Y Freichled Gron (2021), is a text piece commissioned for Mwnwgl Issue 1, which explored the concept of 'Anghyfiaith' ('Non-Native').
Heb fod o’r un iaith, yn siarad iaith estron neu’n perthyn i iaith estron, mewn iaith estron, yn yr iaith wreiddiol, heb ei gyfieithu; estron, dieithr: not of the same language, speaking or pertaining to a foreign language, in a foreign language, in the original language, untranslated; foreign, alien, strange.
In Y Freichled Gron, I use a charm bracelet I inherited from my mother, as a tool for translation where contingent conversations, questions, and frictions are viewed as fields that provoke meaning and interrupt.
The bracelet begins like this: arriving in the village of Bethesda seeking a 'home' my mother wanders into a second-hand shop and a bracelet finds its way into her palm. She is tracing her roots to Wales from Canada, where her own father emigrated as a boy from one coal mine to another. As a child, I was told that the coincidence of charms on this bracelet (from the Canadian canoe to the 'Sospan Fach') activated a sense of belonging, or being in the right place, and the concept of entanglement or encounter here; made me believe or assume, that the bracelet had magical moveable qualities.
My relationship to the Welsh language is seen through the objects that hold the bracelet together, charms that stand as metaphors generating infinite readability. As I glean from texts and translate in circular motions, I lean towards a more psychic quality of reading, driven by senses and sounds, passive but total.
Here, harps see into the future, Great Lakes are measured with felt hats, and alphabets thaw; are fused together...foreign, alien, strange.
