Translator’s Note: “The Wind” by Dafydd ap Gwilym

Translating Dafydd ap Gwilym into anything but a line-by-line prose gloss is an extreme technical challenge. You can see the magisterial new edition of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poems complete, with free-verse translations, at www.dafyddapgwilym.net. Former translators have either given a prose rendition of the sense or loosened the content in order to preserve the rhyme.

My aim was to preserve the brilliance of ap Gwilym’s metaphorical thinking while retaining his metrical lightness of touch. This is important because the pace of his meter is how he embodies “The Wind” in the poem. Ap Gwilym, who called himself a second Taliesin, may well have had the earlier poet’s ode, which I’m translating now, in mind as he wrote his own hymn to the havoc that art can work in the world. This poem shows ap Gwilym’s muse tumbling, at the pace of his words, through the world.

The main difficulty is that Welsh poetry is syllabic, English accentual. Dafydd ap Gwilym’s extreme concision in Welsh is hard to convey within seven-syllable lines and without a sense of strain. My priority has been to capture the tone of the poem’s wit and his joie de vivre.

My choice of vocabulary steers between two extremes. The first would be using words consistent with the historical period of the poem. The second would be using fully contemporary words to “update” the world of the poem. I chose to steer a middle course, so that this will not date my translation unduly. I showed this version to Dafydd Johnston, the scholar who led the online Dafydd ap Gwilym project. Referring to lines 5 and 6, Johnston said that he couldn’t see that there was a reference to clouds as loaves of bread in the original. I pointed out that there’s a metaphorical line of thinking leading from the sky as a pantry, which is in the original, to clouds as loaves and the wind as yeast:

Yeast in cloud loaves, you were thrown out
Of sky’s pantry with not one foot.

He admitted that I could be right. I hope it’s the kind of extravagance that ap Gwilym would forgive.