Storytelling Starters ~ Marwnad
Saturday, January 11th, 2014I 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? (more…)