Papur gan Damien Walford Davies am ei brofiadau recordio R.S. darllen ei waith ar gyfer y set 3 CD a gyheoddwyd flwyddyn neu ddau cyn iddo fe (RST) farw.
Ffeindiais i hyn achos fy mod i’n darllen, am y tro cyntaf, barddonaieth Waldo Williams, a threiliais i oriau yng nghwmni “Mewn Dau Gae” ddoe.
After his powerful reading of “A Thicket in Lleyn,” I asked whether in the closing lines he had meant consciously to echo the great twentieth-century Welsh poet Waldo Williams’s masterpiece on the imagination and its relation to the world, “Mewn Dau Gae,” “In Two Fields,” a poem Thomas has in fact translated : “Yr oedd rhyw ffynhonnau’n torri tua’r nefoedd/ Ac yn syrthio’n l a’u dagrau fel dail pren” (Fountains burst up towards heaven/ Falling back with tears like leaves of a tree). Thomas’s poem ends thus:
Your migrations will never
be over. Between two truths
there is only the mind to fly with.
Navigate by such stars as are not
leaves falling from life’s
deciduous tree, but spray from the fountain
of the imagination, endlessly
replenishing itself out of its own waters.Was he thinking of Waldo Williams’s lines, then, in “A Thicket in Lleyn”? “No,” he smilingly replied, “I was thinking of a thicket in Lleyn.” Chastened, I remember musing at the time that poets should respond more often with that kind of corrective bathos to over-zealous critics grubbing around for literary allusions.
Un o’r pethau sy’n yn fy moddran i gyda cherdd Waldo yw’r ymadrodd chwibanwyr gloywbib yn y pennill cyntaf. Ai gylfinirod yw’r rhain fel yr awgrymir yng Ngeiriadur y Prifysgol, neu jyst whistlers (h.y. adar heb eu henwi) fel y dwedir gan Thomas a Tony Conran yn eu cyfieithiadau? Am ryw reswm, dw i am glywed llais y gylfinir yn cyfeilo i callwib y cornicyllod.
[caneuon yr adar via findsounds]
