I've spent a couple of days translating a poem, On a Misty Walk / Ar Niwl Maith, from Mediæval Welsh into English. It's by the 14th century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, about whom not much is known except for what we can glean from his poetry. And his poetry is immense: he's widely regarded as the best Welsh poet of all time, but he's not very much known outside of Welsh circles because decent translations of his material in English are hard to come by. There is a Works of Dafydd ap Gwilym website by Swansea University, but I noticed that they didn't have Ar Niwl Maith, a poem which I really like, which is why I figured I'd translate it.

So, why is Gwilym so good? It's mainly because he eschewed the formal structures of the time and started to write about anything. The girls of the local parish that wouldn't sleep with him, for example, or even one poem about his penis. But as well as flexing the rules, he could also bang out some really powerful expressions, coin words, and do all the other things that we expect of the best lyric poets. Unfortunately, since I'm not well versed in Mediæval Welsh literature, there's an awful lot about his poetry that I still don't understand, but I think it's well worth getting into.

My inexperience also didn't put me off translating Ar Niwl Maith. This poem is about a date that he made with a beautiful girl, and then tries to keep but runs into this otherworldly mist that sprouts from the night. Most of the poem is in the dyfalu mode, which basically means a piling up of comparisons, done as poetically as possible. So he compares the otherworldly mist to all kinds of things for most of the poem, then talks about getting waylaid towards the end, and ends it with a punchline that I wasn't able to translate all that naturally.

One thing that I sadly couldn't replicate in trying to stick to the semantics of the original so closely is the metre. The original uses rhymed couplets and a basically octosyllabic metrical scheme with probably some stress pattern that I'd be able to pick up if, again, I knew more about Mediæval Welsh. If there are any Welsh scholars out there who know about this stuff and want to enlighten me, please feel free to contact me.

I wonder how many other great poets are out there inaccessible across cultures because of language barriers? If Shakespeare had spoken Manx or something instead of English, how well known would he be?