing,

The glass : and see, its ugly!

The mirror told me at last

That I am not good-looking.

The cheek for one like Enid

Turns sallow, it’s scarcely flushed.

Glassy the cheek from groaning,

But a single sallow bruise.

The long nose might be taken

For a razor : isn’t it sad?

Is it not vile, the glad eyes

Are pits completely blinded?

And the worthless curly hair

Falls from the head in handfuls.”

Or just really absolutely hating one particular owl to the extent that he writes a whole poem cursing it (this Owl specifically);

“She’s a slut, two tuneless cries,

Thick head, persistent crying,

Broad forehead, berry-bellied,

Staring old mouse-hunting hag.

Stubborn, vile, lacking colour,

Dry her voice, her colour tin,

Loud gabble in the south wood,

O that song, roebuck’s copses,

And her face, a meek maiden’s,

And her shape, a ghostly bird.

Every bird, filthy outlaw,

Beats her ; how strange she still lives.”

A review of The Golden Peaches of Samarkand

 by Edward H. Schafer

tldr; this book has a whole sub-section on Dwarfs

Its 1962 and Edward H Schafer delves into ream upon uncounted ream of scholarship and records, all to make a list. Lists, beloved by RPG nerds, chroniclers, romantic writers and a Billy Joel.

If reams of DnD theory have been ejaculated from the question ‘What do they have in their pockets?’, birthing engines of devisment dedicated to the rapid simulation of a goblins pockets, and thence, by inference at least, also making query; what can we learn of Goblin culture from the contents of one Goblins pockets? Here now, are the pockets of a People, or an Empire, or at least a Dynasty; one of the big ones, the T’ang. Her is an encyclopaedia of all that the Emperor received. This shows us several thing;

First, it is an image of the world as perceived by the T’ang court. At its distant, wildest most suggestive western reaches, it brushes against ‘Rum’, but the more common Occidental foreigner is the ever-wealthy Persian, bringer of materials and artistic styles. To the East we hear of jungle islands, home of rare hardwoods, poisoned arrows and magical pearls. In the ocean lie the phosphorescent eyes of whales. To the South West is India; source of scripture, and of suspicious witchy alchemists who probably accidentally poisoned the Emperor that one time. South lies the known, but uncivilised aboriginal lands of continental China, malarial yet wealthy country. To the north, the ever-dangerous and very charismatic horse-riding barbarians; one Chinese noble larps so hard as a northern barbarian he ends up living in a tent erected on his family estate, wearing furs, drinking milk and eating near-raw meat, dreaming of the steppe

Second; it is an image of China and Chinese tastes and culture, as seen from the very peak of the pyramid. Horses are desired. The Middle Kingdom has a massive thirst for Horse and is always drinking dry its own supplies. A centrally-mandated Horse-sustainment organisation exists, with vast government herds, but they never seem to have enough and tribute in horses is ever-desired. Some treasures have cross-cultural appeal; hawks, dwarfs and slave girls might be banned occasionally but the tribute always starts up again. One wise magistrate is honoured by his land; he elegantly evades the relentless Imperial demands for MORE DWARFS, taken from his small population, by claiming that since everyone in his country is very small, and they are all pretty much the same height, he really can’t choose anyone exceptional to be sent to the Imperial Court. Another wise one saves the nature pearl-farms by instituting fierce governmental controls, later he is deified as one who returns the pearls. Its only about 800ad but the environmental devastation and consumption of a massive civilised population is already a stark part of the story. China needs horses, but despite efforts, can’t maintain them. She loves pearls, but over-fishes them. The exotic creatures from the borders of her lands keep going extinct or disappearing. This land is like a great terrible octopus, devouring whatever its can from the edges of its knowledge, but ever-spreading.

Third; it paints a suggestive and utterly deranged picture of what life might actually be like in the Imperial Palace; gilded squalor comes to mind. Wealth incalculable, chaos unending. The throne must have tribute and that tribute can come in many, almost in any, form. This means the Palace is filled with, is crammed with, whole zoo’s and parks of rare and strange animals, often the only ones of their kind. Horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, asses, mules onagers, dogs, elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, cheetahs, sable, ermine, gazelles, marmots, mongeese, weasels, ferrets, hawks, falcons, peacocks, parrots, ostriches and several animals, the ‘Doubtful Ungulates’ or ‘Doubtful Carnivores’, whose name and nature is unclear. These creatures may be mythic, or extinct.

That’s just the animals. If a foreign king sends the Emperor, for instance, an instrument, he will send the musician to play it, in fact, the whole band, actually send the orchestra, the dancers, backstage people, everything. Its not a holiday, they belong to the Emperor now. The palace holds entire third generation micro-communities descended specifically from such ‘gifts’. Throw in prisoners, slaves, (Dwarfs of course), Hostages (the heirs to foreign kingdoms might end up joining one of several ritual palace guard companies), or other skilled workers in materials and crafts.

We haven’t even gotten to the objects. For all the animals, imagine at least ten times the variety of plants, sent to wither or bloom in strange soil, then woods, foods, aromatics, skins, drugs, textiles, pigments, industrial materials, jewels, metals, weapons, lamps, books and sacred texts and yes of course when an Indian king sends a sacred Buddhist text in Sanskrit, he also sends along a sage who will spend the entirety of his life in the T’ang court, translating this One Book into Chinese, in one case with the Empress Wu hanging out directly over his shoulder (she liked to watch him do it).

Those are just the generalities, you must imagine, hidden and skittering amidst these grand illusions of systemic knowledge, just a bunch of weird random shit; a solid gold wine jug in the shape of a great goose, a 100 foot iron pillar holding at its top a ‘fire orb’ carved with the names of the Empress and her greatest Advisors. Asbestos robes.

Magic has no meaning here because everything is a bit magic by western standards. Nothing is ever just material. Amber, born from the coagulated glance of a dying Tiger, works well to seal wounds from weapons. Ground up Jade imparts its irresistible immortality to the taker, ground (whole, not pierced), pearls impart watery blessings. Of course, mysterious and distant foreign cultures, from places where blessings, icons, witches and ghosts are common, know the best ways to draw out these sacred abilities. Everything edible has properties that might verge on ‘magic’, and everything inedible can be made edible, or burnt as incense, or turned into a house, or clothes. Sleeping on a tiger-skin pillow obviously chases away bad dreams, but at some psychic danger to the sleeper. Those oppressed by Ghost Tigers, incubi or sex in dreams will be cured by eating Tiger Meat.

Some treasures have no modern cognate. What was ‘Purple Gold’? Perhaps the same stained metal recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun? What is ‘Myrobalan Wine’? Black as ink. The several kinds of ‘Dragons blood’, pigments, ointments, medicines and foods, are all the same? What of ‘Gibbons Blood’ pigment?

Excess also shapes the scene; some rare aromatic woods are supplied in such superfluity that, while rich Chinese might burn fragments as incense, and others have perhaps a single box, one noble contracts an entire pavilion from the semiprecious wood, inviting noble guests to midnight smell sessions, walking their aromatic decks, smelling the contents of their wonderful garden, filled with plants from a host of nations.

Imagine living in this. Specifically, in the Imperial Court. It feels like a lurid, lively Gormenghast. What an insane mess of people. How did they live together? The endless rituals, bizarre entertainments, animal, plants, slaves, nobles. That palace guard? Yeah he’s the third-hand heir to an empire somewhere, he’s never actually been there though.

Schafers grasp of his overflowing subject and his ability, and willingness, to connect themes, facts and ideas across reaches of history, make many of these entries, about the most obscure kinds of treasures, little humanist windows, little perfect ink-sketches, of a strange and living world. As an example, here is the full entry for ‘Amber’, not the shortest and by no means the longest;

...

“Amber

The Chinese word for ‘amber,’ *xuo-p’nk, has been pleasantly explained as “tigers soul,” a phrase which has the same pronunciation, the etymology has been rationalized by the tale that the congealing glance of a dying tiger forms the waxy mineral. This reminds us of the Greek notion that amber was the solidified urine of a lynx. But Tuan Ch’eng-shih, our T’ang bibliophile and collector of curiosa, has this to say:

“Some say that when the blood of a dragon goes into the ground it becomes amber. But the record of the Southern Man has it that in the sand at Ning-chou there are snap-waist wasps, and when the bank collapses the wasps come out; the men of that land work on them by burning, and so make amber of them.”

This strange and ambiguous tale seems to contain an allusion to the wasps and other insects, often found encased in amber, but the rest of it is incomprehensible. In any event, “tigers-soul” probably has nothing to do with the word *xuo-p’nk, which seems to represent a loan from some language of western or southern Asia, in its original form something like *xarupah, related to harpax, the “Syrian” form mentioned by Pliny.

Although the legend of the relation between amber and the vital essence of tigers and dragons persisted into medieval times, the true nature of amber has been known since the third century, of not earlier. This scientific knowledge was familiar to the T’ang pharmacologist, and preserved in their compendia. The Basic Herbs of Shu for instance, states; “Amber then as a substance, is the sap of a tree which has gone into the ground, and has been transformed after a thousand years. Even poets knew this truth. Wei Ying-wu’s brief ode to amber embodies it:

Once it was the old ‘deity of chinaroot,’

But at bottom it is the sap of a cold pine tree.

A mosquito or gnat falls into the middle of it,

And after a thousand years may still be seen there.

The ‘deity of chinaroot’ is a precious fungoid drug found among pine roots; it was believed that this was an intermediate stage in the development of amber from pine resin.

The precious resin was known to be a product of Rome, and was imported from Iran. This must have been the famous amber gathered on the shores of the Baltic Sea. But closer at hand was the amber deposit of upper Burma, near Myitkyina (and near the jadeite mines which would be exploited mand centuries later); this material was acquired by the people of Nan-chao, where the nobles wore amber in their ears, like the modern Kachins. There were even gifts of amber from Champa and Japan. A commercial variety brought up by merchants through the South China Sea was thought to be especially fine.

Amber had a part in T’ang jewellery similar to that of coral, that is, it was readily converted into ornaments for ladies, and small but expensive objects of virtu for well-to-do households. Among the objects of Amber in the Shosoin are double six pieces, a fish pendant, rosary beads for a ceremonial crown, and inlays in the back of mirrors. Medicine also had a place for amber, as it had for all precious substances which might conceivably lend their beauty and permanence to the human organism. Venerable pine trees were revered in themselves and fresh pine resin was itself a life-prolonging drug. How much more so must amber be, which was pine resin suitably embalmed by a spiritual preservative. More specifically, it was prescribed for “bad blood” and affusions of blood caused by weapons. In short, recipes based on the ancient idea that amber was coagulated blood continued in use even in the T’ang, despite evidence of better knowledge.

The T’ang poets found ‘amber’ a useful colour word, signifying a translucent red-yellow, and used it particularly as an epithet of ‘wine’. We have already seen it used by Li Po, in our discussion of saffron. A line by Chang Yueh is another case;

“In the Northern Hall they stress the value of amber wine.”

Li Ho, the precarious ninth-century poet, went a step further, and made ‘amber’ stand for ‘wine’ by metonymy. This usage was part and parcel of his well-known interest in colour imagery for the intensification of emotion; he was unique in his abundant use of “golden”, “silvery”, “deep green”, and in the way in which he used “white” to express intense illumination and emotional contrast in landscape descriptions (as in black and white photography, say): “the sky is white,” and even “the autumn wind is white.” Here is his “Have The Wine Brought In!”

In glass-paste stoup

The amber is thick -

From a small vat wine drips - true pearls reddened;

Boiling dragon, roasting phoenix - jadefat dripping.

Net screen, embroidered awning, encircle fragrant wind.

Blow dragon flute!

Strike alligator drum!

Candent teeth sing -

Slender waists dance -

Especially now when blue spring day is going to set,

And peach flowers fall confused like pink rain.

I exhorrt milord to drink besottedness by end of day,

Nor let the wine upset on the earth over Liu Lings grave!

Liu Ling, one of the ancient “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” was a notorious winebibber, and bottles were buried with him; to spill wine on the ground now, was a libation, intended or accidental, would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.”

...

Within one entry we go from a discussion on etymology, to a discussion of mythic origins, consideration of foreign word origins, perhaps explained or obscured by a pleasing poetic ‘just so’ story, this then contrasted with apparently already-known origins, this knowledge embodied by an ode, a brief line on some weird drug that never comes up again, a geographic analysis of likely sources of the raw material considering global trade routes, a paragraph on the use of this luxury and its integration with the lives of its final consumers, a loop back round in which magical properties are considered, then finally a little pleasing dive into the use of the ‘idea’ of the material in poetry, its effect on high language, and lastly a line about a famous legendary drunkard.

If this pleases you, then here you are.

This is the sort of ‘Wunderkammer’ book which used to go very hard in the OSR, (when I had any connection to it). Back in the day, bloggers would knife fight a monkey to be the first to post this kind of thing.

Its obvious use as a list of incredible treasures is only the first part. Every aspect of the book suggests adventure, perhaps not of the dungeon-diving variety, but certainly adventures of intrigue, travel and trade, as well as medicine and art. The tantalising but specific hints about the most curious elements of imperial and T’ang life have a vivifying effect, one wants to fill them in, to experience the world they describe. Who wouldn’t want to run into the cosplay steppe-barbarian noble as an NPC? Or Ultimate Smell Guy? Or the Foreign Orchestra Tribe? Or even just they guy in charge of the Elephants?

It is the kind of text that feels like gloves; you want to grasp and manipulate its contents.