Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
A few days ago I called Boyd Williams, the president of the Paris Welsh Society, to arrange a meeting. Boyd is a native Welsh-speaker from Abergwaun (Fishguard), who wrote to me in English because, he claimed, his written Welsh was ‘full of mistakes – mutations, mostly’. I figured someone so sensitive to error would surely understand my fear of speaking Welsh on the phone. He did; unfortunately his secretary did not, and made me speak French, which was worse.
It did my heart good to know that Boyd, too, is stalked by a fear of mutations. Or mutilations, as one of my teachers liked to call them. In a bewildering grabbag of situations – new moon, high tide, to impress singular female nouns – ‘c’s become ‘g’s, ‘p’s become ‘b’s, and so on. The first letters of words shift their shape like the great magicians of Welsh folklore. But whereas the latter were circumspect about their shapeshifting, the Welsh alphabet is locked in a perpetual game of musical chairs from hell. There are soft mutations (the nicest), aspirate mutations (rarer; forgivable if you miss them), and nasal mutations (horrible). You have to use the latter, for instance, if you live in the capital of Wales. Rydw i’n byw yng Nghaerdydd: I live in Cardiff. In this case, all because of a wee preposition, Caerdydd mutates to Nghaerdydd. A bit of an over-reaction, I’d say. If you were born there you would be o Gaerdydd, from Cardiff. Right now I’m not in Paris, I’m ym Mharis. Go figure.
Actually, I admire the language’s infatuation with the ear. Mutations have no meaning, they’re simply built-in riffs and slides, so that even mundane sentences glide together like the blues. Ym Mharis is yn Paris, slurred like a late-night love song – and grammatically correct, to boot. Welsh isn’t alone in this mutation game: its first cousins, Breton and Cornish, and second cousins, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx – the world’s Celtic languages – play too, but by their own rules. The miracle is that all these tongues, even Cornish and Manx, both now extinct, have managed to incorporate flux and change into the heart of themselves and make a fixed system of improvisation. It’s almost as if they found the trick of internalizing time, put it on a grammatical wheel instead of a straight line. Speaking Welsh is the poor man’s way of flirting with immortality.
Bwyta Caws to Eat Cheese
The goat cheese sits like a bruiser on Marguerite’s sister Nina’s cheeseboard, bullying the Camembert and Port Salut. Nina’s three kids, all under ten, looked at it when I presented it to the family as if I’d brought the goat instead of the cheese. Their father, Bernard, a Frenchman whom Nina met while also studying in Paris, valiantly tried some, pulled his mouth down, raised his eyebrows and shrugged. He hasn’t eaten any since.
When we return from the Louvre Nina is excited.
‘You’re never going to believe this.’
‘What? HarperCollins called and wants to give me more money?’
‘No. There’s a Welsh movie on TV tonight. Isn’t that incredible?’
At ten-thirty I turn on the television, still astonished by this marvel of good timing. Below us on the street are the sounds of migration: laughter, footsteps, the hollow ring of aluminium lawn chairs bumping together. Every evening at this hour half the neighbourhood – Nina and Bernard live in the ‘decidedly unchic’ nineteenth arrondissement, in north-east Paris – wanders down to the Parc de la Villette, where a series of free films are being shown en plein air, beneath a city sky the colour of dark amethyst. Tonight’s feature is Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. We, however, shut the windows and tune in to Une Si Jolie Vallée, ‘Such a Pretty Valley’, as Nina begins her nightly ironing.
It’s the story of a love triangle between Kevin, an unemployed miner (a Welshman but a monoglot English-speaker), his wife Sian (bilingual in English and Welsh) and Nahuel, a dashing, horseback-riding writer from Patagonia who is fluent in Welsh and Spanish, but speaks no English. The dialogue alternates between English and Welsh, with French subtitles. I sit like a pointer spaniel throughout the whole thing, still and tense, with my language brain in hyperdrive. As it is I blurt out French words when I want Welsh ones, and vice versa, but this verbal-visual stew of (for me) half-cooked languages is too much. Thank god Argentina is still four months away. It’s a huge relief when Sian decides to stick it out with Kevin (you knew she would), and Nina zaps off the set.
‘Is South Wales still so depressed?’ she asks, folding up the last of the clothes.
‘Actually Cardiff was tops on the list of UK cities last year for economic growth. A lot of high-tech companies, Japanese especially, are moving into the old mining valleys. But coal mining itself is finished. The movie review in Le Monde described the valleys today as vertes comme des choux tendres – green like tender cabbages. Honestly, the French are too much.’
‘Didn’t that one mine reopen?’ Marguerite asks. ‘There was that photo of guys covered in coal dust in the New York Times.’
‘Oh, that’s right. The Tower mine. It was the last working mine in South Wales – four and a half miles straight down – not far from Merthyr Tydfil. After it closed in 1994 the miners pooled their savings and bought it, and they’re working it again. But that’s just one mine, pulling, I think, around 400,000 tons of coal. In 1920 there were 620 mines operating in Wales. Think about it: Cardiff once exported over 36 million tons of coal and was the largest port on earth.’
At a quarter to one everyone else has gone to sleep, so it’s safe for me to plug into the family phone jack and do E-mail (which would otherwise become child’s play, literally). The Welsh chat group is in a furore because someone has surmised that Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was Welsh, and asks if anyone has noticed the number of professional baseball players with Welsh surnames. One person responds, ‘What’s your point? – that everyone with the name Davis is of Welsh descent, or that Jefferson indirectly fathered a lot of pro baseball players?’
I stay out of it, thinking instead of Welsh coal. That was the real Welsh diaspora. By the late nineteenth century Welsh anthracite had travelled to western France, northern Spain, Italy, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, India and throughout the Far East. I’ll be doing a good job just to keep up.
Cyfarfod to Meet
It’s a warm dusk, and the breeze kicking around Les Halles smells of fresh electricity. A storm is dickering with us tonight; the clouds look bruised and apprehensive.
Emile Zola called Les Halles ‘the belly of Paris’. There’s a Welsh expression, llond bola o ofn, a belly full of fear, which suits the occasion of my imminent meeting with the Paris Welsh at a café nearby. Les Halles means ‘the Marketplace’. From 1100 – one hundred and eighty-two years before Wales lost its independence – until the mid 1970s an immense wholesale food market occupied this area. Now there’s only a shopping mall, the name Les Halles, and a feeling that something’s missing.
I walk past a string of cafés that reputedly specialize in onion soup and pig’s feet. Au Chien Qui Fume – The Smoking Dog – sounds nice, but the Welsh are awaiting at Le Comptoir. I spot a table of people all looking past one another expectantly; there’s a keen crack of thunder as it occurs to me, good god, it’s me they’re looking at. Boyd Williams isn’t at all what I’d imagined. He’s about my age, with shoulder-length, greying hair tied in a pony-tail and a kind of toss-away elegance. With him is Eluned, a violinist o Gaerdydd, Arwel from Amlwch, Iori’s home town on Anglesey, and Nesta from around Bangor, and older than the rest of us by a good thirty years.
This is the Cylch Cymraeg, the Welsh-speaking circle of the Paris Welsh Society, and they’re already doing it. After Nesta tells me that the society has between seventy-five and a hundred members, around thirty of whom speak Welsh, and I give my spiel, which I’ve nearly memorized by now – Dw i’n ysgrifennu llyfr am bobl o gwmpas y byd sy’n siarad Cymraeg … I’m writing a book about people around the world who speak Welsh – multiple conversations begin to sprout. It occurs to me that there’s a geography of comprehension at work here. I’m sitting between Boyd and Nesta,