Williams - The Poems of Rowan Williams

This book includes all the poems published in AfterSilentCenturies (1994) and RememberingJerusalem (2001), and some more recent ones. Several of these pieces began as responses to visual works; in particular, the poems Our Lady of Vladimir, Pantocrator: Daphni, Rublev, and Feofan Grek: the Novgorod Frescoes, on some of the best-known and most frequently reproduced images in Eastern Christian art. Several of the poems are contained in three clusters (clusters rather than sequences, I think, as the order is not of major significance ). The first began with a visit to Jerusalem during Orthodox Holy Week in 1995, and makes a fair amount of allusion to the sites and ceremonies of the season; Abu Ghosh is one of the sites traditionally (though not very plausibly) identified with the Emmaus of St Lukes Gospel, scene of the resurrected Jesuss self-disclosure at the end of a journey, when he is recognised as he silently breaks bread. Today, Abu Ghosh is the location of a Benedictine community of French origin. The Graves and Gates poems reflect a period of several years marked by the death of parents and some close friends, among them the extraordinary figure of Gillian Rose, Jewish philosopher and critic, baptised on the day of her death.

Around all this, I found myself thinking about death in general, and about the deaths of some of those I love and admire from a distance as persons and writers; exploring how their deaths uncannily metaphorise something central to their work and thought (Simone Weils apparent self-starvation , Rilkes throat cancer). Celtia embodies a lasting scepticism about some modern romantic pictures of Celtic identity, looking instead at bits of the ancient Celtic world, in the literal form of artefacts from that age and also in the shape of fragments from one or two of the classical writers who describe it. There are some free translations: three from fairly well-known Rilke poems (Todes-Erfarhrung, Das Karusell and Der Engel, the originals in Neue Gedichte/New Poems, translated by Stephen Cohn, Manchester, Carcanet, 1997, pp. 83,101, and 67 respectively) and nine from the Welsh. The versions of poems from Welsh originals require a word of comment. The three writers represented differ widely.

Ann Griffiths was a farmers wife without formal education, who died in 1805, leaving a handful of hymns still remarkable for their bold and extravagant imagery and sustained emotional density. She wrote in conventional eighteenth century metres, with a straightforward rhyme scheme. She does not employ classical Welsh metrical forms, though she will sometimes use the alliterative idioms typical of these older forms. T. Gwynn Jones (18711949) was a major critical and historical writer and, in his time, an innovative poet of high reputation. Waldo Williams (19041971) was perhaps the foremost poet of his generation in the Welsh language, a visionary pacifist whose moral and cultural influence was (and is) immense; he was a brilliant exponent of classical Welsh forms, though he could also write in a more free style.

The six poems by him which I have translated are taken from DailPren, Llandysul, Gomer, new edition 1991. Each of these presents different problems for the translator. A close rendering of poems written in classical Welsh metre can often produce a lifeless English version, because the essential feature, the complex internal assonance and rhyming, disappears. Equally, renderings of poems in metres more recognisable to English readers, like Ann Griffiths hymns, can soften the odd and baroque quality of the strings of imagery. And to translate one of T. Gwynn Jones less formally innovative poems in a correspondingly traditional quatrain form does him less than justice.

As a result, I have adopted, for all three writers, a style of translation designed to be not at all a literal rendering, but an attempt to recreate the progressions of imagery with something of the energy they have in the original. I hope that to Welsh readers they will still be recognisable; but they are efforts to compose poems in English rather than to give a crib to the Welsh, and I have taken considerable liberties with Ann Griffiths verse in particular so as to present something appropriately fresh (as she deserves). For help with these translations, I must gratefully acknowledge the kindness of my friends John Walters and Patrick Thomas. Other friends have helped with comments and reactions over the years, to other pieces here. ROWAN WILLIAMS