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, and tensions and failures. Here, the infinite particulars of a non-native tongue,
become synchronized with our bodies and with our landscapes
[ neither existing without the other ]
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.
