Y SBIEN DDRYCH
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, but sometimes the image has moved too fast outside the frame, so the bird becomes a sentence.
Together on the river bank, we explored things like; the rhythm of exchange, movement as a form of knowledge, and confluence as grammar. We spoke about intimacy and joining-together (community as plurality), but also difference, distance, and a good deal of make-believe as we came to know our place in language through our bodies and our tensions, our valleys and our imaginations.
As active listeners in landscapes we inhabit (and that inhabit us), such things as mud and moss intersect with an absence of lost words and the making-up of new ones, forming gestures through shared language and play.
Holding the cup of my hand towards the base of my mouth, I describe to the group the experience of seeing a photograph of my Nain for the first time, and how my knowing her before this was through the sensing and sounding of her birth place, M a e s g w m. The pace is slow, 'the area of the valley' is pointed. I cannot separate the sound from the photograph, and it strikes me that my relationship with my (absent) Welsh lineage circles around being with/being in and inhabiting the landscape I actively participate in as a self directed form of care.
Does not-knowing allow for a deeper more intimate understanding of language?
Wff wff wff
Wffu wffu wffu
Hwthu hwthu hwthu
Chwythu chwythu chwythu
-Waldo Williams