'The Life of Rebecca Jones' by Angharad Price (Review)

While I've covered many languages over the course of the past few years, there are so many others out there that I haven't managed to get to.  Luckily, today's post sees me rectifying that situation with a language that's very close to home, both geographically (my hometown in England is not too far from the border) and biologically (with two of my grandparents born there, it really is the land of my fathers).  I'm sure most of you will have worked it out by now, but let's see where Women In Translation Month is taking us today :)

*****
Angharad Price's The Life of Rebecca Jones (translated by Lloyd Jones, review copy courtesy of MacLehose Press) is a beautiful little book, an elegant look at the life of a woman who has spent her whole life in a secluded valley in North Wales, the heart of the Welsh-speaking community.  Part biography, part history, the book starts with the narrator at the end of her life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, from where we follow her back to the beginning of the twentieth century to see her mother and father returning after their wedding to their home in the valley of Maesglasau.  This sets the scene for Rebecca herself to appear in 1905 (and on page nineteen).

What follows is a leisurely journey through the life of the family over the next hundred years, and despite being secluded in the middle of nowhere, it's actually a rather eventful story.  With brothers born into blindness, and the risk of infant mortality ever present, growing up wasn't as easy as it might have been.  At times, she compares the unfolding of her life to the course of the stream running through the valley, even if she admits that there are limits to this comparison:

"Indeed a stream is not the best metaphor for life's regular flow between one dam and the next.
 I have not mentioned the reservoirs.  In these the emotions congregate.  I approach them with hesitation.  I stare into the still waters, fearing their hold on my memories.  In terror I see my own history in the bottomless depths."
p.35 (MacLehose Press, 2014)

On the whole, Rebecca relates the ups and downs calmly, making a hard, bitter life sound calm and desirable.  We always suspect, though, that there's something more below the surface, just waiting to be uncovered.

The Life of Rebecca Jones is a wonderful little book, and it's already considered as a Welsh-language classic, despite having been written a mere dozen years ago.  The original title (O! Tyn y Gorchudd, which translates to 'O! Pull aside the Veil') is taken from a hymn written by a resident of the valley centuries ago, but the significance goes beyond its writer.  There's an obvious nod towards the blind brothers, but there's also a hint that our sight is also limited, with certain things beyond our view.

While the plot, as it is, is fairly simply, the book is wonderfully descriptive.  It opens our eyes to a life that seems light years away, but is, in fact very similar to that lived by our own grand-parents and great-grand-parents.  The family live a life dictated by the elements, matters revolving around seasonal events such as harvest time and shearing.  For those of us accustomed to supermarkets with an almost unlimited array of food, the idea of only being able to eat what's in season (and only having fresh meat for a few months of the year) is a rather alien one.

Life's hard for everyone, but it soon becomes clear that it's doubly so for women.  The farmer works hard outside, but the wife's job spans a much wider area, with cooking, cleaning and  child-minding added to various outdoor jobs, including bringing food to the workers.  It's not a situation which would be accepted today, but Rebecca sees it as a natural consequence of the farm environment:

"At important times, such as shearing or harvest, Mother was expected to do her share of the tasks, in addition to preparing food and drink for a horde of men twice in a day.  After clearing the table she'd go out to work again until sunset.  Then she'd need to prepare supper for everyone and put us children to bed, after which she'd clean the tens of plates and dishes that had accumulated during the day.
 My father never offered to help.  It wasn't expected." (p.23)

Yes, it was still very much a man's world, as shown during one of Rebecca's rare trips to England.  Visiting Oxford, she's dazzled by the beautiful college buildings - it's just a shame that, as a woman, she's not allowed to see what's inside...

With the story being a mere succession of events, there's a danger of the novel becoming pretty, but dull, but towards the end of the story, change is skilfully woven into the structure.  Events move more quickly, changes become more obvious and progress rears its head - whether it's an ugly or attractive one depends on your point of view.  Certainly, many changes are welcome; the coming of electricity means that light can be had at any time of day, and the invention of the washing machine turns a day's hard labour into an hour sitting chatting over a cup of tea.

However, not all change is for the better, and as helpful as these innovations are, they actually help to speed up another trend, that of the demise of the local way of life.  As Rebecca sits in her ancient cottage in the twilight of her years, she sees the demographic shift sweeping across the valley, with young Welsh people moving away and the middle-class English moving in to enjoy the idyllic scenery.  She also sees into the future, predicting the gradual, yet inevitable, erosion of the status of Welsh, as English becomes used in more and more places, eventually displacing the local tongue.  In this way, a book about the passing of one old woman becomes representative for the decline of an ancient language and culture...

The Life of Rebecca Jones is a fascinating book and a rather personal one for the writer.  Angharad Price is actually Rebecca Jones' grand-niece (and is mentioned once by name in the book), and the majority of what happens in the book is simply a factual account of her family history.  However, there's a twist in the tale, and her work is an example of Sebaldian intermingling of real life and imagination, family details and black-and-white photos twisted around a liberal dose of imagination and some elegant writing.

It's this writing, above all, which makes the book, and credit must go to Lloyd Jones, a writer himself, for his excellent work.  There's a successful mixture of simple prose and more descriptive writing, and the book never comes across as stilted or unnatural.  I enjoyed the challenge of the Welsh words and place names scattered throughout the text, but those who might be a little more daunted by this are catered for too.  There's a guide to pronunciation at the back, and you'll soon be racing through phrases like Cwm Maesglasau without missing a beat ;)

In short, this is a beautiful tale of rural life and a search for tranquillity in an ever-busier world.  It's not an easy thing to seek out, a fact Rebecca acknowledges:

"From the moment of conception until the moment of death, tranquillity is within and without us.  But in the tumult of life it is not easily felt.  It shies away from our inflamed senses and all physical excitement; it recoils from our birth cries, from the rush of light to the eye, and from the fond indulgence of our loved ones, salty tears and sweet kisses, our earth-bound corruption and putrescence, the ghastly grunt of death...
 When our senses are spent we seek tranquillity again.  And as we age, our search for it becomes more passionate, though never easier." (pp.9/10)

If you're in need of some, though, you could do worse than try reading Price's (and Rebecca's) story, an island of calm in the hurried rush of life.  It's definitely a read for those in search of a little tranquillity of their own :)

'The Tilted Cup: Noh Stories' by Paul Griffiths (Review)

While Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 8 has been running for almost two months now, thus far I haven't really been able to contribute much.  Today's post, though, is an attempt to rectify that with something a little different.  You see, while the inspiration is Japanese, the end product is Welsh - and the style is excitingly unique.  I shall explain...

*****
Paul Griffith's The Tilted Cup: Noh Stories (review copy courtesy of the publisher) is another of the wonderful slices of writing from The Cahiers Series, a coproduction between Sylph Editions and The Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris.  Each of the cahiers is a slim, aesthetically-pleasing volume, running to about forty pages, and they all have some sort of connection with translation.

This particular cahier is of special interest to J-Lit fans as it takes classic stories from Japanese Noh plays (slow productions which use wooden masks to convey emotions) and condenses them into brief, elegant short stories in English.  While it sounds a little unorthodox, it's actually a decision which works very well, as the original stories are less complete tales than thought-provoking vignettes - and they are all very well-known in Japan, on a par with such tales as the Arthurian legends or Aesop's fables.

Several of the choices touch on the supernatural, depicting encounters between humans and spirits.  In 'Hagoromo', a fisherman agrees to return a spirit-being's cloak to enable it to return to the heavens and, in return, is allowed to witness a heavenly dance - an indescribable event:

"The fisherman never tried to describe what he then saw, not to his beloved, not to his friends, not, when he was an old man, to the children of the village.  He had seen something; that much they all knew.  They would look into his eyes, for a trace of it.  Of course, there was nothing to be seen."
'Hagoromo', p.13 (Sylph Editions, 2014)

The first story, 'Tadanori', also introduces a spirit, when a monk sleeping beneath a cherry-blossom tree is watched over by a ghost - the poet the monk is seeking -, and in 'Kayoi Komachi' we hear of a poetess, a ghostly lover and spilt wine which never reaches the floor...

Another theme is the occurrence of chance meetings, as detailed in 'Hachi no Ki'.  In this story, a ruined, exiled nobleman decides to show pity on a traveller on a cold winter night, and while the outcome is perhaps the most predictable of all the stories, it's still elegantly done.  In contrast, 'Hanjo' tells of a chance meeting between two young lovers, where fortune conspires to put obstacles in the path of their happiness, leaving the woman to abandon hope of ever finding the man again.

As much as the stories are fascinating, though, the real beauty of The Tilted Cup is in how the tales are told.  The title itself comes from the writer's preface, which he begins:

"Translation tilts the cup, and the text takes on a new shape.  What spills over, the translator hopes, is not lost to the ground but held in the ambience of that which remains." (p.5)

In fact, by taking stories from Japanese into English, and converting them from drama to prose, Griffiths is making a double translation - or, as he puts it, tilting the cup at least twice.  Happily for the reader, it doesn't appear that too much of the essence has splashed out onto the ground ;)

Griffiths has brought the stories into the new language (and genre) with some beautiful writing, and he has a pleasingly light touch with words.  In 'Kantan', a tale of a student, a pillow and some spell-binding dreams, one of the images is described thus:

"Thereupon a messenger in court uniform arrived to tell him the emperor had died, and had named him heir.
 Why?  The messenger didn't know.  That wasn't his job."
'Kantan' (p.17)

There are many more examples of sly winks to the reader, but let's not give too much away here...

What stands out most about the collection, however is the way in which several of the tales play with the structure to make the story stand out.  In 'Fujisan', the brief text is shaped in the image of the famous mountain, and 'Teika', which recounts the perfect love between a princess and a poet, takes the form of an incomplete sentence, one which circles back on itself and could almost be read continuously.

The best of these, though, is 'Saigyozakura', in which a famous poet laments the visitors who journey to see his famous cherry-blossom tree - and disturb his tranquillity.  However, a spirit chides him for blaming the tree:

"It seems to me, said the flowers, that you carry human nonsense within you.  Only the fool thinks himself raised above folly."
'Saigyozakura' (p.36)

The beauty of this one, however, is what you discover when you glance at the end notes.  You see, this one is a story within a story, for if you look back at the text, there is another, similar tale hidden within, just waiting to be discovered by the careful reader...

*****
As always with the cahiers, there's far more to the work than just the text.  The book also includes several photographs by John L. Tran of contemporary Japan, interspersed between the stories and perhaps reflecting them in a new light.  Many of them focus on empty hallways in covered shopping strips, cold, shiny and fairly claustrophobic.  For people who have visited Japan, they're fairly familiar images, yet the absence of people, and the forbidding, rolled-down shutters, give the pictures a slightly more sinister, other-worldly air...

...which brings us nicely back to the stories :)  The Tilted Cup is a beautiful work, another perfect coffee-table piece (for if I ever get a coffee table), and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Japan, Noh plays or Japanese shopping centres.  It's not a book which will take long to read, but it's certainly one you'll be dipping back into time and time again...

Back To My Roots

I am, as my family name suggests, of Celtic origin, but my roots are actually more Welsh than Irish, so I was more than happy to answer the call when Gary of The Parrish Lantern pointed me in the direction of Seren Books, a small Welsh independent publisher.  After making an enquiry, I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of a book I liked the look of, Fflur Dafydd's The White Trail.  The book itself was a wonderful read, but (as you will see) the individual story is just part of a greater whole...

We begin with the character of Cilydd, an ordinary middle-aged man facing a slightly extraordinary problem.  After a trip to the local supermarket, his wife Goleuddydd, fiery, temperamental and very heavily pregnant, has... well, vanished into thin air.  CCTV shows nothing, and the police are unable to help, so Cilydd turns to his cousin Arthur, a private investigator, for help in unravelling the mystery.  Eventually, there is progress in the case, and poor Cilydd has to face up to some bad news.

The more he learns about what has happened, however, the more confusing the whole affair becomes.  He throws himself into searching for details of the disappearance, joining a network of people who have had similar experiences and becoming a sort of secretary, a filer of information about the disappeared.  Then, many years later, events take an unwelcome turn - and Cilydd begins to receive some rather disturbing phone calls...

If you think this book sounds a little left-of-centre, you wouldn't be far off.  This is not a Proustian study of reality, but rather a more ethereal story of losing a loved one and carrying on.  If I were to attempt to pigeon-hole it, I would have to suggest the genre of magical realism, and there is something distinctly Murakami-esque about proceedings.  It's also peppered with wry humour though, with Dafydd often eliciting a chuckle with an ironic comment or two (as in the following example):

"The look, the one she fixed him with week after week was actually tinged with desire, and in a bizarre twist of fate he found himself making love to her in a secluded spot in the community-hall car park.  It was the most wildly irresponsible and impetuous thing he had done since he had inadvertently pushed her husband off a cliff." p.61 (2011, Seren Books)

From the astounding disappearance which sets off the story, Dafydd sketches a chain of events in elegant and poetic language, a style which enhances the fairytale-like feel.  At times, the prose is a mixture of myth and the modern, further intriguing the reader:

"And so Culhwch, Cilydd and Arthur set out, in the thick of night in Arthur's old carpentry van, to find Olwen, daughter of Ysbaddaden Bencawr.", p.118

This is an image which definitely sticks in the mind...

The hapless Cilydd is a man completely out of his depth in a sea of unlikely occurrences, with his only possible ally being Arthur, a private eye of Dirk Gently proportions and someone who definitely has more to him than may first meet the eye.  As Cilydd stumbles from one surprise to the next, the reader becomes just as eager as he is to learn the full truth of what has happened.  When we do, it all begins to make sense - even more so on a second reading.

This all makes for an intriguing novel, one which I devoured in a few hours, before reading it again more slowly a few days later, but there is a lot more to The White Trail than there would appear from just an outline of the plot.  The book is actually a retelling, or reimagining, of a mediaeval Welsh folktale, Culhwch and Olwen, one of the eleven stories making up the Welsh-language collection of myths, the Mabinogion.  Seren Books have commissioned contemporary Welsh writers to produce their own versions of the classic stories, and there will eventually be eleven of these New Stories from the Mabinogion.  The White Trail is being released in October (along with another book, The Prince's Pen), bringing the number of books released so far to six.

Dafydd, while taking inspiration from the original, has shifted the focus somewhat in her version, making Cilydd the main focus of the reader's attention and concentrating on the way he copes with the disappearance of his wife.  You don't have to take my word for that though - the writer tells us that herself.  You see, another wonderful feature of this book, in addition to a short summary of the original Culhwch and Olwen, is an 'Afterword' (like an introduction, but at the end) by the author, in which she tells us about her experiences with the Mabinogion and the process she went through in adapting the myth to a modern story.  In this, Dafydd explains why she decided to shift the attention from the young lovers featured in the original to the glum Cilydd, and details some of the similarities and differences between the two versions.

On its own merits, The White Trail is a great novel and well worth reading; as part of a series of loosely-connected books, it is even more intriguing.  When you then throw in the idea of the original mythological background, this becomes the kind of book that a lot of people will want to read.  I, for one, am very interested in seeing what Dafydd's fellow writers will make of the remaining stories - and I am also keen on obtaining a translation of the Mabinogion itself (and I know that there is a version available in the Oxford World's Classics series).  Maybe it really is time to get back to my roots...