totally different or somewhat so

Love is the topic here, and not noble, decorous love, but, you know, the carnal type. I would not suggest in any way that the Brythonic peoples have a particular affinity with such, but what we have this week is Welsh and Breton. Back to Irish next week.

 

Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl 1320 – 1370) is the great medieval Welsh poet of love and nature, whose literary persona was something of a blend of Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin. He was a minor nobleman in the first generations after the Norman English conquest of Wales and pioneered a shift in focus from the somber older poetry and meters to the cywydd.

 

It is a measure of how old-fashioned Ireland and the Highlands were that the comparable shift from Dán Díreach to amhrán only happened really in the 18^th century in Ireland, though, to be fair, cywydd poetry is more complex than amhrán.

 

 

                                    Offeren y Llwyn  (The Mass in the Grove)

 

            I was in a pleasant place today,

            under the mantle of the green hazel wood.

            I was listening, as the day began,

            to the fine and able cock thrush,

            as he sang his skillful learned poem,

            his glorious ceremony and exhortation.

 

            He’s a traveler from afar, his nature is steady,

            this love messenger has come a great distance.

            He’s come here from beautiful Caerfyrddin

            under the command of my bright lover;

            and he’s eloquent, though he carries no license.

            The place he seeks is here, the glen of Nentyrch.

            Morfudd is the one who dispatched him

            with his poetry, this fosterling of May.

            He was wearing a vestment

            of the flowers of the dear branches of May,

            and his chasuble, as you would expect,

            was of wings, green mantles of the wind.

 

            There wasn’t a thing that was there, by great God,

            as roof for the altar that wasn’t of the purest gold.

            I heard there, in an exquisite language,

            a long chant, a chant that did not falter,

            a reading for the parish, not timorous or uncertain,

            of the gospel, clearly and distinctly.

            The communion wafer, a fine green leaf,

            was raised up for us then on a hill.

            The beauteous, fair, eloquent nightingale

            by the borders of the grove  there by us,

            the poet of this glen, she sang for us

            the communion bell, and her descant was loud

            as the sacrament was raised high

            towards the skies over the grove

            in worship of our Lord God,

            a chalice of the love of man and woman.

            I am fond and pleased with this music,

            and with the birch grove, the dear wood that made it.

 

Dafydd says things a bit obliquely. There are plenty of what might be called medieval Welsh “bawdy” poems, but most to me sound a bit too much like a bunch of guys trading stories, and I’ve got to say that I prefer Dafydd’s approach. Apparently only the Irish and Scottish Gaels were able at that point to make luminous, majestic poetry about, well, making love.

 

In the mid-eighteenth century, Alasdair mac Mhaistir Alasdair composed a long piece about lovemaking that is modeled on pibroch (the contemporary, complex classical music of the Highland bagpipe that was probably originally from the harp), but it is too long to post now, so here's a version of the tune.

           

Mererid Puw Davies, the author of Deffroad (below) is a contemporary Welsh woman. The poem is from her book Cerrdi o Pen Draw y Byd (Poems from the End of the World). She was living in the Breton department of Finisterre (Pen ar Bed in Breton) at the time. The book was part of the series Cyfres y Beirdd Answyddogal (Series of Unofficial Poets) (Welsh poetry was more almost all formal and serious at the time.) The publisher, Y Lolfa (the Lounge, or "Place of Nonsense), based in the small village of Talybont, took the lead in the 1970s in making light and even junk reading available in Welsh.

 

                   Deffroad

           

            the world is a chocolate gateau

                            the world is a total holiday

 

            the world is dancing on rocking roads

                   the world is a roman candle

                        difficult books new shoes

 

                        the streets are girls

                                    with golden earrings

                                    and eyes of silver

                                    in a huge gallery of pictures

                        there’s a mirror in every frame

 

                       the world is a chocolate gateau

                           the world is a total holiday

 

                           the buses are running

                             the rain is coming down

                              the coffee is boiling

                           the sun is shining

                           and I marvel, I marvel

 

                       how you can so impudently dare

                                        to promise blasphemously

                                        to mean more even

                                        than all this to me?

           

Naig Rozmor was born in 1923 and died in 2015 near Kastell Pol (Saint Pol de Leon). Her parents were small tenant farmers, like most people in the area, but had the farm sold out from under them by a priest (the area was then very very Catholic) and they had to move to Treboul near Dournenez.

 

She was the first Breton woman poet to speak openly of physical love and such matters, and she also wrote very effective dramas dealing with contemporary life and the situation of women and peasants.

 

Only one very short medieval Breton poem remains. The rest was lost when the nobility and learned poets turned to French.

 

                         Pa Dremen an Askell-Grohenn

 

           

            Now, my love, the magic bell of love has sounded;

            I’ve heard the bat rend the silky sails of night,

            and the owl hoot in answer, there in the distance.

 

            See now, in the gleam of the glass

            my body’s ardent harp stretched out before you

            with all its gardens trembling on edge.

 

            Kneel down before it for a moment,

            before you taste its sweet tunes of music,

            and caress it tenderly.

 

            Drink gently its anguished smile,

            Give ear to its prayer,

            hear my complaint, 

            smooth my yell,

            tremble with it when it shudders between your arms,

            fly on its gossamer wings

            up beyond the highest arch...

 

            For the time of astonishing communion is now,

            come to knot us together, body and soul,

            until morning.

Here is the one medieval Breton poem. (Well, it will be here tomorrow, Monday. It is in a big box with other papers above the garage where there are no lights.)

 

And above is a link to a film about Naig Rozmor. It’s quite interesting, though a lot of it is various people in the last fifty years talking, leading horses and so on  You will learn that her father, who was very religious, threw his rosary in the fire after the landlord priest threw them off the farm they’d been on a long time, and that she herself refused a proposal of marriage from a man she would happily have married, so that she could focus instead on writing.

The Breton of Kastell Pol has always sounded a bit “thin” to me, but the bits with Goulc’han Kervella (in a blue shirt) from further west along the coast give a good idea of the Breton of Leon province, the most classical, and I think, beautiful, of all the dialects. This and Morbihan were the areas that probably received the most British refugees. The dialects may still reflect, though  in very different ways, the long extinct British dialects of west Wessex (Sussex, Somerset, Dorset etc.), though I admit that 1500 years is a long time.

By the way, Goulc'han Kervella has steered the extraordinary Strollad ar Vro Pagan for many many years. It started as a loose group of young people interested in Breton language and culture, but became a theater group creating home-grown spectacles in Breton focused on relevant topics: spectacles that were also fun and enjoyable and were performed all over Brittany. (Bro Pagan was then a poor remote area of small farmers and fishermen sand seaweed-gatherers.)

 

The film also demonstrates the fact that almost all young Bretons raised in French but who have learned Breton seem unable to leave French cadence and phonology behind.  It is a shame.