Bobi Jones, Planet, 1970 (?)
I write English like a dead language. This is probably will-power.
When I write Welsh, however, it is not by choice. There is nothing voluntary about that medium. Confronted with the muse, (to adopt the usual cliché) I find that it stuffs the Welsh language down my throat.
Language is so totalitarian. How else would many of the most interesting writers in Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Sanskrit have chosen to write in a second language, even in a "dead" language ? I suspect that Beckett in his second language, like Conrad in his third, experienced this same compulsion of discovery and chose the path of least resistance.
I am not the first to notice this totalitarianism. When imperialist England submerged Wales, the first and last blow at destruction was at the language. Conquer that, and conquer all. A Welshman might henceforth feel a superficial equality in other spheres, but regarding his own country he was permanently condemned. Even inferiority in the economy would now be accepted because the language had inferior status. This was the norm for centuries, the mentality of slant towards London. The language was to be the economy, was politics, was industry, was science : when the language rolled over, they all rolled over.
The key to our dull dark cell was found a long time ago ; but the door was not properly opened until about 1936. And Welshmen very slowly and hesitantly, some fearfullY, even terrified, began to creep out into the open air : many still cowered in the cupboard. Others slept.
The same thing has been happening over most of the world. Those inbreeding, monoglot, parochial people next door are amazed when they visit the five continents and discover the incomprehensible people everywhere who have been excited by their roots. Why don't they grow up and speak English ? Why not die "internationalists" ?
Suddenly, everywhere, we are no longer foreigners standing before our own past. We belong to our land, and are responsible, psychologically and culturally responsible for it before the whole world.
To be born into this is naturally an inspiring experience, as it involves one in the greatest constructive cultural movement on this globe in this century. In scores of countries there has been a strong affirmation. It is true that there are here and there some very important areas of decadence ; but culturally or socially, there has been in many places a positive bid for life. This cultural and psychological movement is something we are very conscious of in Wales, and it is paralleled with a movement towards or into the language.
This affirmation has been my main artistic interest, and its linking through and within the Welsh language in my work is a part of its character. The affirmation, naturally, has reservations : all of us who recognise original sin as an axle point in the human predicament can understand that empty optimism about the language and the universal civilisation it symbolises and enshrines would be pointless. The dangers for the language are a part of the dangers of living in the third third of the twentieth century. But in moving away from the decadence of our culture towards a renewed vigour, one finds that the old-fashioned Anglo-Welsh masochism, for instance, peels off, and Wales is no longer just a sordid boghouse at the bottom of a coal-tip. Welsh history is no longer just depression. Gradually, the inferiority we felt about Welsh nationhood and identity no longer exists, and the language can wash over the sores. Gradually, the immense parochialism of the "Englishman", with his negation of all that the world stands for, is replaced by a realisation of the essential variety within the unity.
As a dogmatic Calvinist, the accidents of life never seem very convincing to me. In my own person history, there may appear, on the surface, to be an element of the accidental, and my first real encounter with the Welsh language was all just an unfortunate mistake, and should not properly have happened. So too, I suspect with the whole society. No doubt those neutralist historians, who discuss history as a series of undirected events, could make out a solid case for this absolutely incongruous movement towards the language as being just an understandable disturbance in the genes of the community. But I would plump for election.
We were a shy band, on a September morning in 1940, standing before a grand old gentleman from Lancashire, Mr J.0. Cheetham. It was his lot to divide us into three streams, two to take Spanish, one to take Welsh. French was - well, compulsory is not the word - a "natural" subject, like English and the air we breathed.
There were ninety of us, and he asked those who wished to "do" Welsh to stand forward. Some five quivering schoolboys ventured a step. The rest of us stood our ground, certain that Spanish would be intensely useful for our commercial weekend trips to South America later on. And would we not have chosen Timbuktuish, if such a language existed, rather than degrade ourselves to do that indeed-to-goodness stuff ?
But the headmaster had his job to do. and needed a "stream" : at a push, twenty-five might do, but certainly not five. It was wartime,' and volunteering was in the air. "Tell me, my boy", said he, turning on a fat blushing specimen in the middle of the front row, "Why don't you want to do Welsh ?"
"I know enough, sir".
Had I not done it in the elementary ?
"Well, tell me, my boy. What's 'good morning' in Welsh ?
This was one of those phrases that had somehow slipped the syllabus of the elementary. The blush reached my knees.
"Tell me, my boy. What's 'good night'?"
This too had slipped attention.: The blush rattled to the floor.
"Don't you think you'd better reconsider your decision ?"
The vision had come.
I was converted. On that sad September day my fate was sealed, and unknown to myself I now slid into the clutches of one who must be amongst the most brilliant Welsh teachers Wales has ever employed - W. G. Elvet Thomas. Quite by accident, of course.
The rot set in.
It is impossible for me to analyse the quality of his teaching, but I have always supposed that the main secret of his gift was that he used the language as an introduction to the whole versatility and contemporary energy of Wales. Language was not just a means of communication, and certainly not a school subject. It was the expression of a complete national life and was linked to place-names, the Urdd, mountains and history, poetry and songs, dances and drama and the Eisteddfod, altars, and lots of enthralling Welsh characters and anecdotes.
My ambitions were, naturally, in Africa at the time. And so they continued into my first year in College. I had, at the bright shining age of nine, decided to be a missionary, and kept my path direct all the way to the University : I thought that I could conveniently shed my Welsh after the first College session, and raise my sights to broader horizons.
However, another collision with the parish-pump occurred during the first term. This accident was in the shape of inspiring University teachers and a new type of ethos amongst Welsh-speaking students never before encountered. Even at that advanced stage in my education, although fully able to read Welsh, and write it less fluently, I was completely socially dumb, due to the artificial examination emphasis on written answers. Now, for the first time, I came in contact with the rollicking charm of the gwerin. A tidy anglophile from Cardiff became immersed in the warmth and gaiety of a rural culture hitherto hidden from him in the form of students, and in a teacher who was as intense about the Latin Element in Welsh as if it were the Day of judgement.
And it was my day of no return, to say the least.
For an adolescent involved in such a personal upheaval, there had to be a most disconcerting reorientation.
Dreaming in Welsh, lovemaking in Welsh, poems, stories, children, friends, a nation, the whole world : the relationship between peoples, this daily consciousness of international friction and its dangerous but golden possibilities, from the inside, no longer dead or academic or up in the gallery, but here down in the arena. Writing in Welsh means now to be in the middle of the great human struggle - not to have pulled out, not to be superior or neutral or to have one's eyes on the ends of the world as if they were not here ; it is to be sensitive to the tingling life of words to the rhythmic muscles of sentences, to the quiveringness of images, to the possession of great themes. It is to turn the soil in this part of the earth as it should really be turned.
For a middle-aged man I presume there must be a settling down too, although to settle down in the Welsh language today is rather like trying to snatch a nap on the tip of a volcano. But by now, for me, there are so many more cogent reasons for writing in Welsh : quiet ones, old ones, long ones. Welsh has been for many years my first language, and practically speaking, my only language. There is so little time to read any other languages, as the Welsh materials are endless and so tremendously versatile ; they are the windows of the whole world. Writing in English or any other foreign language is, for me, a discipline, necessary but almost tedious and irrelevant. I still can't help savouring the salty tang of a Welsh which will always be for me a new-old language. My ancient dynamite.
In his delightful essays, The Dragon has two tongues, Glyn Jones refers to himself as belonging to a generation or rather a series of generations that had moved away from the Welsh language, or as he says, "From Taf Carmarthenshire to Taf Glamorganshire, in fact". A few years previously I had brought out a little book of verse Rhwng Taf a Thaf (Between Taf and Taf), referring to the same two rivers but expressing a completely contrary experience. I suppose I belong to the opposite generation, maybe generations, younger than Glyn Jones ; but would agree wholeheartedly with him that a writer's "mother" tongue, in the literal sense, is not necessarily his best medium for his creative workbut "the language which captures his heart and imagination during the emotional and intellectual upheavals of adolescence, the language of his awakening, the language in which ideas-political, religious, aesthetic-and an understanding of personal and social relationships first dawn upon his mind". This is the language that writes him.
During each of the last three centuries, it is worth noting that there has been at least one poet in Wales creating in, his second language who must be amongst the two or three greatest poets of his age, namely Iolo Morganwg, Islwyn and Waldo Williams. They have written in true language of their hearts. For me, in a in much more minor way, the same has again been true. Why I write in Welsh is partly why I write at all : there is no longer any question to answer.