“Inspired by Humphries’s reworkings and in keeping with my established approach, I chose to write poems ‘after’ Dafydd rather than translations – not changing the setting or period but aiming to bridge the imaginative gap between his world and that of the modern English-speaking reader.”

Those readers who were enchanted by Matthew Francis’s collection The Mabinogi (and it would be a dull reader who was not) have another pleasure looming, in these versions of the mediaeval Welsh poet Dafydd ab Gwilym. In the absorbing Introduction, Francis explains why, before he came across the reworkings of the American poet Rolfe Humphries, more literal, faithful translations had left him with a sense of something wanting:

“They present the poet as a historical oddity, someone we have to make allowances for, imagining what his poems would be like if we were the sort of people for whom he originally wrote, speaking his language and sharing his culture. They are not so much poems as placeholders indicating what the poems were for other readers in other times.”

This resonated with me, because it was just what happened to me when reading translations of Aristophanes. Most British translators of him were good enough at indicating what he was to Athenian readers in the fifth century BC, but what they never did was make him sound remotely funny. Not until I discovered the equally scholarly but less reverent US translators - Dudley Fitts, Richmond Lattimore, Douglass Parker and William Arrowsmith - did it dawn on me why Athenian audiences might have been splitting their sides laughing.

In The Mabinogi, Francis treated the old legends not as sacred texts to be revered (a sure way to kill them) but as stories that were told aloud, added to, twisted according to need and developed a life of their own in the telling – which was why they came so alive in his versions. In The Green Month, he takes the key to the original poems to be Dafydd’s own personality – humorous, self-mocking, fascinated by nature and keenly observant of it, fascinated also by sex and unusually honest about it, fascinated above all by words and the craft of writing. By making this man come alive, Francis can get inside the skin of the poems, as he does in “Fox”, which is both a brilliant sketch of a fox and Dafydd’s rueful admission of his own sexual obsessions:

     Then watch out, hens! The gentleman in the gamey coat
     has a nose for feathered flesh. Men may chase him
     for fifty furlongs, but he’ll be back
     sniffing around your bedroom.
     I know how he feels.

This verse also demonstrates how Francis chose to tackle the poems technically. Dafydd was a very formal poet, and while wisely not attempting to reproduce cynghanedd in a language not designed for it, Francis felt some formal constraint was necessary and chose this 5-line “tapering syllabic stanza in which each line is shorter than the one before”.  It imposes economy, the more so as the poem progresses, and the result is a considerable shortening of some of Dafydd’s longer and more discursive forays into description and metaphor. It produces a poem which is “a snapshot of one of Dafydd’s themes, concentrating on the most striking images and ideas”.

A sort of distilled Dafydd, then.  And often very effective. In the lines from “Hay”, complaining about the rain:

      I must be seven-eighths water now
     as the rest of the world is
     this sodden evening

there is the immediacy that Francis missed from earlier translations, the sense that this fed-up, rained-on man was like ourselves.  In “Geese”, the lines “I told her I ached from my journey/ and other things” are not just indicative of Dafydd’s sexual obsession but a convincing approximation of a voice; one feels that is how he would have said it.

These poems struck me as being very true to Dafydd’s obsessive inventiveness with imagery – the “tattered sheet of snow”, the fogbound man “smothered in fleece, a tick in the weather’s wool” – also to his keen observation of the natural world and to his self-mocking humour. They are also, as one would expect from a combination of Dafydd ab Gwilym and Matthew Francis, hugely entertaining poems in their own right. Just as the American translators fixed on the one thing that really matters about Aristophanes, ie how and why he is funny, so Francis’s “snapshots” have focused on what mattered about Dafydd.