Y SBIEN DDRYCH
Wff wff wff
Wffu wffu wffu
Hwthu hwthu hwthu
Chwythu chwythu chwythu
-Waldo Williams
An exploration of language & landscape engagement; delivered through a presentation, film, and guided walk to the Afon Dwyfor. This collective research considered how access to language-learning can be strengthened through a deeper engagement with the landscapes we inhabit, and that inhabit us in return. I was invited to deliver this workshop for the Welsh Arts Consortium, whose aim is to discuss possibilities in placing the Welsh language and culture at the centre of creativity.
Considering the geography of translation, y sbien ddrych documents fragments of a walk to a river, as we pass the binoculars one way, and a story grows another way. “Here, this is what I’ve seen, can you see it too?”. Sometimes the lens re-orientates the image, and sometimes the image has moved too fast outside the frame, so the bird becomes a sentence or a gesture.
Does not-knowing allow for a deeper more intimate understanding of language?
How can we coexist and collaborate?
Experimenting with methods of exchange , we considered movement as a form of knowledge, community as plurality, and confluence as grammar. As active participants in the landscapes that hold us together, we explored how knowledge, or 'Welshness', can be embodied through listening deeply to our environments, and to each other, as a means to belong.
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Y sbien ddrych [2023] refers to a reflective document made up of film, audio, personal photographs and excerpts from the Voynich manuscript, that bring together some of the conversations shared during the workshop with the Welsh Consortium at the Ty Newydd writing centre in Llanystumdwy, autumn 2022. Y sbien ddrych is part document, part reflection, and part ongoing.
'I think that you are right—translation is a work of intimacy. The writer and the translator are sharing a time experience. In other contexts this might be called love. In this sense, translation is a completely necessary historical process, a political work. Could we imagine translation as the opposite of war?'
-Lisa Robertson
