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Its volume of bilingual poetry celebrating the A470 road, which zigzags through Wales, proved a surprise hit.
Inspired by the success, an independent publisher is releasing another anthology in English and Welsh, this time focusing on the rivers that tumble through the country.
Afonydd (Rivers) is a celebration of Welsh waterways, from the grand to the modest, from the picturesque to the polluted. Some of the country’s most famous rivers, such as the Severn, feature, but so do unheralded ones such as the Adda in north Wales, much of it forced by humans into culverts.
Cherry Potts, the director of Arachne Press, said when the publisher toured Wales with A470: Poems for the Road/Cerddi’r Ffordd, the energy and good humour the book generated made it keen to do another with a Welsh theme.
“Rivers came up quickly as the next theme,” said Potts. “We wanted specific poems about specific rivers, not generic descriptions, and we wanted at least some of them to deal with the threats to our waterways.
“I think this is the strength of both books – personal responses to identifiable, specific places. You can’t use Afonydd to navigate like you could A470, but I feel like I’ve been to every one of those rivers.”
About 400 poems were submitted for consideration and 50 chosen. Of these, 18 originated in Cymraeg (Welsh) and 32 in English. The poems that arrived in just one of the languages were translated into the other. The English and Welsh poems are set out side by side with the originating language leading.
The editor and translator, Ness Owen, said: “The submissions really were as varied as the rivers they were inspired by, ranging from the deeply personal to the political, the humorous and the glorious, folklore-filled.”
The poet and lavender farmer Rae Howells wrote about Pennard Pill, which flows into Three Cliffs Bay in south Wales.
She tends to write in English first and translate to Welsh. “It’s been a brilliant challenge to push outside my comfort zone and use my Welsh in this way.”
Howells said some phrases were difficult to translate. “One example is my phrase ‘some nights’, which translates as ‘ambell noson’ but ‘ambell’ means ‘occasionally’ rather than ‘sometimes’, which isn’t quite what I wanted to say, but there is no elegant translation of ‘sometimes’. You have to compromise.”
She said Welsh rivers were a brilliant way to tell the story of the country. “Wales is a country of water, of rivers, of brooks and streams and rain clouds and mythical lakes and political reservoirs.
“Like the road running down the middle of the country, our multitude of rivers is another powerful image that represents what Wales is about – connection, and people, and politics, and the use of resources, and where history is remembered and legends are made.
“A publisher giving equal weight to both English and Welsh in the same volume is actually pretty innovative, and not something you tend to see much of in Welsh publishing, let alone UK publishing, where it feels like Wales is very much kept ‘over there’ and separate.”
The book is published on 29 May, but is available for pre-order from Arachne Press. The books are being released to trade next week so bookshops will be able to place orders or take pre-orders.
