In a collection of unedited odds and ends from Borrow’s papers bearing upon Wales, and dating from various periods of his career, there is one insignificant-looking sheet on whose back some lines are pencilled, beginning “The mountain snow.” They are reproduced in the text, but deserve notice here because of the evidence they bring of Borrow’s long-continued Welsh obsession and his long practice as a Welsh translator. Apparently they date from the time when he was writing “Lavengro,” since the other side of the leaf contains a draft in ink of the preface to that book. Other sheets of blue foolscap in the same bundle—folded small for the pocket—are devoted to unnumbered chapters of “Wild Wales.” Yet another scrap, from a much earlier period, is so closely packed in a microscopic hand that it reminds one at a first glance of the painfully minute script of the BrontË sisters in their earliest attempts. Its matter is only a footnote on the Celts, Gaels and Cymry, and its substance often reappears in later pages; but other items both in the early script of a fine minuscule, and in the later bold, untidy scrawl, serve to carry on the Welsh account, with references to Pwll Cheres and Goronwy Owen; and the upshot of them all goes to show that Borrow, whether he was at Norwich or in London, was not only a stout Celtophile, but much inclined, early and late, to be a Welsh idolater. And since the days when the monks of the Priory at Carmarthen wrote the “Black Book” in a noble script, I suppose no copyist ever took more pains than Borrow did in his early years in transcribing the lines of the Welsh poets, as the facsimile page given in this volume can tell.

Of the bards and rhymers that he attempted in English, he gave most care to translating Iolo Goch, four of whose odes open the present collection. He was tempted to dilate on Iolo, or “Edward the Red,” because of that poet’s association with Owen Glendower, a hero in whose exploits he greatly delighted. The tribute to Owen in “Wild Wales” is, or should be, familiar enough to Borrovians. In Chapter XXIII. there is an account of the landmark which Borrow calls “Mont Glyndwr” (though I have never heard it so called in my Welsh wanderings); while in Chapter LXVI. a description of the other mount at Sycharth accompanies a translation of the Ode by Iolo, which in a slightly different earlier text is printed on page eight. It was after repeating these lines, Borrow tells us, that he exclaimed, “How much more happy, innocent and holy” he was in the days of his boyhood, when he translated the ode, than “at the present time.” And then, covering his face with his hands, he wept “like a child.” If one re-reads the ode in the light of this confession, one observes that there is a strong vein of personal feeling about its lines, and a certain pilgrim strain in its opening, which would lend themselves readily to Borrow’s mood and the idea, never far away from his thoughts, that in his wanderings he too was a bard doing “Clera.” It need hardly be said that he was wrong in estimating Iolo’s age as “upwards of a hundred years,” when the ode was written. In other details of the poem he is more picturesque than literal; but the English copy of the Welsh sketch is in essentials near enough for all ordinary purposes; and the achievement in a boy of eighteen, living at Norwich, far from Wales, is an extraordinary one. The sort of error that he fell into was a very natural one to occur; for instance, misled by his mere dictionary knowledge, he omits the reference to St. Patrick’s clock-tower and the cloisters of Westminster. The words “Kloystr Wesmestr,” only lead in one text to the line, “A cloister of festivities,” and in the other to the yet freer rendering—“muster the merry pleasures all.” Again, the original has no mention of “Usquebaugh,” though the Shrewsbury ale is in order. In medieval Wales, I may add, the bragget mentioned in these lines was made by mixing ale with mead, and spicing the mixture—a decidedly heady liquor, one gathers, when it was kept awhile.

Iolo Goch, like the greater—indeed one may say the greatest Welsh poet, Dafydd ab Gwilym, used a form of verse in his odes which it is not easy to imitate or follow in English, keeping all its subtle graces and assonances. It is termed the “Cywydd,” which may be taken to signify a verse in which the words are well knit and finely co-ordinated; or, as Sir John Rhys puts it, “elegantly, artistically put together.” The verse, it should be said, is written in couplets, and the lines are required also to follow a definite symphonic pattern. Try for example Dafydd’s lines, which Borrow has translated (see page 59), upon the mist. In Welsh they run:

“Och! it ’niwlen felen-fawr
Na throet ti, na therit awr:
Casul yr awyr ddu-lwyd,
Carthen anniben iawn wyd,
Mwg ellylldan o annwn,
Abid teg ar y byd hwn.
Fal tarth uffern-barth ffwrn-bell;
Mwg y byd yn magu o bell.”

The second and last of these verses well show the use of what is called the “cynghanedd” or consonancy of echoing syllables required in the cywydd metre. Borrow, in getting his own rhyme, rather loses the force of the original. For instance, he omits the “awyr ddu-lwyd” in verse three—the air black-grey—and he spoils in expanding the idea of the verse—“carthen anniben,” etc. Here the Welsh poet suggests that the mist is an endless cloth, woven perpetually in space. The packed lines of the cywydd, and the concreteness of the imagery, set the translator, however, a hard task. Borrow, in the “Wild Wales” version, omits the opening of the poem, whose last lines lead up to the apostrophe; but the MS. has enabled Mr. Wise to complete it in his Bibliography. More literally, the Welsh might be rendered thus:—

“Before I had gone a step of the way,
I no longer saw a place in the land:
Neither birchclad cliff, nor coast;
Neither hill’s-breast, mountain-side, nor sea.”

Then it is he turns in his humorous rage:

“Och! confound thee, great yellow thing,
That neither turns lighter, nor clears a bit;
Black-grey chasuble of the air;
An endless woven clout, thou art!”

Borrow’s difficulty in attacking the Welsh of a poet so rapid and easy and light-footed, was that of a Zeppelin in pursuit of a Farman. He was over-weighted from the start. His early awkwardness in verse, his rhetoric learnt from the artificial style of the generation before him, were in his way. Iolo Goch was much nearer to him, with the admiring inventory of a chieftain’s house, than was the art of the poet of the leaves, the birch-grove and the love-tryst.

But as time went on Borrow returned on his old steps, and he took up some of his former handiwork, and smoothed away some of its crudities. Mr. Wise, indeed, maintains that the Borrow of 1826 was a much less finished verseman than the Borrow of 1854–60; and his Bibliography illustrates some of the changes made for the better in Borrow’s verse. Thus, in one Norse ballad, he changes “gore” into “blood,” and we remark in many lines an attempt to get at a more natural style in verse. The account of “The Sleeping Bard” in the Bibliography, shows that the improvement in Borrow’s craftsmanship went on after 1860, in which year the book was printed at Yarmouth (a very limited edition, 250 copies at 5s. a copy). For instance, in the poem, “Death the Great,” the seventh stanza ran originally:

“The song and dance afford, I ween,
Relief from spleen, and sorrow’s grave;
How very strange there is no dance
Nor tune of France, from Death can save.”

In 1871 the four lines were recast as follows:—

“The song and dance can drive, they say,
The spleen away, and humour’s grave;
Why hast thou not devised, O France
Some tune and dance from Death to save?”

Here again, we see, he purges his poetic diction, and turns “I ween” into “they say.” It is remarkable that in translating these lines by Elis Wynn he is not content to get the end-rhymes only, but accepts to the full the difficulty of following the Welsh in the interned rhymes throughout—as shown by the words italicised.

In his interesting account of “George Borrow and his Circle,” Mr. Shorter quotes a letter from Professor Cowell to a Norwich correspondent, Mr. James Hooper, which betrays some disappointment over Borrow’s Welsh interest at the close of his life. Cowell had been inspired by “Wild Wales” to learn Welsh, and even nursed a wish to do so under Borrow himself. He found his way to Oulton Hall one autumn day, and its master—now an old man close on eighty—opened the door in person. The ardent visitor talked to him of Ab Gwilym, but his interest was languid; and even the news that the Honourable Cymmrodorion were about to publish the poems of Iolo Goch did not rouse him. Cowell himself, it may be added, afterwards wrote an excellent appreciation of Ab Gwilym in the Transactions of the same society. In his letter, Cowell speaks of Borrow’s carelessness as a translator, and declares the very title—“Visions of the Sleeping Bard”—to be wrong; it should be, not the “Sleeping Bard,” but the “Bard Sleep.” However, in this case, Borrow’s instinct was truer than his critic’s. For “Cwsg” is used as a noun-adjective by Elis Wynn; and the latest translator of the book—Mr. Gwyneddon Davies [17]—adopts the same title precisely.

Borrow’s record as a Welsh translator would not be complete without a page or so of his version of the prose text of the same work. Elis Wynn, I may explain, was, after the tale-writers of the Mabinogion, the best author of Welsh narrative prose that the language possesses. He was at once idiomatic and exact in style. He knew how to get the golden epithet; his diction was bold and biblical, his vocabulary could be at times startling and Rabelaisean. Borrow’s efficiency in rendering him may be tested by a couple of passages. The first takes us to the City of Destruction and its streets:—

“‘What are those streets called,’ said I. ‘Each is called,’ he replied, ‘by the name of the princess who governs it: the first is the street of Pride, the middle one the street of Pleasure, and the nearest, the street of Lucre.’ ‘Pray, tell me,’ said I, ‘who are dwelling in these streets? What is the language which they speak? What are the tenets which they hold? To what nation do they belong?’ ‘Many,’ said he, ‘of every language, faith and nation under the sun are living in each of those vast streets below; and there are many in each of the three streets alternately, and everyone as near as possible to the gate; and they frequently remove, unable to tarry long in the one, from the great love they bear to the princess of some other street; and the old fox looks slyly on, permitting everyone to love his choice, or all three if he pleases, for then he is most sure of him.’

“‘Come nearer to them,’ said the angel, and hurried with me downwards, shrouded in his impenetrable veil, through much noxious vapour which was rising from the city; presently, we descended in the street of Pride, upon a spacious mansion open at the top, whose windows had been dashed out by dogs and crows, and whose owners had departed to England or France, to seek there for what they could have obtained much easier at home; thus, instead of the good, old, charitable, domestic family of yore, there were none at present but owls, crows, or chequered magpies, whose hooting, cawing, and chattering were excellent comments on the practices of the present owners. There were in that street myriads of such abandoned palaces, which might have been, had it not been for Pride, the resorts of the best, as of yore, places of refuge for the weak, schools of peace and of every kind of goodness; and blessings to thousands of small houses around.”

This comes from the first of the Three Dreams, that of the World; and a further quotation from the same dream-book touches what is Borrow’s high-water mark as a translator:—

“Thereupon we turned our faces from the great city of Perdition, and went up to the other little city. In going along, I could see at the upper end of the streets many turning half-way from the temptations of the gates of Perdition and seeking for the gate of Life; but whether it was that they failed to find it, or grew tired upon the way, I could not see that any went through, except one sorrowful faced man, who ran forward resolutely, while thousands on each side of him were calling him fool, some scoffing him, others threatening him, and his friends laying hold upon him, and entreating him not to take a step by which he would lose the whole world at once. ‘I only lose,’ said he, ‘a very small portion of it, and if I should lose the whole, pray what loss is it? For what is there in the world so desirable, unless a man should desire deceit, and violence, and misery, and wretchedness, giddiness and distraction? Contentment and tranquillity,’ said he, ‘constitute the happiness of man; but in your city there are no such things to be found. Because who is there here content with his station? Higher, higher! is what everyone endeavours to be in the street of Pride. Give, give us a little more, says everyone in the street of Lucre. Sweet, sweet, pray give me some more of it, is the cry of everyone in the street of Pleasure.

“‘And as for tranquillity, where is it? and who obtains it? If you be a great man, flattery and envy are killing you. If you be poor, everyone is trampling upon and despising you. After having become an inventor, if you exalt your head and seek for praise, you will be called a boaster and a coxcomb. If you lead a godly life and resort to the Church and the altar, you will be called a hypocrite. If you do not, then you are an infidel or a heretic. If you be merry, you will be called a buffoon. If you are silent, you will be called a morose wretch. If you follow honesty, you are nothing but a simple fool. If you go neat, you are proud; if not, a swine. If you are smooth speaking, then you are false, or a trifler without meaning. If you are rough, you are an arrogant, disagreeable devil. Behold the world that you magnify!’ said he; ‘pray take my share of it.’”

In the foregoing extract Borrow makes a few obvious errors. For instance, he turns the Welsh word “dyfeiswr” into “inventor,” whereas the sense here implies a schemer, or intriguer (the last is the rendering adopted by Mr. Gwyneddon Davies), and the translation suffers a corresponding lapse in the same clause. But on the whole Borrow’s rendering is good of its kind, and it gains by its freedom at times, as in the page where he turns “dwylla o’th arian a’th hoedl hefyd,” into “chouses you of your money and your life.”

The fact is, Borrow was vital in prose, while the shackles of verse often weighed on him. It was only in mid-career that he learnt to move at all easily in them—how much more easily we should not have known had not Mr. Wise, with his bibliographical intrepidity, set about printing for his own library some of the unpublished matter. In the light of those green quartos, Borrow is seen to be a translator of more force than grace, who generally contrived to give a flavour of his own to whatever he touched. Because of the subtleties of the prosody, he was rather less effective in dealing with Welsh and Celtic than with Norse and Gothic verse. But he managed to create an English that was undoubtedly rare in his day, and is now unique because the Borrovian accent is in it, and the masculine voice of Borrow—like the cry of Vidrik in the ballad—is unmistakable. He knew the art of giving a name to things; and, again like Vidrik, who called his sword “mimmering,” and his shield “skrepping,” this Cornish East Anglian, who dabbled in gipsy lore and learnt Welsh, made his weapons part of himself, whether they consisted of his pen, his portentous umbrella, or his father’s silver-handled blade:—

“Thou’st decked old chiefs of Cornwall’s land
To face the fiend with thee they dared;
Thou prov’dst a Tirfing in their hand,
Which victory gave whene’er ’twas bared.

“Though Cornwall’s moors ’twas ne’er my lot
To view, in Eastern Anglia born,
Yet I her sons’ rude strength have got,
And feel of death their fearless scorn.”

Little need be added about the various sources of the following text. The first three poems are from a quarto MS. owned by Mr. Gurney of Norwich, who has kindly lent it to the publishers. Its title runs:

poems.
By IOLO GOCH;
With a Metrical English Translation.

Some former owner has pencilled below, “By Mr. Borrer of Norwich” (sic). From Mr. Wise’s green quartos, already referred to, or from MSS. in his library, come the two Goronwy Owen poems, “The Pedigree of the Muse,” and “The Harp.” Also Lewis Morris the Elder’s lines, “The Cuckoo’s Song in Meirion,” or Merion, according to Borrow. The Epigrams by Carolan and “Song of Deirdra” are Irish items from the same source; while “Pwll Cheres, the Vortex of Menai,” and “The Mountain Snow,” are two Welsh ones, which have not, I believe, been printed in any other form. The familiar pages of “Wild Wales,” and the less-known volume, “Targum,” account for the bulk of the remaining poems and fragments; while Borrow’s “Quarterly Review” article on Welsh Poetry (January, 1861) provides us with four more translations. The versions are printed with all their faults on their head; and if he put a whiting into a fresh-water fish-pond (in the Ode on Sycharth, original text), or mistook a saint for a secular detail, the collector of his works will be glad to have the plain evidence under his hand, and will not wonder a bit the less at the boyish achievement of this East-country Celt. It remains to be said that, being Borrow, he was duly astonished at himself, and under the Sycharth poem wrote in Welsh a footnote which runs in effect: “The English translation is the work of George Borrow, an English lad of the City of Norwich, who has never been in Wales, and has never in all his life heard a word of Welsh from man or woman.”