Waxing Poetic on Ancient Welsh Poetry

I haven’t heard anything lately about Tom Jones, the young Welsh singer who overstimulated millions of female hearts all over the English-speaking world about five or six years ago. I met him back then, and he congratulated me on what he said was my almost perfect pronunciation of the almost interminable name of a small town in Wales.

My mother’s side of the family was Welsh. Her father arrived in the United States from Wales about 100 years ago, I think. He was a Congregationalist minister, nearly 40 years old at the time, and he took on the task of ministering to some of the many Welshmen who had mined coal in Wales and were now lining their lungs and other respiratory membranes with coal dust in the mines of Pennsylvania and Ohio. He must have been quite a guy. Before leaving Wales, he had been honored with, I think, three bardic chairs at the national Eisteddfod. I’ve been told that the bardic chair is one of the highest honors a Welshman can get. In effect, its conferment names its recipient as the poet laureate pro tem of Wales.

I saw two of the chairs. Maybe that’s all there were; but I seem to recall hearing that he’d received three. They were heavy, dark, wooden affairs. I wouldn’t blame him for not lugging any more than he felt he had to. He met and married a young woman also recently off the boat from Wales. He was a Stephens, and she was an Evans. They had two daughters: my mother, Ruth, and her younger sister, Mary. His wife died when both girls were children, and he reared them by himself, sending my mother through Oberlin College before he died. My mother then put together enough money to send Mary, too, through Oberlin.

I never saw any of my grandfather’s poetry, but since it was all in Welsh, which is incomprehensible to almost everyone in the world, that made little difference to me. My mother knew a few Welsh phrases, enough to give a good rendition of many of the exotic phonemes, so from early on I had some knowledge of the sounds of Welsh.

Ten years ago, my wife and I went to Wales, and in the course of our stay there, I picked up a postcard showing a suspension bridge over a broad river in an idyllic pastoral setting. The bridge is in a town called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. I thought I’d take a crack at it, using what I remembered of my mother’s Welsh. The double-L at the beginning of a word is tricky. You set your tongue in the “L”-position, then as you start the L-word, you expel bilateral gusts of air over the sides of your tongue, so that you have a sort of aspirated “L.” In “Henry V,” Shakespeare rendered the Welsh name Llewellyn as Fluellen. He might equally well have made it Clewellen. As I said, Tom Jones told me I had it down pat.