Jun. 17th, 2015 10:19 pm
Wylit, Erallt
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muckefuckThe second episode of Hinterland finally featured some Welsh, so naturally I'm disappointed. It was sloppy of me to complain earlier that its use is confined to signage, since both episodes have featured it on book pages as well. Episode 1 had a close-up of an open Bible, but I wasn't sharp enough to identify chapter and verse (or even book). In Episode 2, we get an establishing shot of the cover of the novel Yr etifedd coll by E. Morgan Humphreys, which I was able to hunt down afterwards. The title translates to "The lost heir" and is a sly reference to the plot of the episode, which is drive by a struggle for title to a piece of land extending over three generations.
The parcel in question is called Talygroes ("Highcross"), a farm which gets swallowed up by the neighbouring estate of Parc y Boda ("Buzzard's Park"). In the house of a dispossessed heir, there's this eponymously-titled cross stitch:
As you can no doubt tell, it's doggerel: irregular line lengths (9 - 6 - 7 - 7), no end rhyme, no consonance or assonance, etc. Given that Wales has one of the longest and richest formal poetic traditions in Europe, this is a crying shame. Some of the best poems in the world are in Welsh and you don't even need to know the language to recognise this. Take, for example, the first stanza of Gerallt Lloyd Owens' sardonic commemoration of the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales:
And why are we still witnessing a rural Wales that's all by bereft of Welsh? There was a perfect opportunity, I thought, for inserting some into proceedings: at one point, an investigator visits a demented old woman in a nursing home in order to coax some details from her about events half a century ago. She's unresponsive to attempts to address her in English and neither the inspector nor the nurse suggests using Welsh to someone with a thoroughly Welsh name who lived her life "on the mountain". Sure, this would have reinforced the association of the language with dying old people, but even that is preferable to acting like it doesn't exist in spoken form at all.
The parcel in question is called Talygroes ("Highcross"), a farm which gets swallowed up by the neighbouring estate of Parc y Boda ("Buzzard's Park"). In the house of a dispossessed heir, there's this eponymously-titled cross stitch:
Yn hedd yr unigeddau - yn nythuMy rough version:
Mewn eithin a chreigiau
Wele glwt a chwl a chae
Hên aelwyd y cymylau.
In the peace of solitudes, nestingI was unsure about "chwl" (translated "blame"), but one of the characters reads the poem aloud in formal diction and I can't imagine what other word this could be. Oddly for a procedural, she doesn't translate any of it and the content has no bearing on the plot. Just a spot of local colour?
In gorse and rocks
Behold patch and blame and field
Old hearth of the clouds.
As you can no doubt tell, it's doggerel: irregular line lengths (9 - 6 - 7 - 7), no end rhyme, no consonance or assonance, etc. Given that Wales has one of the longest and richest formal poetic traditions in Europe, this is a crying shame. Some of the best poems in the world are in Welsh and you don't even need to know the language to recognise this. Take, for example, the first stanza of Gerallt Lloyd Owens' sardonic commemoration of the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales:
Wylit, wylit, Lywelyn,It certainly adds something to know the meaning of the lines ("You would weep, weep, Llywelyn / Weep blood if you saw this. / Our heart with a foreigner / Our crown with a conqueror / And a populace of favour-seekers/ With meek smiles, where once were men.”), but the deft use of poetic devices such as parallelism and internal rhyme stands out at a glance. So, if the words didn't actually matter, why not steal some lines from one of Welsh literature's many bucolic odes rather than throwing up some crap authored by an English-dominant screenwriter?
Wylit waed pe gwelit hyn.
Ein calon gan estron ŵr,
Ein coron gan goncwerwr,
A gwerin o ffafrgarwyr
Llariaidd eu gwên lle’r oedd gwŷr.
And why are we still witnessing a rural Wales that's all by bereft of Welsh? There was a perfect opportunity, I thought, for inserting some into proceedings: at one point, an investigator visits a demented old woman in a nursing home in order to coax some details from her about events half a century ago. She's unresponsive to attempts to address her in English and neither the inspector nor the nurse suggests using Welsh to someone with a thoroughly Welsh name who lived her life "on the mountain". Sure, this would have reinforced the association of the language with dying old people, but even that is preferable to acting like it doesn't exist in spoken form at all.