Verse 13
Guenin igodo, oer agdo rid;
Reuid rev pan vo;
Ir nep goleith, lleith dyppo.
‘Bees in cover, a cold covering has the ford;
Freezing frost comes when it will;
Despite all evasion, death comes.’
1
All withdraws, thrall to frost, that covers all.
Fast it holds cold windings.
No one, no world, can wriggle free.
So we become still, a huddled, humming tribe
Unable to forage, to find food.
A cease of movement
Falling white frost covered, frozen.
2
Nothing can prevent a fall of freezing frost
Falling on all: the hive, the water, the hall, the blood.
3
Bees in their halls, drowsy and dreaming.
The tribe is huddled, hungry and silent.
The ford is wrapped in cold, a bleak vein,
Mist-chilled, brings no succour to the valley.
Ice teeth tears its edges.
Fogged with frost, water turns metal,
Metal turns ice, cold shrouds all flesh now,
Or when it may, or in the end.
Wriggle or writhe – no escape is there anywhere.
The white winding cloth awaits, none can avoid.
A fog, a mist, an icy frost, it descends on all.
It is as it is, a bleak thing maybe,
But sharp enough to wake a tongue to song
With honey words, a rippling stream of song,
A lullaby to the living, elegy to the dead.
We all await a Spring, a way across the water.
To be led homewards, the priest’s plainsong,
The warrior’s dance, the summer flowers blossoming.
The watchful wake, the blessing of silence.
4
Rimed, it will collapse
Regardless of wishes,
Of urgent wriggling.
All the living become silent
In the end.
The ease of winter:
Ice, frost, freezing when it will.
Effortless, it falls on all.
Bone white with cold teeth,
With sharp tongue
It sucks marrow
From a broken world.
Lord Winter commands
And stillness falls.
Rasp and murmur,
Our ice breath chatters,
Edged at darkness
A distance from the hearth.
5
A cold flow it is,
Draining warmth from blood.
Frost-hollowed, fog-bound,
The valley river, a tusk.
Sudden or slow,
Ice will eat us.
A falling frost freezes all,
Moving or still.
We tumble wordless
Earthwards,
From a bleak
Empty sky.
6
In the perfected chambers,
In the golden chambers,
Silent the queen,
Silent all the host
Drowsy and dreaming,
Hungry, huddled in their halls.
Through and within
Is an echo
With the single moment,
A cold breath,
A wandering , whispered ending.
7
The stars in their millions
The forest’s edge
The river’s roar
The cold darkness,
The ice air.
Muffled is the coming
And going of the ford.
Weighed, constrained,
A limitation of frost
Crust cold, heavy
Sliced iron moments.
8
It shall stalk all halls,
The stars, the cells,
The covering dreams of all
Whilst we sleep, whilst we walk.
Neither frost nor snow,
Not in anger, nor in carelessness.
Within the song.
9
From these strict geometries
Our dances express wriggled sweetness,
As if it were possible to dream away
The stillness behind it all,
The cold between breath and heartbeat,
The petal bloom of mist
Flowering on frozen air.
The way across is covered.
Lost perfection falls
And will not tolerate us.
So we must dream, be still
Or break and burn,
Then crystal clear, rimed, lost.
—
simonhlilly 
LLYM AWEL (part 2)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient gnomic verse, commentary, improvisation, landscape, Llym awel, Poetry, translation, Wales, Welsh language, Welsh poetry, Winter on September 22, 2014| Leave a Comment »
LLYM AWEL ( part 2 )
Llym awel, llum brin, anhaut caffael clid;
Llicrid rid, reuhid llin;
Ry seiw gur ar vn conin.
The second phrase is ” llum brin” , “bleak hill”.
Jackson makes it ‘bare the hill’. My iTranslate prefers ‘bleak’.
The choice of synonyms are many and subtly divergent: bare, desolate, hostile, barren, are all covered by ‘bleak’, whereas ‘bare’ seems to me a thinner meaning, and confusable with ‘naked’, thus making the association physically personal, rather than the ferociously and unconcernedly unsympathetic ‘bleak’.
At this stage in the poem the poet has just drawn a landscape and inferred from the adjectives (sharp, bleak) a human presence. The final phrase of the line is ‘anhaut caffael clid’ ‘difficult to find/to obtain/have shelter’, implying he/we are out in this harsh weather.
As this is the case, I wonder whether ‘llum brin’ should be read as ‘this bleak hill’, or ‘bleak hilltop’, because we are not to view it as something out there at a distance, but something here below our feet, all around us, because it is out on the exposed hilltop that we would want to find shelter from the elements.
“Sharp breeze, bleak hilltop, difficult it is to obtain shelter”
There is a contrast in the two halves of the line between the impersonal elemental world, and a small human being moving,uncomfortable, through it. In the Welsh, the first two phrases glide and tumble, compared to the jerking, hesitency of the last three words.
The next line resumes the echoing, reflecting alliteration:
“Llicrid rid, reuhid llin;”
and also returns to observations of the seen world: ‘Llicrid rid’ , Jackson translates as ‘The ford is marred’. There is a sense in ‘llicrid’ of pollution, contamination, become fouled. Presumably the weather conditions have destroyed the gentle, smooth crossing place. I have settled on ‘churned up’ to give that sense of disorder and chaos. This then nicely contrasts with the following phrase: ‘reuhid llin’, lake freezes. Slight variations will give a different taste. Jackson translates this line as ‘ the ford is marred, the lake freezes’, but I feel this distances the experience and makes it rather general, something that happens each winter, not something that is causing an immediate emotional reaction in the poet at this moment, on this journey.
‘The ford is churned up, the lake frozen’
These two phrases contrast each other in the same way that wind/ breeze is active and hilltop is motionless. Here the ford has become wrecked and flooded where it is usually calm, and the gentle rippling lake has become motionless and still.
In Celtic worldviews ( even as a continuation from the Bronze Age) both fords and lakes were sacred as gateways to the Otherworld, liminal places to access the spiritual. Here, they can no longer serve that function – the poet feels even more isolated from the succour of the spirit worlds ( and so giving another meaning to ‘difficult to find shelter’).
The last line is:
‘Ry seiw gur ar vn conin.’
‘Ry seiw’ is “it is (even) possible to stand”, gur/gŵr is ‘a man’, ar is ‘on’, vn/un conin is ‘one stalk/grass/reed’
So: it is possible to stand a man on one reed
It is possible for a man to stand on one reed.
A man might stand on a single reed.
Jackson says: ” A man could stand on a single stalk” , which has a nice quality of flow and wonder to it. To my eye, a ‘stalk’ can be too easily visualised as lying flat on the ground, whereas a reed maintains its sense of verticality, and has a more proverbial sound to it.
Nicola Jacobs’ commentary explains this line as meaning the reed/grass is so frozen, so hard that it can be (theoretically) balanced on. But it also suggests a man made hollow by care and hunger, so light, so worn away and insubstantial, that a reed would not bend under his weight.
The ‘sharp breeze’ of the first phrase is echoed by the sharp, blade-like reed of the last, both summing up the discomfort of the season.
I will mull these ideas and work on my interpretation……
IMPROVISATIONS ON LLYM AWEL
Sharp beeeze, bleak hilltop, difficult it is to obtain shelter.
The ford is churned up, the lake frozen.
A man might stand on a single reed.
Splinter cold, breath stolen.
Pummelled, stripped, this ice wind.
Desolate my road, this dead, domed hill,
Rotted brown and wan.
Shelterless, this way or that,
Remorseless the trudge, and dismal.
Every ford is ice mud,
Churned by all the cattle of the world,
Cast, charnel, sullied, broken.
No joyous lake,
No light waved, rippled,
No meek lap nor song.
All iron ice, white and burning stillness.
Worn hollow by winter,
Wormed and wrought, ringed out.
I wince from every blade of it.
Reeds rattle underfoot.
Pierced, I am lost amongst grasses,
Harsh-throated, severed from home.
—-
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