| By
Andrea MacDonald
Jesus
College provided a particularly apt setting for Sioned Davies's
reading of "Culhwch and Olwen": a tale from The Mabinogion.
Jesus
- with its longheld associations with Wales - houses the fourteenth
century manuscript of the collection. The tales themselves are believed
to date from around 1060 to 1120 with this reading being the most
ancient in the Oxford Literary Festival line-up.
A fairly
diverse audience intimately gathered on the wooden benches of Jesus's
Hall and as dusk fell we were transported back into a world of battles,
banquets and betrothals.
Ms.
Davies impressed on the audience how her new translation (to be
published by Oxford University Press) was meant to be heard and
in this her reading did evoke the era in which the tale first came
into being.
Stories
such as "Culhwch and Olwen" would have been performed
from memory rather than read from a text; the storyteller having
to keep his particular audience enthralled by adapting the narrative
while also didactically passing on local history.
The
oral poet would also show off with inventory of names that would
have resonated with his crowd and with narrative digression; quests
embedded in quests like a series of Russian dolls. These elements
were all noticeable in Ms Davies's play-length performance.
She
inventively told this fairly stock tale: the origins of the hero,
his entry into the court of Arthur and his quest to obtain the woman
he was prophesied to marry.
The
extremely extensive listing of the trials he must undertake and
the wonders he must seize in order to please his cantankerous -
and murderous - prospective father-in-law followed. It was on this
point that Ms. Davies chose to give us an interval, which I think
was greatly received from a somewhat waning audience.
The
ostensibly insurmountable task faced by Culhwch seemed also to be
faced by Ms. Davies. Keeping the audience's sustained interest throughout
this kind of cataloguing proved hard but breaking when she did allowed
the audience to recharge, have a glass of wine and become suitably
suspenseful about the resolution of the story. A medieval storyteller
couldn't have hoped for more. A swift - and somewhat gory - resolution
followed which gratified the audience.
Ms.
Davies's translation was comedic in places, exhausting in places
but she left me with some lasting visual images: the hero's sashes
like "two sea swallows swooping around him". But what
was more rewarding was to find the Welsh language being spoken poetically.
Ms. Davies retained many Welsh names and phrases asserting the origin
of the text. The lyrical nature of the language was well received
in the unlikely surroundings of an Oxford College and she effectively
dispelled the myth that Welsh is a harsh tongue leaving the listener
covered in saliva.
Essentially
Sioned Davies told a group of people - young and old - a story;
it was told with the accomplishment and flair that we imagine was
so 900 years ago, and in doing it I imagine she opened a few minds
to Cymraeg.
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