Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh

PROLOGUE

Something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God’s

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of travelling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

R. S. THOMAS

‘Somewhere’

Dechrau to Begin

‘Pam, Pam?’

It could be irony or it could be destiny, but either way my name means Why? in Welsh. My full name, Pamela, smacks of tea and foxhounds.

There’s an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy dresses up in riding gear and fakes an English accent to impress Ricky’s friends. Her assumed name, of course, is Pamela. PAHM-ula, that is, sprung from the mouth with the velocity of a ping-pong ball shot from a toy gun. Now hear a Welsh person speak my name, and the tidy hierarchy of syllables goes right out the window. There’s an anarchic pulse to PAM-eL-A that I like much better. My name becomes a quick trip over the hills on a sled in winter. It’s a less efficient way of calling me, but imagine what that extra syllabic beat does for the musculature of the tongue.

The most efficient way to get my attention is to shout ‘Pam!’, which is what I’ve answered to for most of my thirty-five years, but which over the past decade or so has become that nagging ‘Why?’ question as well. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I wondered to myself in 1983, when I turned down a job in Washington, DC to go to the smallest university in Britain – the University of Wales, Lampeter – to get a master’s degree in something called ‘The Word and the Visual Imagination’.

‘Just why did you say you’re doing this?’ my friends wanted to know in 1987, when after two years back in the States I enrolled in a Welsh language class at Harvard.

‘But why are you doing this, Pam? Why do you need to spend a summer working on your Welsh?’ my family asked in 1992, in a tone of supportive desperation that they’ve become very good at, when I returned to Lampeter to spend two months in a seven-days-a-week intensive Welsh language class in a Portakabin, on the hockey pitch, in the rain.

I don’t know. Maybe when I first went to Wales and unwittingly enrolled in an English department, the old Welsh god of Irony vowed to teach me a lesson and made me besotted with the place and its language (I made up the god of Irony, but there really is an old Celtic god of Panic, who comes in handy in cases of both travel and language study). To tell the truth, I really can’t say why my desire to continue learning Welsh got so out of hand that I chose to pursue it on a five-month, fourteen-country crusade around the world. Perhaps I had a premonition of what Ursula Imadegawa would tell me in Tokyo. ‘Pam,’ she said, leaning against her kitchen counter about to hand me a glass of Johnnie Walker Black with pink and purple plastic ice cubes floating in it, ‘you only regret what you don’t do.’

I suppose the rejoinder to Ursula’s wisdom is that I haven’t flown a jet or pierced my eyebrows or gotten married yet, and I’m not racing off to do any of those things for fear of potential regret. So it’s ‘Pam, Pam?’ again: Why travel around the world when I could just as easily – and for a great deal less money – go back to Wales to study Welsh?

There are two answers to this question. One is, simply, that I like to travel and make up shameless excuses to do so. The other is that learning Welsh is like digging a hole in the sand. You make a dent at first, but as you bore deeper you encounter a frustrating snag of nature called the angle of repose; you can only dig so far before new sand spills in from the top, eternally preventing your hole from getting any bigger. All you wind up with is grit under your fingernails. It’s the same with me and Welsh: whenever I try to practise Welsh in Wales I get only so far before English comes spilling in from all sides.

The fact of the matter is that the principality of Wales is buried beneath the verbal tonnage of English. Of Wales’s nearly three million inhabitants – compared to around five million apiece for Ireland and Scotland, and 48 million for England – only about 18 per cent, or some 540,000 people, speak Welsh. And these folks are fluent in English as well. Now imagine waiting your turn at a post office in rural Wales. Behind you is a line that winds out the front door, peopled with old men in tweed jackets and ties, leaning heavily on identical canes and making preliminary retching sounds in their gullets; redolent farmers with manure-caked Wellingtons; a mother with three uncontrollable children; and at least one old woman struggling beneath the weight of a heavy shipping box. Your turn comes and you approach the window. The clerk raises his eyebrows in efficient expectation of your request. Do you say: ‘Um, bore da.’ Clear your throat. ‘Um, gaf fi, no, um, gai, uh, bruny stamp, um, os gwellwch chi’n dda?’ Or do you say, ‘Good morning. May I have a stamp please?’

If you are a worthy and courageous language learner, you do the former, and sweat, and hold people up, and tell yourself it’s for a good cause. If you’re a coward like me, you backslide on to the easy cushion of English. I imagine that giving in to the majority language is a lot like drowning. The familiar words, like the waves, come as a relief when they finally wash down your windpipe once you’ve decided to quit the struggle. But you lose big both ways.

Like Basque or Breton or Catalan, Welsh is a minority language, and it takes fierceness and mental blinkers to learn it by pretending that you and the person with whom you’re practising really don’t share another language – say French or Spanish or English – in which you are both perfectly fluent. The essential wink and nod between you is a fragile conceit, and it usually invites its hangers-on, self-consciousness, the giggles and a sense of unreality, to come and enjoy the struggle.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn Welsh in Wales; plenty of people do it every day. But because I’m gutless in crowded post offices, because Welsh-speakers tend to be indulgent with American learners and hold us to lower standards than their fellow countrymen, and because a five-hundred-year-old blanket of English is pinned tightly to the land, I’ve had a hell of a time. The truth is, I got so infuriated with myself one day in 1992, when after five years of semi-serious study I still couldn’t conduct a coherent telephone conversation in Welsh, that a radical thought came to me. I’d heard there was a mother-lode of Welsh-speakers in Argentina whose other tongue was Spanish – a language in which I knew only menu words like guacamole and burrito; but suppose there were Welsh-speakers in other non-English-speaking countries as well? If they existed, they had to be pretty unusual people. That was a plus. If they didn’t speak English, I’d have to speak to them in Welsh. That was scary. And even if they turned out to be bilingual Welsh expatriates, they and I might prove less likely to succumb to the high tide of English than we would in Wales, the nearest moon orbiting the planet England, where the gravitational pull of the imperial language is harder to resist. By visiting Welsh-speakers in places such as Norway and France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Singapore, Thailand, Japan and Argentina, I’d have an unheard-of opportunity to use Welsh as an international language. Even better, I’d get to travel around the world.

The mere thought brought on goosebumps. Could it be, I wondered, that the Old Man of Pencader was wrong? He’s the cheeky devil who foresees the future for Henry II of England at the end of Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-century travel guide to his native land. Henry asks the Old Man what he thinks of the Welsh army’s chances against the English (an impertinent question, even from a king). The Old Man replies with dignity, ‘Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.’

God give me such self-possession in the face of kings (the irony is that Henry would have asked his question in French – another language that makes me weak at the knees). Now I didn’t doubt the Old Man of Pencader’s prediction, but, I thought, maybe the Supreme Judge should just get his ear ready to hear accounts of Oslo, Tokyo and Buenos Aires in Welsh as well.

Of course, all this was just pub talk. I never expected any of it to happen, and spent the next three years wallowing like a happy sow in the murk of American English.

Paratoi to Prepare

Mind you, I didn’t quite abandon the idea either. I took to baiting the bio-lines of articles I wrote for the Welsh journal Planet with the bare bones of my scheme – more to prove to readers that I had an association with Wales than anything else. Then one day I got a letter from Philip Gwyn Jones, Planet subscriber, Welshman and HarperCollins editorial director, who thought it might be a good idea. Six months later he called to say that my travelling the world in search of Welsh-speakers – not to mention questing after the language itself – was officially a good idea and, well, bon voyage.

To say I was not prepared is like saying the Titanic didn’t expect an iceberg that night. Philip had called in January; the earliest I could possibly leave for the world was June, the same time my friend and housemate Marguerite, a bilingual Brazilian-American, was due to finish her doctoral dissertation on Brazilian fiction. By then she’d be PhD’d but jobless. I invited her to come along. You never knew, I pointed out, when we might run into a pack of Welsh-Portuguese speakers, whereupon her presence would be invaluable. She agreed, we drank a bottle of champagne, then we became devotees of the god of Panic.

While Marguerite wrote night and day about fictional Brazilians I hunted the Welsh. My strategy was to find address lists of all the Welsh societies in exotic (that is, non-English-speaking) spots around the world and write to them. Simple enough, but procuring the lists took time. The daffodils were up before I was actually addressing letters to the Mashonaland Cambrian Society in Harare, Zimbabwe and the St David’s Society of Singapore, among thirty-four others.

In March I made a brief foray to New York to try to persuade newspaper and magazine editors to assign me enough travel stories to pay for the trip. One night after a long day of wheedling I met my friends Mary and Tom at Tom’s office. They’d just hooked up to the World Wide Web and he wanted to show us how cool it was. ‘See if it does anything with “Welsh”,’ I asked. He pressed some keys and in moments had overcome the space-time continuum.

‘Here’s something.’

The screen held a message from the Clwb Cymraeg – the Welsh Club – of the Shimizu Girls’ Junior High School in Shimizu City, Japan. They were looking for Welsh-language pen pals.

‘Now that’s just plain weird,’ said Mary. ‘But it looks as if you’re in business.’ I felt like I’d finally made contact with aliens. So they were out there after all. We were high above Central Park late at night and the lights of Manhattan receded from our office tower like a distant galaxy. The three of us were chartreuse with the green glow of the Japanese schoolgirls’ message. ‘Well duw, duw,’ I murmured to myself, astonished, in the idiomatic Welsh equivalent of a good slap on the thigh.

The trouble with finding the Shimizu Clwb Cymraeg was that I had to write back to its members in Welsh. The Welsh part was the problem. After speaking it poorly but daily in the summer of 1992 I’d returned home to Providence, Rhode Island and my Welsh had gone fallow. Since more people in Rhode Island probably speak Pig Latin than know Welsh exists, practice opportunities were at a minimum.

I dug out my old cassettes and repeated the ABC of Welsh in the car. Every night as I made dinner a man correctly guessed ‘Ella Fitzgerald’ on the Welsh version of Name That Tune and Hurricane Andrew slammed into Florida as people were evacuated from their homes (I’d taped the news in Welsh off Radio Wales three years earlier; consequently at dinnertime in my kitchen it was perpetually 24 August 1992). I was never bored listening. Other things happened that day as well – I think mortgage rates rose and there was a sailing accident off Llandudno – but come May all this was still new to me, since I couldn’t quite figure out what the announcer was saying. Surveys have shown that about half of all native Welsh-speakers can’t understand the news either, so I didn’t despair.

But I did need speaking practice. Tom’s computer in New York had also turned up an on-line Welsh course that went out to hundreds of learners around the world. Remarkably, the guy who produced it lived about ten minutes away from me in East Providence. The world was shrinking and I hadn’t even found affordable luggage yet. I looked him up in the phone book and we agreed I’d come over on a Thursday evening to speak Welsh.

Mark Nodine is an American computer jockey who visited Wales once on a two-week vacation and decided to learn the language. That seemed excessive even to me. I imagined he could speak rings around me and downed a big glass of wine to lure my vocabulary out of its usual cocoon before appearing on his doorstep with a bunch of supermarket daffodils. Mark was waiting for me. He projected earnestness and clean living. I sucked in my breath after the prerequisite Noswaith dda – Good evening – so he wouldn’t smell the wine. My stomach ached.

I sat on his sofa and he drew up a chair. He spoke. I tilted my head like a parrot. He spoke again and I tilted again, smiling mightily. I couldn’t understand a word he said. His vocabulary seemed arcane and his rhythm – the syncopated, palpitating heartbeat of the Welsh language – fell into a monotone like the pulse of a long-distance runner. I, meanwhile, had rhythm. Sometimes I even had music. But I could ask my Welsh language memory for nothing more than an occasional unconjugated verb followed by an inblown hiss of winy breath. Forty-five unintelligible minutes later I suddenly remembered an important phone call I had to make. On the way out Mark told me he’d learned Welsh from the Bible.

‘I didn’t understand a word. Do you hear me? Not a single word,’ I cried to Marguerite later, clutching the rest of the Merlot.

‘But you’ve been studying all the time.’ She looked concerned.

‘Get this,’ I whimpered, ‘he learned Welsh by reading the Bible. Can you believe that? Jeez, the Bible! And now he’s creating this mega Welsh vocabulary program on the computer. How does he have time for that? He’s got a job. He’s got a wife and kids. Man, I hate that.’

‘So he probably speaks in Welsh thees and thous and uses verbs like smite. How could you possibly understand him?’

Coulda shoulda woulda, I thought darkly, but time for fear was running out. I painstakingly wrote the Shimizu girls. Marguerite spent Easter weekend summing up her thoughts on Brazilian fiction. Responses from Welsh societies began to trickle in: a Welsh Studies Centre in Germany would be happy to see me, same with the Paris Welsh, and the Dutch. A hearty invitation arrived from the Argentinians. No word from Asia, but for a letter from a very old Japanese Celticist who was in the hospital with pulmonary emphysema. He wrote wishing me luck from his hospital bed. The Mashonaland letter came back from Zimbabwe stamped ‘Return to Sender’. The travel agent demanded an audience.

‘You can’t go below the equator,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Why?’

‘It’s just a hemisphere thing. Most round-the-world packages don’t.’

‘That discriminates against Brazil,’ said Marguerite.

‘You’ll have to buy a separate ticket from New York to Buenos Aires, but now you have more immediate concerns. You have to choose your round-the-world route today.’

With less than half the response letters in, selecting an air path was like taking so many shots in the dark. We closed our eyes, drew our travel bow and shot: New York – London – Paris – Frankfurt – Athens – Frankfurt – Bombay – Singapore – Bangkok – Tokyo – Hong Kong – Tokyo – New York, followed by New York – Buenos Aires-Rio-New York. For better or worse, it was done. We were committed.

Then life speeded up. The director of the language course I’d attended in Lampeter sent me names and addresses of all the overseas learners who’d attended the programme in the past two years: it seemed Poles, Germans, Swedes, South Africans and Argentinians have all been flocking to Lampeter. I’d already heard something about Welsh being taught in a high school in Poland, and fired off a letter to Gdańsk. A last-minute invitation arrived from the Oslo Welsh, and I added another leg to the trip. Marguerite defended her dissertation. Hurricane Andrew beat the hell out of Florida every night in the kitchen. Mark called and told me (in English) about the ‘Welsh-L’, a Welsh-language chat group on the Internet and advised me to get E-mail.

This entailed wrestling a modem into my computer, which brought out a vindictive streak in its software. Over the next week it fought my every attempt to master the art of E-mail, by which I hoped to keep in touch with my editors, my brother, and the over four hundred yakkity Welsh-speakers who monopolized my E-mail box.

In the last, frantic days before we left I began to feel as if I were learning two languages at once: one, the synaptic slang of the twenty-first century, the very cutting edge of computer-speak itself; the other, possibly the oldest language in Europe, a contemporary version of Brythonic, the tongue that had been brought to the island of Great Britain around 600 B C (some argue for an even earlier date, around 2000 B C), and which, along with Basque, is the only language in Western Europe to have been spoken before, during and after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a sweet, strange moment when I finally managed to unite the two on my computer screen.

This is the gist of one of the first messages I received on the Welsh-L (Welsh, Breton and Cornish are the official languages of the discussion group; English is tolerated, but frowned upon):

Sir John Morris-Jones, after a series of tests, has ascertained that the proportion of Welshmen who pronounce the double-L on the right side of the tongue, as compared to those who pronounce it on the left, is three to one.

Dychmygu to Imagine

Unlike most travel narratives this is not a book about place but a book about language. Can a language be said to describe a place, a place the language that is spoken there? Is it possible to travel to many different places and arrive, not back home, but in the terra incognita of a new language? And just where might that be?

I’ve travelled to Brazil with Marguerite but I don’t speak Portuguese. While we were there she read the signs, laughed at the jokes, and got drawn into the novelas, or nightly soap operas, that hold the country enrapt. I stared at the outcroppings of abrupt, conical hills that pock Rio de Janeiro and felt I’d slipped into the iconic backdrop of a medieval painting; I was consumed by the tangy tastes and smells of the place. Did my country of the viscera have the same boundaries as hers of the mind? Stumps me.

If these questions were simply knotty in Brazil they’re absolutely bound, gagged and tortured in Wales, where 82 per cent of the population does not speak Welsh. Are these English-speaking Welshwomen and -men just tourists in their homeland, as I was a tourist in Brazil, because they can’t read the old poets, hold a government teaching post or watch the nightly soap opera Pobl y Cwm (People of the Valley)? Hardly. And yet … There is no self-governing political entity on earth that corresponds to Wales: it is not, to use geo-political terms, an historical nation. A leading Welsh academic, Gwyn A. Williams, wrote a book called When Was Wales? Might as well ask why is Wales? Because that’s where the sheep are? Because that’s where it rains all the time? Because that’s where Welsh is spoken?

Look at the two names of this twice-spoken-for land. ‘Wales’ comes from an old Saxon word meaning something like Place of the Romanized Foreigners. It’s an audacious etymology: around the fifth century AD Saxon invaders moved into Britain and called the inhabitants foreigners. They subdued most of the southern half of the island, and what they couldn’t they called Wales. The word Cymru – the Welsh name for Wales – was born around the year 580 in reaction to these events. The unconquered people who spoke Brythonic, the ancestor to Welsh as Anglo-Saxon is to English, called their bit of high, rough, western Britain Cymru, or the Home of Fellow Countrymen (the word Cymry means Welshmen). As late as the 1180s, Gerald of Wales – ironically writing in Latin – noted, ‘To this day our country continues to be called Wales and our people Welsh, but these are barbarous terms.’