Note by AD on The Gododdin and on Richard Caddel's phonic version of it
In the 1960s, Louis Zukofsky tried to transliterate Catullus into an English version which had the same sounds:
O th'hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that's so re queries.
Nescience, say th'fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.
The earliest example of this technique known to me is by Ernst Jandl, from circa 1963, "oberflächenübersetzung" (Mein Herz liebt zapfen eibe hold). Caddel's poem, which is one part of For the Fallen (other parts in shearsman and fragmente), is a similar exercise based on Neirin's early seventh-century Old Welsh poem, The Gododdin (or as the colophon has it, Hwnn yw e gododin. Aneirin ae cant.). Ifor Williams' introduction to his edition points out the nature of the text as we have it, where phonetic drift and association have taken over parts of the original text, as written by a named individual, and reduced it to sound; he quotes three variants of a certain couplet:
cret ty na thaer aer vlodyat
un axa ae leissyar.caret n hair air mlodyat
un s saxa secisiarcleu na clair air uener
sehic am sut seic sic sac
These do not resemble each other, or any known kind of Welsh. Language has here gone all the way back. Forfeiting its nature as a string defined in several dimensions at once, it gains by falling into a world of unbound association. There is no text of the Gododdin which is wholly meaningful; that is, more than mere sound. The verbal ornaments of the poem, as described by Williams, supply, moreover, a compositional principle which is phonic before, or beside, semantic: the verse structure obeys the rules of cynghanedd as well as those of rhyme. Each couplet is preceded by an acoustic shadow of definite structure, into which the words, when they arrive with their specific sounds and their burden of meaning, must fit; the nature of such poetry is double, and its quality depends on the interaction of these two sets of actions, one organised and semantic, and one phonetic, based on simple principles of repetition and alternation, and nonsensical. The poem contains its own, old, babble score as something folded inside it, like an animal cell containing captive plant DNA. Caddel makes association the foreground factor of poetry; clusters of words without syntax orchestrate a shadowy and indefinite experience; sound flows follow a pattern of memory which flows rather than stand upright, rolling along a surface which offers no depth (of coding). Caddel produced an English poem by listening to the sound of Welsh words whose meaning he does not know. Memory is stimulated indirectly, by a mere nominis umbra, like the wires of a piano trembling to a sound from the next street; this abolition of the keyboard may resemble Tom Raworth or Adrian Clarke. I suspect that a principle of phonetic echoing of entire lines is also present in early Welsh poetry:
Kyn mynet or byd bryd breuddwydawl
kein vynwent brouent bro gorfforawl
kyn maynved diwed bwyf dwywawl gyffes
(Bleddyn Vardd, 13th century?)
In the same poem we find "yny may mawrway heb ymeiriawl/ Yny may mawrwall eneit marwawl", where the highlighted words are lexically quite distinct (respectively, "great woe, intercession, great want, mortal") but Bleddyn is making a dazzling play on the similarity of their casing.
Williams' hypothesis is that Neirin composed his poem around 600 AD, but the 13th century manuscripts we have are copied from a version in 9th century spelling; this copy, partly effaced by 13th C forms, must have been considerably adapted from the original; Williams reconstructs one couplet as follows:
ac cin guo-lo gueir hir guo-tan ti-guarch
derlidei med-cirn un map fer-march
while the manuscript form is:
a chyn golo gweir hir a dan dywarch
dyrllydei vedgyrn un map feruarch
Clearly, there is no authoritative text from which Caddel's sound-shadow could have worked. We do not know the pronunciation of 7th century Welsh. However, the original form persists, puzzlingly, in the shape sketched out by the rules of alliteration, although the words have vanished. The earliest form of the poet's name is Neirin, which later evolved into Aneirin (cf. the shift from Latin scutum to Welsh ysgwyd).
The other parts of For the Fallen are composed on quite different principles.
(Ifor Williams, Rhagymadrodd to Canu Aneirin, 1938)
Page(s) 121-122
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