Peter Island, The Bell Ringer, sea jellies, Mabinogi blog

Finally, I’ve tumbled down the rabbit hole again. It’s been a bit of a grim past three months as I was sick, but I’m very much on the mend and I had many magical experiences on the way which makes me wonder whether this wasn’t such a horrid experience after all. My family have been a host of angels, and it confirmed that I do indeed have the most incredible, loving and wise mother in the world (not that I needed it confirming but…). Last week, my father was working in the British Virgin Islands and I went down to visit him and my mother for a week on Peter Island (a treat to help me get well – sunshine and maternal pampering being the best healing combo I discovered). My brother also took time off work to come for a few days. It was one of the most special, wonderful times of my life. The island was one of the most beautiful, tranquil places on earth and I will never forget the walks I took with my mother and brother when we talked about so many things.
To get down to the articles that caught my eye:
1. The Sunday NYTimes book review (4.6.08) of Benazir Bhutto’s ‘Reconciliation’ by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International: “..Written while she was preparing to re-enter political life, it is a book of enormous intelligence, courage and clarity. It contains the best-written and most persuasive modern interpretation of Islam I have read.”
2. The Sunday NYimes book review (3.30.08) of Parag Khanna’s “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order”: “Now a young..foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khann, suggests…that we are on the cusp of a new new world order – ‘a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.’ The three are the US, the European Union and China. The contest now is primarily for the world’s limited resources and it will be waged in Khanna’s second world… And since each of the new empires has nuclear weapons, ‘economic power is more important than military power’.”
3. The Sunday NYTimes book review (4.6.08) of Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories “Unaccustomed Earth”: “The eight stories..expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph…by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women ‘strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.’ ..But Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne’s notion as test it. Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes?”
4. The Sunday NYTimes book review (4.6.08) of Siri Hustvedt’s “The Sorrows of an American”. The character Erik in this novel says: “It’s odd that we’re all compelled to repeat pain…but I’ve come to regard this as a truth.”
5. "Soft Cell”, from the Sunday NYTimes Mag (4.6.08) – about a web site which creates (and profits from) a community for the family and friends of the incarcerated. (Gaia Online, Prison Talk)
6. “The Real Work: modern magic and the meaning of life” by the ever-prolific Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker (03.17.08).
7. “The Bell Ringer” by John Burnside from the New Yorker (03.17.08). I am often disappointed by the short stories in the New Yorker (they are often the lesser good stories of very well known writers), but this was one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in a while: “It was dark, out on the narrow lane that ran past the sawmills, dark and very green, the boundary wall a dim colony of moss and ferns, the shadows under the trees damp and still. To most people, it seemed gloomy, but for Eva it was as close to the landscape of home as she could imagine – especially now, with the new snow settling on the pines and on the ridges of the drystone wall, so that the land resembled nothing so much as a children’s-book illustration, the snow steady and insistent in a kingdom that had succumbed to the bad fairy’s spell and slept for a hundred years in a viridian web of gossamer and thorns.” (WOW)
8. “Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper” by Eric Alterman, the New Yorker (03.31.08).
9. “Ghost Writer: Pat Parker’s haunted imagination” by Kennedy Fraser from the New Yorker (03.17.08). (Pat Parker’s “Regeneration” trilogy won her the Booker Prize in the late 1990s). I like her words “As metaphor – and similes are trivial, but metaphors go to the heart of what human beings are – there is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of ghosts haunting the living… It is simply a statement about our relationship to the past, and to the parts of the past we haven’t managed to cope with. I thank the Lord I grew up in a setting like that.”
10. “Can Cellphones Help End Global Poverty?” by Sara Corbett (The New York Times Mag 03.13.08)
I look forward to reading Kurt Vonnegut’s posthumous book of essays “Armageddon in Retrospect.” To quote from the collection (a rule for writing a short story, and advice he applied to non-fiction too): “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
Also, one of my students wrote about sea jellies in her essay on visiting the Boston Aquarium, which I marked today. Apparently they have no brains or bones… She said they reminded her of white blood cells (she’s a pre-med student). It was quite a wonderful essay. As she wrote, “Nature truly is amazing, and also our body.”
Valete, I better swim back up out of Wonderland to Boston now.

p.s. I paste below my first blog for Words Without Borders. I talk about the Mabinogi, a classic of Medieval Welsh literature.

Mabinogi
by Sophie Powell
10 March 2008

Wales has a vast and vibrant literary heritage, though among Americans this rich tradition remains a bit in the shadows. One of the most seminal Medieval Welsh texts is The Mabinogi, also a great classic of European literature. The Mabinogi, also known as The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, is a set of four tales written in Wales in the late eleventh century, by an unknown master of Welsh prose. John K. Bollard, an American, has recently produced a superb translation, published by Gomer Press, Wales’ largest independent publisher. He presents to the reader an accurate and close rendering, reflecting with elegance and energy the original Medieval Welsh text in a modern English idiom. My parents bought me Bollard’s new translation for Christmas. I was deeply impressed by the way Bollard managed to preserve the original storyteller’s voice in the Welsh original whilst still making the verses sound natural and accessible. Previous, older translations I had read sounded too archaic and stiff. In addition, Bollard’s translation is accompanied by evocative photographs of the places mentioned in it, allowing the reader a glimpse of the magical landscape of Wales where the tales are set. Bollard is an academic with a unique and diverse background. I emailed him out of the blue and he wrote back a very warm email, answering my questions with enthusiasm and patience. I’m sharing parts of our email exchange here:

SOPHIE: Why should people read The Mabinogi?

BOLLARD: The Mabinogi is the jewel in the crown of Welsh literature. It is a written work derived from traditional oral sources with their roots in Celtic myth, and it is a masterpiece of the storyteller’s art. It is also a work that explores the nature of our humanity, providing a moral view of life and human interaction without being dogmatic. While the origins of these tales lie in a mythic Celtic past, the tales and characters have been skillfully woven together to deal with such important questions as “What is friendship?”, “How should we respond to hostile or unfriendly words or actions?”, “What is the role of marriage as a social bond?”, “What is the role of women”, “How should women be treated?”, and perhaps most importantly — “How do we stop this seemingly endless round of feuds and wars, destruction and death?” Any work that addresses such themes with understanding is worth reading in any age.

SOPHIE: How did you, an American native, become interested in Medieval Welsh?

BOLLARD: I was an English major at the University of Rochester (some years ago), concentrating in medieval and especially Arthurian literature. Frequent references and footnotes to the Welsh sources suggested to me that it would be good to find out first hand what these sources were like in the original. Before I knew it I was setting out to do graduate work at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth. There I got increasingly fascinated with medieval Welsh language, literature and history and have remained so ever since.

SOPHIE: When translating The Mabinogi, did you look at previous translations? How did you want to make your translation different/unique?

BOLLARD:I didn’t set out to make my translation “different” or “unique;” I just started translating as best I could, staying as close to the meaning and intent of the Welsh as I could manage without becoming too stilted or archaic in my English, recognizing that the result would be distinct from other translations. I was, of course, familiar with other translations, and I was undoubtedly influenced by them through that long familiarity, but I made no particular attempt either to agree or to disagree with them. My greatest hope was to capture some of the author’s tone, some of the liveliness and spirit of the medieval storyteller’s art, so that the reader might hear at least an echo of his voice. Whether I have succeeded is up to the reader to judge.

SOPHIE: What is the linguistic origin of Medieval Welsh? How far does Medieval Welsh deviate from modern Welsh?

BOLLARD: Medieval Welsh is the descendant of the Brythonic language that was spoken in much of Britain before the Romans arrived in the 1st century BCE—and after they left in the fifth century. Thus, it is a Celtic language most closely related to Cornish, spoken in Cornwall into the 18th century, and to Breton, still spoken in Brittany / Bretagne in northwestern France, and somewhat more distantly related to Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx. The spelling of Medieval Welsh is different from that of Modern Welsh, but the language has not changed as much as English has in the past thousand years. To a native Welsh speaker, reading Middle Welsh (as it is called) might be analogous to an English speaker reading something between the language of Shakespeare (Early Modern English) and that of Chaucer (Middle English). Comprehensible, if somewhat archaic in vocabulary and structure.

SOPHIE: Are there any other books in the original Welsh that you think non-Welsh readers should be aware of?

BOLLARD: There are many Welsh books that should get a wide audience. For those interested in early literature, I recommend The Gododdin, a fascinating elegiac poem celebrating the heroes who fell in the battle of Catraeth around the year 600 CE. (I did say ‘early’, mind!) There is an excellent facing translation by A.O.H. Jarman. A bit later and on a lighter note, I highly recommend the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Dafydd, an older contemporary of Chaucer, was the greatest Welsh poet and one of the greatest of European love poets from any age. His poetry ranges from the lyrical to the satirical, and his self-effacing persona is at times hilarious. There are several translations; I recommend those by Rachel Bromwich, with a facing Welsh text that will give a visual sense of the poetry of the language even if you can’t read it.

Among modern works I particularly recommend two important novels of Islwyn Ffowc Elis—Cysgod y Cryman “Shadow of the Sickle” and Yn Ol i Leifior “Return to Lleifior”—which have been translated by Meic Stephens. The stories of Kate Roberts are also available in English.

***

I'll be discussing the work of Islwyn Ffowc Elis and Kate Roberts in later blogs. For the next couple of months, I'd like to focus on modern Welsh authors writing in the original Welsh. Wales and its literature are much neglected despite its incredibly rich historical and cultural value.

Gomer has also issued a companion edition to The Mabinogi, Companion Tales To The Mabinogi, translated by Bollard which is equally engaging and beautifully presented with photographs. Bollard said he'd be pleased to send signed copies of his books to anyone who would like to get one from him directly, as stated on his book website: http://themabinogi.googlepages.com. For more information on Bollard also see the link http://jkbollard.googlepages.com.

Pop hwl! (Welsh for Ciao) for the time being,