Storytelling Starters ~ Marwnad
I surprised myself this week. I wrote a poem in Welsh. It’s a mourning poem, an elegy, Marwnad in Welsh, and it came to me in my sadness at the death last Sunday of my good friend, the Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart. Simon had been a friend for 49 years, ever since we met in Cambridge. With all his restless humour, acute perceptions and capacity to make me laugh like a drain, he has felt like an integral part of my life ever since. But only after several days of returning to my poem for him did I begin to realise that my feeling in writing it had anything to do with my storytelling.
First of all, I don’t usually write poems. Yes, there have been one or two in the past. But despite loving and often reading poetry, I’ve never thought of writing it as something for me. Certainly not in Welsh. Only through attending a weekly Welsh class at London’s City Lit have I recently developed enough confidence to try writing anything at all in Welsh, let alone anything vaguely literary. Welsh was not the language of my home (my mother was English-speaking). I did not grow up bilingual. Yet I grew up surrounded by Welsh – for instance, in Primary School, we used to learn and recite a Welsh poem each week – and the sounds of Welsh have always run deep in my blood.
Now, as I gain confidence to start writing in Welsh, and particularly this week since starting that poem, I’m really beginning to understand how different languages endow you with different ways of seeing and feeling. And back with my poem, for it’s not yet quite finished, I’ve also made another connection. Mourning poems are a very strong part of Welsh poetic tradition. So although writing that poem for Simon felt like my own personal thought, I was actually picking up on something that I realise now was in my bloodstream.
So there’s the nub of it. It’s been a sad week. But it’s also been a good week. For I’ve started realising through sadness how much my storytelling has also owed specifically to my love of the Welsh language, its sounds, its intimacy and its grandeur. Every language has its own traditions. Every language has a world of seeing and feeling inside it. And through storytelling as through poetry, whatever the language we use, we endow our listeners with that seeing and feeling. Could anything be more valuable? And isn’t it really important to acknowledge this value in a country that has within it not only English and Welsh but, by now, such a huge diversity of people from other language-backgrounds too?
Tags: bilingualism, Marwnad, Simon Hoggart
January 14th, 2014 at 11:01 pm
Dwi’n hiraethu am Simon, hefyd, Mary, er don i ddim yn ei nabod fo, dim ond trwy ei erthyglau yn y Guardian. Mae ysgrifennu yn fath cryf o nabod rhywun heb ei nabod fo neu hi, os wyt ti’n gweld be dwi’n ceisio dweud …
Hoffwn darllen dy gerdd rhywbryd.
Cariad mawr
Fiona
January 17th, 2014 at 12:33 pm
Fiona, diolch am dy neges. Rwy’n meddwl bydd lot o bobl yn hiraethu am Simon fel wyt ti’n dweud. Mae’r angladd wythnos nesaf. Ar hyn o bryd, mae’r cerdd rwyf i wedi sgrifennu gyda fy nhiwtor yn y dosbarth Cymraeg. Bydd e’n cywiro camgymeriadau (siwr o fod mae nifer o rhain) ac wedyn – achos dy fod ti wedi ofyn – byddaf yn danfon y cerdd i ti i ti cael gweld. Mary xxx
January 24th, 2014 at 12:03 pm
So sorry about your loss love the blog that embraces the Welsh language
I have been reading upon Welsh hymns and the basis of their origin
Your blogs always encourage me to do something different.
Love Lizxx