In his 2007 notes on ‘Some Aspects of Poems and Translations’ Jeremy Prynne had suggested that ‘if you can read and understand poems written in a foreign language, then you will have insights into the very heart of another culture.’ Having made this comment of rising newness he went on to add that the tasks of translation  are often very hard and frustrating ‘because it is mostly not possible to know whether an attempted understanding of a poem has been successful or not.’ In one sense translating a poem or story from one language to another is like crossing a bridge and if a text to be translated is from an earlier historical period rather than recent or contemporary then the translator needs to have a sense of the historical state of the language and of story-telling from the time of the original composition and this will involve an awareness of the different styles and literary cultures of the day. Twenty years earlier, when referring in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei to the great Tang poet, Eliot Weinberger had also suggested that great poetry lives in ‘a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation’ before going on to assert that a poem dies ‘when it has no place to go’.

          The prose tale of Culhwch and Olwen was originally written in medieval Welsh and it survives in two manuscripts from the fourteenth-century. Forming part of a group of eleven stories collected together as The Mabinogion it is the oldest surviving Arthurian tale. In the opening words of his recent publication from Shearsman Books Liam Guilar addresses the reader about not only the difficulties of translation but also about recognising the new ways of seeing the world of narrative and evocation as revealed in this particular tale of How Culhwch Won Olwen:

By modern literary standards it is chaotic and unsure of its genre. It is episodic, inconsistent and contradicts itself. There are conversations which read as though parts have been lost or misunderstood, and episodes in which the sequence of events seems to be scrambled. But if one accepts the story is the way it is because its audience liked it that way, then it is a reminder that ‘modern literary standards’ are not the only way of approaching a text, and any attempt to cling to them will ruin your enjoyment of what follows.

Crossing Prynne’s bridge of translation Guilar goes on to say that his verse translation of the oldest Arthurian tale ‘has the logic of dreams and the morality of nightmare.’ He also crosses this cultural and historical bridge with great care and seriousness and introduces this important third publication of his from Shearsman Books by giving us clear indications about the process of translation:

Where things aren’t clear in the original, and they aren’t in any other translation, do not tidy them. The story is contradictory and inconsistent. To describe a narrative as ‘dreamlike’ is perhaps unhelpful, but the world of Culhwch’s quest is not one that can be rationalised and that is one of its attractions.

The imaginative absurdity of this early Arthurian romance is caught by Guilar with both humour and music and this is presented to the reader, or the listener, from the moment of Culhwch’s arrival at the king’s court and is greeted by the gatekeeper:

      The boy asked, ‘Is there a porter?’

      ‘There is and may your head not be your own for asking.

      I am Arthur’s porter on the 1^st of January,

      for the rest of the year my deputies are Goodhearer,

      Littlemeatman, Slowstep, and Penpingpong,

      who goes upon his head to save his feet,

      neither earthwards nor heavenwards,

      but like a rolling stone on the floor of the court.’

As Guilar’s note to this tells us these names (Huandaw, Gogigwr, Llaeskemyn, Penpingyon in Welsh) are an abrupt indication that the hero accompanied by us as readers is about to enter ‘a different version of the world.’ As the porter opens the gate Culhwch enters on his horse in such a manner that may bring to our mind the opening of another Arthurian Romance from the Middle Ages, Gawain and the Green Knight’in which fantasy and shockingly dramatic action combine together to usher in the opening of a new year. However, in contrast to the narrative of the Gawain poet in Guilar’s tale there is an informal tone to the story-telling:

      Back went the porter to the gate and opened it.

      Most riders dismounted on the mounting block,

      but not our boy, he rode his horse

      straight into Arthur’s hall.

The dramatic sense of the ballad-maker who sings his narrative version of a legend can be recognised here when one places these lines alongside the prose translation of the episode from The Mabinogion as published in 1949 by Gwyn and Thomas Jones:

      And Glewlwyd came to the gate and opened the gate to him. And what

      every man did,  to dismount at the gate on the horse-block, he did not do;

      but  on his steed he came inside.

Casey Finch’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight presented the reader with a similar vivid recreation of the entry of a New Year fantasy as the larger-than-life figure of a knight rides into Arthur’s court on New Year’s Day:

      Such a high, haughty hero, such a horse as he rode,

      Such a strange, striking sight had been seen never once

      In that hall.

Referring to his own version of that Middle-English text Finch had suggested that a translation ‘lies in order to tell the truth’:

      …it transforms and alters so that its original text – that infinitely delicate

      and mutable thing – may be carried across from one cultural space

      to another.

John Barnie’s In the Shadow of the Yew, a sequence of 33 poems, asks the reader to question whether the suffering experienced by humanity and also the associated suffering that humanity inflicts upon the world reveals a concluding sense that our species is a curse. As the blurb on the back cover of this handsomely produced collection from Cinnamon Press puts it:

       Barnie sits in a long line of writers who consider that the natural world

       would be better off without us. There’s a note of Leopardi, Hardy,

       Beckett, Cioran and, above all, Robinson Jeffers in this unflinching collection…

Indeed in a world which seems all-too-familiar to us now ‘Ignorance wanders across a desert / clothes flapping in a searing wind’. However, both the act of reading and the consequent act of thinking, both in themselves a form of translation, leads to transformations that set out on their own wandering journeys. With a deeply-held and energetic determination to continue the narrative and remain true to its inconsistencies the poet offers the reader a sense of both relief and awe:

      you think nature is tamed

      but it seeds itself in cracks

      pushes up through tarmac

      ready for the final assault

This seeding perseverance has led poetry into a nomadic life which, as Eliot Weinberger had put it back in 1987 in his analysis of the Wang Wei poem, insinuates itself into the minds of the readers:

      Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.

John Barnie’s sequence of new poems goes on to conclude with an atmospherically realised sense of that movement:

      There are a lot of turnings, a lot of overridings and underminings in a

      long life a lot of climbing spiral stairs in a deserted church where wood

      pigeons nest and flee with a clap of wings at your approach where with

      hands on the platform’s battlements you look out across fields and woods,

      farms and villages, though not so far as cities, those forests of humanity,

      of anonymity, kinetic exuberance…