Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

GWYNETH LEWIS
Whose coat is that jacket?
Whose hat is that cap?
IF YOU'RE TRULY bilingual it's not that there are two languages in
your world, but that not everybody understands the whole of your
own personal speech. Welsh is my first language. I was born to a
Welsh-speaking family living in predominantly English-speaking
Cardiff. I remember not being able to understand the children I
wanted to play with on the street. I know exactly when I acquired
English, as my father taught it to me when my mother went into
hospital to have my sister. I was two and a quarter. A section of
my poem "Welsh Espionage" is a version of that event:
Welsh was the mother tongue, English was his.
He taught her the body by fetishist quiz,
father and daughter on the bottom stair:
'Dy benelin yw elbow, dy wallt di yw hair,
chin yw dy en di, head yw dy ben.'
She promptly forgot, made him do it again.
Then he folded her dwrn and, calling it fist,
held it to show her knuckles and wrist.
'Let's keep it from Mam, as a special surprise.
Lips are gwefusau, llygaid are eyes.'
Each part he touched in their secret game
thrilled as she whispered its English name.
The mother was livid when she was told.
'We agreed, no English till four years old!'
She listened upstairs, her head in a whirl.
Was it such a bad thing to be Daddy's girl?
The details of sitting on the bottom of the stairs and of learning
the parts of the body are true. Later, of course, this made me think
of the scenes in Shakespeare's King Henry V when the French
Princess learns English, using the Lewis technique. The suggestion
of child abuse in the poem is not drawn from my own experience,
although it seemed very important to the piece. I suspect that this
sinister suggestion was a way for me to explore the discomfort I
felt at being born between two cultures. Early on I had an acute
sense of the cultural clash between the social values tied up in both
languages. I suppose that, in some way, I still feel guilty about
being Daddy's girl and writing in English at all.
Let me give a quick cultural outline. The Welsh language is a
Celtic tongue which has, against all the odds, found itself in the
modern world, coining words for "television" and "fast reactor fuel
rods." With half a million speakers and numbers in decline—it's
an "all hands on deck" situation. It is a beautiful language, and to
speak it is to know the sound of a long, unbearable farewell. It's
the key to a literature which goes back to the sixth century.
One of the noteworthy features of this tradition is a system of
strict consonontal alliteration
codified into twenty four meters
My first l^vdwas a i
Beautiful thi ^ingslwere,
Tinv eves/shining at night,
Though mainlyjin the moonlight.
TK A'I"'^)'* ' ! '
Example of Welsh cynghanedd, with
analysis, from Plover hove Song.
and called cynghanedd. Twm
Morys, the travel writer Jan
Morris's son, recently wrote a
wonderful version of one of these
meters in English. Basically, the
line gets divided in half and the
consonants on each side of the
break have to be used in the same
order. That is, when the line's not
divided into three and rhyme
added to the cocktail. Have a
look at this when you're in cross-