Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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English in Oslo, and his measured sentences, slowed to a student’s ear, nail their targets in my brain. Diwylliant, he tells us, is his favourite word in the language.
‘It means culture,’ he says, ‘but it really means to “un-wild”. Isn’t that wonderful?’
The word conjures forests and wolves and people tearing meat from bones with their teeth. The hairs on the back of my neck recall some dim, ancestral impulse and flex into attention.
Lynn and I, meanwhile, are handicapped by our one-track vocabularies and find each other mutually incomprehensible. Since neither of us knows enough Welsh to find alternative routes for our thoughts, if we don’t comprehend the other’s phrasing the first time around we’re out of luck.
(Thank you, Vortigern. Had a proto-Welsh king of that name, active c. AD 420–50, not seen fit to grant British land to Germanic mercenaries – an incident depicted throughout the ages as ultimately leading to the Britons’ loss of the island to the Anglo-Saxons – Wales might never have been ‘Englished’, Lynn and I might not have been able to communicate at all, and that would have been a terrible shame.)
Surprisingly, Iori is the first to crack and abandon what for him is his first language. Sprawled on the back seat of Lynn’s car on the way into Oslo, he interrupts Lynn’s painfully faltering monologue and shouts,
‘GOOD GOD, EDWARDS, it’s like listening to the dog barking.’
Lynn takes this well. As we near Vigeland Park in the city centre, Iori lapses back into Welsh one last time and unexpectedly recites R. Williams Parry’s poem ‘Ode to the Pylons’, dedicated to the high-tension wires that cantilever across the broad, flat sweep of his native Anglesey. I can’t understand a word, but sense that the sounds take him to a place a little more gwyllt (wild) than this tidy Norwegian highway. To an island that was once a centre of learning for the druids, and even now retains a cool remoteness from the twentieth century, though those pylons carry electricity produced by a nuclear power plant not far from Iori’s home town of Amlwch. If you count the druids – and the Romans, who flamboyantly exterminated them there in AD 61, most certainly did – that makes two unholy power sources from one island.
I have requested a tour of Vigeland Park, an outdoor sculpture extravaganza and the chef d’oeuvre of the Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland, and am no longer surprised to find these two golf-mad, former rugby players know it well. In 1921 Vigeland made an extraordinary contract with the city of Oslo: he agreed to give every piece of sculpture in his possession, as well as every piece he would ever make for the rest of his life, to the city in exchange for a studio and living quarters to be built to his specifications, all the materials he would ever need, and carte blanche to create whatever the heck he wanted to with no creative restrictions. Not a bad deal if you ask me.
The result is an immense outdoor studio of figurative works, principally in granite and bronze, its centrepiece a fountain held aloft by burly bronze giants, surrounded by twenty smaller figures collectively known as ‘Man and the Tree of Life’. Each of these last depicts a human figure engaged in some muscular way with a tree: young boys climb the tree for a look-out; a girl bursts forth from its trunk, arms extended from her shoulder blades like wings; a man and woman try to separate themselves from each other but the branches entwine them together; an old man feebly clings to the trunk, unwilling to let go.
It’s a place to spend some time. Unlike the super-hero icons at Rockefeller Center in New York, Vigeland’s bronze and granite women, men and children manage to express the human side of Art Deco. All are naked and caught in momentary poses – a little girl snubbing a little boy from behind her mother’s back, an old woman resting against her son – less icons of virtue than aspects of vulnerability. At the other end of the park is the Monolith, a human pillar of twisted, interlaced figures, a veritable granite rocketship of body parts. I point out that it reminds me of a big initial – an ‘I’ – from the Book of Kells.
Lynn looks away from it. ‘All I ever see are the ovens,’ he says, casting an unexpected shadow in the bright afternoon.
Bod Rosemary to Be Rosemary
Dim ond Cymraeg! – Nothing but Welsh! That’s what Iori had said when he and Lynn left me at Rosemary’s house on the suburban outskirts of Oslo a few days ago. Rosemary was back from Denmark with lots of booze and new suede pumps. Her middle daughter, Lisa, had just auditioned for Holiday on Ice and was waiting to hear if she’d been hired. Since then, Lisa’s fate has yet to be resolved and her mother and I have hardly spoken a word of Welsh.
Rosemary is the most enigmatic woman I’ve ever met who perpetually wears pearls. Lynn was right, she does have music in her voice – her words peal like a clear bell choir up and down the scales of a Welsh accent as thick as his – though until now I’ve heard her words ring almost exclusively in English. What I’ve heard mostly is ‘PAM-eL-A, where is your glass?’ Today she and I have downed enough wine to fill a large birdbath. Miraculously, it seems to have no effect on her. She remains the scrubbed, buffed, pink toe-and-fingernail-polished image of a head-turning widow in her mid forties. Her bright red cheeks and tanned skin damn well glow with good health. Her hair at any given hour can only be described as ‘coiffed’. Only Rosemary’s laugh, a raucous, high-speed blowout straight from Tregaron, her home town in mid Wales, gives a little tickle to the outer edges of propriety. It’s her laugh that makes me inclined to believe the story of Rosemary being dragged out of the Lampeter Post Office in the sixties, following a Cymdeithas yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) sit-in protesting the absence of bilingual signage (now standard procedure).
In Tregaron she’s known as ‘Rosemary BBC’. Tregaron is a grey place not far from Lampeter, on the edge of a great bog. On our first evening together we traded stories about the Talbot Hotel in the centre of town: she didn’t know there’s a circus elephant buried out back, and I didn’t know it’s haunted by the ghost of Elsa Wilde, a London ballerina who married the publican, tried too hard to stay young, and died pining for the great world she once knew. I hope Rosemary doesn’t have plans to move back home. The townspeople listen when she gives reports from Oslo on Radio Cymru, even though they have trouble understanding her.
‘I once met a Tregaron woman at the Lampeter Eisteddfod,’ she told me. ‘We used to call her the chicken lady. And she came right up, wagged her finger under my nose and said sternly’ (Rosemary drops into a parody of her own accent), ‘“Now you speak so we can all understand you, you hear?”’
Even Rosemary’s mother can’t make her out. After her latest broadcast, in which she vehemently defended the notion of homosexual marriages, her mother called up and said, ‘Well, I couldn’t understand what you said, but I know you were talking dirty.’
Herein lies the problem – well, one of the problems – of contemporary Welsh. Because she went to university, Rosemary, like the nation’s newscasters, speaks what people in Tregaron call ‘posh Welsh’, a politically correct strand of the language stripped of its sloppy Anglicisms. It’s the difference between computer (pronounced ‘com-PU-tearrr’), and cyfrifiadur, a synthetic Welsh word for the same thing. This rift is a source of no small inferiority complex among the hundreds of thousands of people who speak what’s derisively called ‘Kitchen Welsh’, or the even more adulterated ‘Wenglish’. I have acquaintances in Lampeter who won’t talk to me for fear of corrupting the ‘correct’ Welsh I’m learning in books. To me, an American of dubious linguistic breeding, this is ridiculous, but then I also think the French make too much of a fuss. Many in Tregaron consider Rosemary a traitor.
Meddwi to Get Drunk
The kitchen table is invisible beneath a collection of cartons, tins, platters and plastic containers that seem to provide the raw ingredients for all Norwegian meals. So far I’ve only been able to tell breakfast apart from lunch and dinner by the absence of wine bottles; otherwise, it’s been potato salad, a kind of coleslaw called italiensalad, salamis, cured hams, flat breads and the family favourite, a sweet brown goat’s cheese, pretty much round the clock. If you