Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh
The idiosyncratic and witty travelogue of a young Welsh-speaking woman who travels the globe in search of Welsh communities.Studying in Lampeter, Dyfed, and learning Welsh, Pamela Petro found it infuriating that whenever – in the post office, at the butcher’s, in the pub – she stumbled with her Welsh, the locals would – kindly, they thought – always revert to English: ‘English is so much easier for you, izznit?’ So she decided to go where English was not an option (i.e. not to Canada, Australia, South Africa or the USA) for the student of Welsh – Paris…Oslo…Tokyo…all kinds of unlikely places with long-standing Welsh communities.Once you start to look, you find the Welsh everywhere: among Petro’s intended ports of call were the Hong Kong Men’s Choir, all Chinamen who sing in Welsh; the Japanese bardic eisteddfod in Tokyo; the Welsh golfers of Oslo; the diners of the Paris Welsh Society (one of three in the city); and many more including, naturally the long-suffering Patagonians. Her simultaneous virtual travels (through the Internet) explore the effects and implications of the language itself, ranging from global searches for the strongest Welsh expletive (Iesu Christ) to how exactly Welsh (officially outlawed between 1536 and 1967) survived centuries of English oppression.
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PAMELA PETRO
Travels in an Old Tongue
Touring the World Speaking Welsh
Willam Collins
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published by Flamingo 1998
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Publishers 1997
Copyright © Pamela Petro 1997
Pamela Petro asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
The author and publishers of this work would like to express their gratitude to the following:
David Higham Associates for permission to quote ‘The Sunset Song’ from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas; Gwydion Thomas for permission to quote R. S. Thomas’ poem ‘Something’; J. M. Dent & Sons for permission to quote ‘The Small Window’ and ‘Welsh’ from Collected Poems 1945–1990 by R. S. Thomas; and Gwasg Gomer for permission to quote T. H. Parry-Williams’ poem ‘Hon’ from Poetry of Wales 1930–1970; Meic Stephens for permission to quote Harri Webb’s poem ‘Ode to The Severn Bridge’.
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Source ISBN: 9780006550105
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007393299
Version: 2016-01-12
For my parents,Patricia and Stephen Petro
Something to bring back to show
you have been there: a lock of God’s
hair, stolen from him while he was
asleep; a photograph of the garden
of the spirit. As has been said,
the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up
into the honey the mind feeds on.
R. S. THOMAS
‘Somewhere’
Dechrau to Begin
‘Pam, Pam?’
It could be irony or it could be destiny, but either way my name means Why? in Welsh. My full name, Pamela, smacks of tea and foxhounds.
There’s an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy dresses up in riding gear and fakes an English accent to impress Ricky’s friends. Her assumed name, of course, is Pamela. PAHM-ula, that is, sprung from the mouth with the velocity of a ping-pong ball shot from a toy gun. Now hear a Welsh person speak my name, and the tidy hierarchy of syllables goes right out the window. There’s an anarchic pulse to PAM-eL-A that I like much better. My name becomes a quick trip over the hills on a sled in winter. It’s a less efficient way of calling me, but imagine what that extra syllabic beat does for the musculature of the tongue.
The most efficient way to get my attention is to shout ‘Pam!’, which is what I’ve answered to for most of my thirty-five years, but which over the past decade or so has become that nagging ‘Why?’ question as well. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I wondered to myself in 1983, when I turned down a job in Washington, DC to go to the smallest university in Britain – the University of Wales, Lampeter – to get a master’s degree in something called ‘The Word and the Visual Imagination’.
‘Just why did you say you’re doing this?’ my friends wanted to know in 1987, when after two years back in the States I enrolled in a Welsh language class at Harvard.
‘But why are you doing this, Pam? Why do you need to spend a summer working on your Welsh?’ my family asked in 1992, in a tone of supportive desperation that they’ve become very good at, when I returned to Lampeter to spend two months in a seven-days-a-week intensive Welsh language class in a Portakabin, on the hockey pitch, in the rain.
I don’t know. Maybe when I first went to Wales and unwittingly enrolled in an English department, the old Welsh god of Irony vowed to teach me a lesson and made me besotted with the place and its language (I made up the god of Irony, but there really is an old Celtic god of Panic, who comes in handy in cases of both travel and language study). To tell the truth, I really can’t say why my desire to continue learning Welsh got so out of hand that I chose to pursue it on a five-month, fourteen-country crusade around the world. Perhaps I had a premonition of what Ursula Imadegawa would tell me in Tokyo. ‘Pam,’ she said, leaning against her kitchen counter about to hand me a glass of Johnnie Walker Black with pink and purple plastic ice cubes floating in it, ‘you only regret what you don’t do.’
