Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

The Bilingual mind HUW MENAI MY EARLY BACKGROUND OF CYNGHANEDD SOMETIME AGO I was asked to explain why lines of Cynghanedd appear so frequently, as if by accident, in many of my poems. I am afraid I could not then at once give a really satisfactory answer. Indeed the best I could do was to suggest that it was probably all due to some ancestral gremlin, to some momentary and mysterious bubbling of my Cymric blood. Later on, after some thinking on the matter, I came however, to the conclusion that the true answer to the riddle was after all quite a simple and prosaic one: that my Cynghanedd habit, for the number of unpremeditated ones that have found their way into my poems are quite formidable, was only a matter of echoes from the secret storage of memories asserting themselves-wraith-like segments of sound surfacing from the Unconscious, clamouring for an outlet, in- sisting on intruding themselves on a medium that was really foreign to them, a characteristic maybe of the bilingual mind, and a pointer to the snares and struggles which beset it-often for the better. The first money I ever earned by means of the written word was a guinea for a semi-humorous poem, which, I believe, had something to do with Epsom Salts. It happened in a weekly publication called Yes or No, edited by a well known journalist personality of the time called Charles Shurey, if my memory does not trick me, because it all hap- pened nearly 60 years ago when I was a lad of 14 or thereabouts. Curiously enough, on the very day this poem in English appeared, I also had a Welsh Englyn on 'De Wet' in the Eco Coch, then edited by Eifionydd. And there is little doubt that I must have felt myself on that great day to be quite an inflated 'broth of a boy!' In any case it would seem from this that I was at least quite one of the earliest Welsh pioneers in the attempt at bilingual creative writing, even if in but a most crude way. About this time my boss, a man of substance in the town of Caernar- von, a pious Welsh Calvinist, a very pillar of Nonconformity, and a deacon, decided to put me out on loan for five months or so to 'tidy-up'