Afonydd: Poems for Welsh Rivers / Cerddi Afonydd Cymru
by Sian Northey (editor), Ness Owen (editor)
Genres: PoetryPages: 111
Rating:
Synopsis:Lleisiau hanner cant o feirdd yn llifo gydag afonydd Cymru. Pob cerdd yn Gymraeg a Saesneg, wedi'i chyfieithu o'r naill iaith i'r llall.
Fifty Welsh poets speak for and with the rivers of Wales. Every poem translated Welsh to English, English to Welsh.
I really loved Afonydd. It’s a great idea for a collection, put together by Sian Northey and Ness Owen, and bringing together various Welsh (and at least one ?English) voices to write about the rivers of Wales. Each poem is presented both in Welsh and English: whichever language the poet wrote in, it’s been translated to the other. The introduction, contents, everything is all in both languages.
The dragon has two tongues, indeed; Northey and Owen have been very sensitive to that, and I think it’s a really well-done project, even before we get to the poems.
I didn’t love all of the poems, as expected in an anthology, but I did love a lot of them, and I loved sounding out the Welsh (even though I don’t understand it) and just revelling in what is, in almost all the poems, a deep love for Wales. It’s probably a good thing that when I read it I knew I’d be visiting Wales for at least a couple of days within just over a month, or I think I’d probably have cried.
It’s quite hard to find this book on StoryGraph: typing the title gets you 25 other results first, and you have to add the editors’ names to get it to come up — with books like Rick Remender’s Deadly Class vol 11: A Fond Farewell coming up before the actual book with the exact title Afonydd. There are, as I understand it, no plans to remedy that bug in the search, beyond telling me to put Welsh as a language I read in (which adds insult to injury, naturally; I don’t speak Welsh, because English imperialism was and is a whole thing — and anyway, the edition I was looking for is listed as English on the site).
So if this book tickles your fancy at all, I’ll note that it’s available on Kobo Plus and is in the National Poetry Library’s collection, and has my recommendation, and that it might be nice to make it a little bit more discoverable.
Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)
The Welsh language is absolutely fascinating to me and I wish I could read it. You said you don’t speak Welsh, but can you read it? I have found that I can still read some German, which I took in high school 20 years ago, but can not speak it to save my life – beyond saying I’m tired, lol.
Poetry is really hard for me, I don’t really know how to connect to it the way I do with prose. I’ve tried, but it’s hard.
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Alas, no, I’ve never learned much Welsh at all. I can count to ten, say “I am a dragon” (thanks Duolingo) and “I like books”, and a couple polite greetings, but that’s it. The last generation of my family on either side who spoke Welsh were my grandparents, and then it was only Grampy as far as I know.
I’m sorry, that must be so frustrating sometimes, especially know you were within two generations of such a beautiful language. Duolingo is teaching me German again and a lot is coming back but I still don’t think I could speak it.
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I find that Duolingo’s alright for teaching vocabulary, and it works okay when you’re familiar with the grammar of the language or it’s not too different, so I found it okay for French but no good for Dutch or Welsh.