Speaking with two tongues: the Welsh book awards

Tag : linen suits

Think of literature and Wales and there's a good chance you mightthink of the Guardian Hay Festival , the "Woodstock of the mind", as it was memorably called by one ofits most prominent guests, Bill Clinton. Hay is the little Welshborder town which has become English literature's annual holidayhome, and the festival is its country house-party with all theaccoutrements: deckchairs, panama hats and, if you're one of theguest speakers, a crate of rather pleasant champagne. With all thelinen suits, it sometimes looks like a convention of Men from Del Monte , and if you live and write in Wales year-round, it can feel moreof an exotic visitation than a native experience.
If you want native, you want the National Eisteddfod . Always held in a different location, like the pow-wow of awandering tribe. Always held in the first week in August. Andalways, and only, held in Welsh. The Eisteddfod's combination ofreimagined druidic ritual, intense literary competition andmulti-faceted cultural affirmation provides the members of theoldest language group in these islands with their annual boosterinjection of cultural confidence. Forget the champagne: theseauthors are rewarded by being robed in purple and greeted withenough pomp to make a despot blush.

The linen suit and the native costume. It might seem that never thetwain shall meet.

Except they do. Surprisingly often. Wales is a small country, andthose charged with promoting its literatures - note the plural -are keen to promote as much dialogue as possible.

Some aspects of the relationship between the two main cultures ofWales can be seen in the Wales Book of the Year awards , which maintain a policy of strict equality between the twolanguages. There are two judging panels, two longlists of 10 books,two shortlists of three and, finally, two overall winners at thescrupulously bilingual awards ceremony.

This year, the English award was won by veteran poet Dannie Absewith The Presence, a poignant memoir of his grief at the death ofhis wife in a car accident. The runners-up were Nia Wyn's Blue SkyJuly and Tom Bullough's The Claude Glass. The Welsh-language awardwent to another veteran, Gareth Miles, for a novel dealing with the1904 religious revival in Wales, Y Proffwyd a'i Ddwy Jesebel (TheProphet and his Two Jezebels). The runners-up were Tony Bianchi forthe novel Pryfeta (Bugging) and Ceri Wyn Jones for Dauwynebog, avolume of poetry, much of it written in the ancient strict-metreform of alliterative verse called cynghanedd .

It would be tempting to view the two literatures dichotomously: theEnglish-language work outward-looking and expansive, theWelsh-language work introspective and intense, each operating onseparate circuits, with different audiences and expectations. Theone with access to the most powerful language group the world hasever seen, the other focused on some 600,000 Welsh-speakers inWales, a number which, although slowly growing, is still hardly inthe big league.

However, the reality is somewhat more complex, and the membranebetween the two literatures is more porous than might be thought.For instance, Abse's work has always been informed by his knowledgeof Welsh literature and mythology. Many other English-languagewriters are either Welsh-speaking to some degree, or have asympathetic knowledge of the language and its culture. On theWelsh-language side, while some work does display an understandablepreoccupation with the politics of identity, the most excitingwriters have long moved beyond angst-ridden cultural catharsis orcommunal cheerleading.

Tony Bianchi is actually a Geordie , a learner of Welsh who has become one of the language's mostprovocative authors. Ceri Wyn Jones is the English-language editorfor a publishing house. Gareth Miles's prolific work is informed byhis mastery of French and Spanish, and his long relationship withMarxist thought. His recent translations of Hamlet and The Crucible into Welsh have been theatrical landmarks: hisWelsh-speaking Polonius came alive for me as he has never done inEnglish. In the other direction, translation out of Welsh isbecoming a minor export industry - one that's a whole lot cleanerthan coal. Still other authors, such as the poet Gwyneth Lewis,write original work of the highest standard in both languages.These authors' energies are those of traffic and exchange, not ofretention and defensiveness.

Proponents of bilingualism in education are fond of quotingresearch that having two languages improves one's performance inall areas. Perhaps the same might be true of a country whose twolanguages live in a constant creative tension. And if nothing else,at least it means that at the awards ceremony not one, but twoauthors went away with a cheque for £10,000.