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 silver charm bracelet I inherited from my mother, as a tool for translation where contingent conversations, questions, and frictions around y Cymraeg are viewed as fields that provoke meaning through intimacy and/vs interruption.
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 the bracelet (from the Canadian canoe to the 'Sospan Fach') activated a sense of belonging, or being in the right place, and the feeling of synchronicity 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.
dim mamiaith
oni bai
bod mam ? dim symudiad
mewn cydosodiad dim lleuad
oni bai bod llygaid
As I glean from texts and translate in circular motions, I lean towards a more physical way of knowing something.
Driven by senses and sounds, tensions and failures, the infinite particulars of a non-native tongue,
become synchronized with our bodies and with our landscapes
[ neither existing without the other ]
Here, translation becomes an act of "LOVE", where harps see into the future, Great Lakes are measured with felt hats, and alphabets thaw; are fused together...foreign, alien, strange.