When is a translation not a translation? When it’s a version.
Or “poems after.” I like that.
They’re definitely after, as Dafydd ap Gwilym was writing poems seven centuries ago.
Now Matthew Francis has written those new versions. He compares what he’s doing to what Verdi or Baz Luhrmann did to Shakespeare, or what Shakespeare did to Plutarch. He’s positioning himself in a long line of men. (So much straight sex… for balance, I will return to a Welshwoman writing a century later than Dafydd, the magnificent Gwerful Mechain).
The Green Month of the title poem is May. It never meets the Black Month, November. They both ride in on their high horse – to find the other gone. As the black casts its shadow, it feels good to return to the green. To dappled leaves patterning bare skin. To wild hills and soaring wings and midnight cloudbursts. This is the landscape I grew up in, and my body misses it.
Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poems have been curated and edited in an AHRB research project at the University of Aberystwyth. Francis is emeritus professor there. The team members translated them into English, too. You can browse and compare and even print… or start with this delightful book.
The glorious cover design is by Kishan Rajani. Faber was ahead of the curve with depopulating book covers. But sometimes more really is more. Green, tangled, bursting with irreverent creatures, this just fits.
And after these poems after, I’ve asked Santa for Francis’s Mabinogi. Those are tales I grew up with, so I’ll be better able to see what his versioning does to them. I expect great things!
Translator, editor, writer, reader
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