Gwyneth Lewis applauds Sioned Davies’s stripped-down translation of the Mabinogion
The Mabinogion
translated by Sioned Davies
293pp, Oxford, £12.99
The Mabinogion (“story of youth”) is the collective name given to 11 medieval Welsh tales found in manuscripts dated between 1382 and approximately 1410. The most coherent group is the “Four Branches”, which depict a mythical world in which Pryderi changes places with the king of the underworld for a year, a murdered husband is transformed into an eagle, and two brothers, as a punishment, are turned into animals and condemned to procreate and produce incestuous offspring with each other.
Although written in medieval Welsh, these legends are set in an area much wider than contemporary Wales. At one time, the Welsh-speaking area of Britain extended as far north as Catterick, before territorial defeat pushed the language into the Cymric peninsula. Branwen marries the king of Ireland; her brother goes to rescue her from an abusive marriage. His severed head is buried in London with its face towards France, protecting the island of Britain from invaders.
Welsh speakers are familiar with the mythical landscape of these stories. The entrance to the underworld is still in Cwm Cuch, west Wales, and two warring dragons are known to be buried in the mound at Dinas Emrys in Snowdonia. One of the corridors in Cardiff’s teaching hospital is decorated with paintings depicting Mabinogion legends. A sheep changes from black to white on crossing a river, a wonderful image for the moral relativity of bad news. Every time I pass this painting I think of the tree planted nearby: “one half of it was burning from its roots to its tip, but the other half had fresh leaves on it”, a mythical depiction of pain. As a child I was taught to recite sections and, in the last year of junior school, played Culhwch, a prince who won the hand of the beautiful Olwen by killing the enchanted boar, the Twrch Trwyth. My mother told me off for biting my nails during my nuptials with Olwen
The tales have filtered through to the wider British tradition in a piecemeal way. There was Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of 1836-49, and Robert Graves drew heavily on them for his mythological arguments in The White Goddess. Alan Garner’s The Owl Service evokes the Blodeuwedd myth, in which a wife is conjured out of flowers and then turned into an owl for infidelity. There’s even an early version of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak in the “Second Branch”, and Sgilti Sgafndroed wouldn’t be out of place in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: “He would travel along the top of the trees … and throughout his life no reed ever bent beneath his feet.” The Mabinogion is also a rich source of Arthurian material, most notably “Peredur, son of Efrog”, an important version of the Perceval myth.
Sioned Davies, professor of Welsh at Cardiff University, has written about the stories in The Mabinogion as performances. They fit the speaking voice perfectly and are full of the repetitions and devices that make oral feats of memory possible. We get the onomatopoeia of Peredur hitting a knight “a blow that was brutal and bitter, painful and bold”. The excitement of the action is further intensified by mid-sentence switching into the present tense, as when Geraint, son of Erbin, “struck the knight on the top of his head so that all the armour on his head shatters and all the flesh splits, and the skin, and it pierces the bone and the knight falls on his knees”.
Davies’s arrangement of the tales shows what happens when an oral tradition begins to be committed to the page. The rhetorically simpler “Four Branches” precede “How Culhwch Won Olwen”, a far more “literary” production. Interestingly, Culhwch wins his bride not by his own feats but by invoking 200 of Arthur’s warriors, who do the dirty work for him. This virtuoso recitation is one of the jewels of The Mabinogion, and Davies’s decision not to translate the names conveys the stirring original rhythm of this astonishing heroic catalogue.
The stories are also released from the faux-Victorian romanticism that has dogged the text, even as late as Jeffrey Gantz’s Penguin Classics translation of the late 1970s. So, the “Countess of the Fountain” is now the “Lady of the Well” and “buskins” are “boots”. This fresh, energetic translation is a revelation and, for the first time, shows off The Mabinogion tales as what they were originally: splendid entertainment.
