Welsh Literature
The earliest Welsh language literature (c600 CE) is therefore a heroic “nation building” literature (to use a modern anachronism), and it already bears the signs of that unique patterning of sounds that would soon consolidate into the regulatory system known as cynghanedd. This in turn generated and governed the great (and still developing) tradition of strict metre poetry that goes under the name of barddas, the chief glory of which remains the rich body of work produced during the later Middle Ages. The form is particularly untranslateable, not least because it is dependent on the mutations that are integral to the Welsh language; yet to fail to translate it is not only to fail to convey the greatness of the Welsh literary tradition but also to fail to engage with the politics inscribed in that tradition even at the level of form.
So
dominant has this tradition been that all other genres have existed in
tension with it, and have had to resist marginalisation by it. A strong
body of metric verse, for instance, appeared in Welsh only in the nineteenth
century; the sonnet was a twentieth-century innovation; free verse was
very much an uneasy Johnny-come-lately; the novel had a hard time getting
established (encountering strong religious as well as cultural resistance)
– even though one of the great glories of medieval European literary
culture (and one of the great success stories of modern Welsh-English
translation) was the magical prose tales of the Mabinogi (translated in
the nineteenth century by Lady Guest under the title The Mabinogion),
and of course the related Arthurian romances. All this means that translators
of twentieth-century Welsh literature face the prospect that, resituated
in the foreign context of Anglophone culture, much of the literature (though
radical and liberating in its own context) can seem old-fashioned.