July 25, 2007
dafyddapgwilym.net
Tags: language, poetry, welshFor a couple years, I studied Welsh. You could say it was because I wanted to learn that funny language that inspired countless cut-rate fantasy writers to replace all of the i’s with y’s and use lots of w’s to make people and place names more exotic.
You’d be wrong. It’s a deeply poetic language and for me a heritage language. See, I’m related to the Joneses. And the Smiths.
There’s a new edition of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poems available online in both Welsh and English that’s very well done. It includes audio of various folks reading the poems in Welsh. Go to the poems and select the third one, Y Drindod (The Trinity). Hit the audio and give it a listen. Note the incredible alliteration on the “oe” sound in lines 9 and 10.
And if you want to know what the “ll” sounds like, try poem 140, Y Llw (The Oath).
(Dafydd ap Gwilym “is generally regarded as the greatest Welsh poet of all time and amongst the great poets of Europe in the Middle Ages.”)
–via Languagehat
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Did you see a poem about “Blodeuwedd the Owl”? I couldn’t find it.
July 27, 2007 @ 12:52 am
I don’t think the Blodeuwedd story is an ap Gwilym poem — it’s from the Mabinogion.
July 27, 2007 @ 8:05 am
“There is a poem about Blodeuwedd the Owl by Davydd(sp.?) ap Gwilym, in which she swears by St. David that she is the daughter of the lord of Mona, equal in dignity to Meirchion himself”
-Robert Graves, The White Goddess, page 315.
Graves should have translated it, as it was sufficiently obscure that most of his readers would never have encountered it.
July 28, 2007 @ 3:22 am
Mal - interesting. I haven’t read Graves in years. I couldn’t find it either.
July 28, 2007 @ 10:15 pm