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The Mabinogi
Shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2017
'Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding
through the space between one world and another . . .'
The Mabinogi is the Welsh national epic, a collection of prose tales of war and enchantment, adventure and romance, which have long fascinated readers all over the world. Matthew Francis's retelling of the first four stories (the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) is the first to situate it in poetry, and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world: a baby is kidnapped by a monstrous claw, a giant wades across the Irish Sea to do battle, a wizard makes a woman out of flowers, only to find she is less biddable than he expected. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder.
The Mabinogi is an important contribution to the storytelling of the British Isles.
'I have waited a life for this book: our ancient British tales re-told, in English, by a poet, as they were in their original Welsh. This is more than translation. It picks up the harp and sings.' Gillian Clarke
'Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding
through the space between one world and another . . .'
The Mabinogi is the Welsh national epic, a collection of prose tales of war and enchantment, adventure and romance, which have long fascinated readers all over the world. Matthew Francis's retelling of the first four stories (the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) is the first to situate it in poetry, and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world: a baby is kidnapped by a monstrous claw, a giant wades across the Irish Sea to do battle, a wizard makes a woman out of flowers, only to find she is less biddable than he expected. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder.
The Mabinogi is an important contribution to the storytelling of the British Isles.
'I have waited a life for this book: our ancient British tales re-told, in English, by a poet, as they were in their original Welsh. This is more than translation. It picks up the harp and sings.' Gillian Clarke
89 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
September 28, 2020
It's easier gettng into Norse and Greco-Roman mythology in the original (translated) texts after growing up on adaptations. So it made sense to read this short poetic adaptation of parts of the Mabinogion although I still haven't read the original. (It covers the first to fourth branches, but not, so far as I can tell, the named stories after those.)
I am part Welsh (North Welsh) but I have a very hazy sense of the culture and never met the few Welsh-born elderly relatives whose lifetimes just overlapped mine, and had much less contact with that side of the family anyway. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, hearing in the news of Welsh protest against English incomers, including the burning of cottages, and the views of respected figures like R.S. Thomas, it felt clear to me that to them I would be an English person and should keep a respectful distance. I used to be quite apprehensive about visiting Wales, even by staying in hotels or hostels, which don't have the same adverse effect on locals' housing as holiday cottages. I can empathise to an extent with awkward white American liberals who have a bit of Native or PoC ancestry but neither the appearance nor the cultural upbringing. And true to form for such types, I have since heard that, genetically, I appear to be slightly more North Welsh than English (when results are compared with data including the 2015 study that produced this map that some UK readers will have seen before).
(The last paragraph should be seen as reflecting the language (incl "white settlers") and vehemence of protest used by these Welsh groups of the late 20th century, rather than that I myself am now totally equating the English-Welsh situation with First Nations in the New World. In the 80s and 90s there hadn't been a widely-available public discussion in which PoC and Native writers & activists pointed out how the UK's Celtic fringe nations have benefited from the spoils of imperialism that were sucked out of other countries further afield. They had also been oppressed, culturally, economically and violently, by the English/London for centuries - and some of their own settler colonialism abroad was a domino effect from that - but that was not the full story. In those days, the papers and TV didn't ask Black British scholars like Paul Gilroy for their views on these statements which now looks like an oversight. [Imagining an alternative-history news where they did.] That kind of crossover largely had to wait for the era of social media.)
Anyway, I'd always felt awkward about Welsh mythology and culture, that I was simultaneously sort-of trespassing but also ought to have always known the folklore. (I didn't - it's easy to pick up Greco-Roman and Norse mythology growing up in England, but not Welsh, not unless you count children's books that take motifs from it like Alan Garner's and Susan Cooper's.) Also, the old translations - like the Gantz Penguin translation of the Mabinogion, which I think I had a copy of in the early 00s, just weren't that appealing. And how do you even get the Gododdin anyway? Seems like you have to read it online in public domain translations.
I've been looking forward to reading the newer Sioned Davies Mabinogion translation since I became aware of it a few years ago, but still haven't got round to it. So when this short poetry book appeared in my GR feed a few weeks ago, I thought why not. My few experiences of Faber Poetry in these colourful, typography-only covers have all been extremely positive, which made me keener - and this proved to be another wonderful experience with the imprint, like T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain & the Green Knight.
Matthew Francis is himself an English incomer to Wales, and as far as I know (though I haven't machine-translated any Welsh-language reviews) this adaptation has been well received. As Wales has had devolved government for twenty years now, and the Welsh language has been quite successfully revived for regular use, that has probably helped ease some of the tensions that existed thirty years ago.
Quite simply, this is beautiful and often extraordinarily vivid poetry. In the brief introduction, Francis said that it may require a "considerable imaginative leap" for many 21st century readers to connect and empathise with a story that opens with a scene of hunting with hounds. But surely he succeeds as much as anyone possibly could, with lines like these:
warm in his company of noises:
hoofs, hornsqueals, hound- and man-cries.
Trees shed their dry brown.
…
He follows the noise of strife. In the dogs’ falsetto
joy and agony scrape the same fiddlestring.
He hears the forest wrestling itself,
the sigh of something heavy
kneeling to its death.
A beast the colour of bark lies on its flank
in the clearing. He catches its eye
as a parliament of hounds
meets at its belly.
That Chaucerian 'parliament' is the sort of attention to historical detail Francis does superbly. Throughout, he has the specialist terminology down for swords, saddles, types of meat and other medieval commonplaces. There's "a point the size of a farthing" when a lesser writer might have said a penny. Very occasionally there are lapses, which only stand out so much due to their rarity, like the "pumpkin-bellied" pregnant woman. (No pumpkins in the medieval British Isles.) I wasn't sure about calling the plant "cottongrass" - but, I noticed when I watched this brief documentary about the Mabinogion presented by Cerys Matthews, formerly of 90s indie band Catatonia, that Victorian translator Charlotte Guest also used the word.
This is poetry conjuring *what it feels like* (or what it might feel like) and I love that.
What it feels like being a giant:
Or think of the vertigo of standing there
gazing from the parapet of self
he can never climb down from,
the wind in his ears
that his friends must shout to compete with,
a life lived in the weather –
no house will hold him.
He is closer to the birds
than his family.
Francis calls this giant Bran, rather than Bendigeidfran as he is in the original - understandable to make poetry scan. If you remember the name from children's fantasy books that draw on Celtic mythology, and don't know the original Mabinogion it might be a bit disorientating to think you have found the original Bran - I did when I read this and was corrected by the Cerys Matthews documentary.
There is often a soft, hazy dreamlike beauty in these poems, making it disproportionately shocking when graphic violence erupts. Even if you know full well from the Greeks and Norse that mythology is bloody, these Mabinogi poems often lull you.
In many of the anonymous or ancient texts I've read, I've not run into anything that strongly convinced me that, in each specific case, as Virginia Woolf said, "anonymous was often a woman". Here, though, absolutely. Of course I've not read the Mabinogion proper, but the repeated tales centred on wronged princesses (folklore motif 'the calumniated wife') put me in mind of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna and the dramatic, glamorous stories she loved and created. The story of Rhiannon and Pwyll made me think more specifically, an upper class woman - Rhiannon is wronged because lazy servants band together to lie about her. I don't know nearly as much folklore as I'd like, but that doesn't strike me as a theme that would readily emerge from peasant folktales. (Though Rhiannon's strange punishment, as pointed out by Sioned Davies the in notes to her translation - I ended up reading her notes when I was near the end of Francis' adaptation - strengthens her association with horses and the likelihood that she is a transmuted horse goddess: she first appears as a magical swift rider. And, I noticed in Francis', her supernaturally abducted son ends up with a "lord [who] measures his wealth in horses" - how that line resounded when I've been listening to the Rig Veda - and who is trying to stop a foal from being magically snatched. Bran/ Bendigeidfran may also be "a euhemerised deity"; Davies mentions a potential connection between the magical resurrecting cauldron he gifts and illustrations on the 2000-year old Danish Gundestrup Cauldron - and there's an echo of the ancient Celtic veneration of human heads after his death.)
Being familiar with the theory that folklore about changelings or those stolen by fairies was an attempt to explain children with developmental delay, deformities etc, and that various methods recommended in it for getting changelings back to fairies were actually a metaphor for euthanasia/infanticide, it was startling to see both ideas appear simultaneously in Rhiannon's story: her (healthy) son is stolen by a supernatural entity, *and* she is accused of having killed him, complete with fabricated evidence.
Events move oneirically - strikingly often without rites of passage that are big events in many other stories. An aristocratic couple have met. Not long after, she is living with him and their first child is born. A character has disappeared from the scene between the first and second branches; one assumes he has died, but it isn't explicitly mentioned until the fourth branch. People return to their land that had been enchanted; one might assume that meant the enchantment had waned, but it becomes apparent in a while that it had not. It is lifted after an encounter between a hero and a magician - one of a couple of instances in which a protagonist watches and waits to catch a supernatural being in the act - and unusually, turns on such humble creatures as mice. (The absence of large non-human predators, of wolves and bears - though I gather there is a story about wolves in the Mabinogion which is not adapted in these poems - always reminded me how late the original texts were written down, and seemed to contribute to that odd sense of gentleness in it. There isn't even a fox in these poems.) The decision to use brief marginal notes to explain the current point-of-view character or other potentially opaque events also contributed to the dreamlike quality, as it allowed the poetry to be more flowing and less direct in its explanations. If it weren't so beautiful, one could consider this a copout - that Francis didn't perhaps use subheadings, or even better, integrate this information into the text as was done in, for example, Clive James' 2013 translation of The Divine Comedy, and much of the info is in the original prose text of the Mabinogion, the way it is not in Dante - but the poetry is lovely enough that I felt it was just about excusable.
It is often a story of atmosphere more than personality, but one character stood out in his modernity: Efynisein - what an antisocial psychopath! (I only felt justified in writing this down as a critic quoted in the first lines of the Wikipedia article shares this opinion.) I don't mean like the Hannibal Lecter stock character who's actually a very rare, or outright fictional, type, but disruptively violent, reckless and inconsistent, closer to a real case-study.
One change made in the poem which I wasn't quite sure about after I looked through the Davies translation - curious about what was in the 'original' of the Fourth Branch - was that Francis centred it on Gwydion, made him the narrator, and had Gwydion do most of the magic that he either did jointly with Math, or which Math alone did. (Math is left passive, which initially puzzled me, as I remembered from some children's fantasy novel that he was significant - maybe it's partly that his name is striking.) This does have similarities to the way folklore can change in the oral tradition, but I was always conscious of it as a rather late-20th century literary device, in which the author as in-universe narrator comments in playfully postmodern fashion on his creation and control of the characters. At one point in this he introduces a 19th-century element - this sounds like an evocation of Frankenstein:
They were both my fault,
these crude experiments in human.
I can understand using this, as a satisfying way for a writer to wrap up the work - and a focus on Gwydion may be meaningful, as according to Davies, "surviving poetry seems to suggest that there was once a large body of literature surrounding him". But in a contemporary literary context it felt slightly dated. Especially as it diverts attention away from the female characters in general (and omits an intriguing story from the original in which Math promises to compensate and marry a young woman who was raped by his nephews, and turns the nephews into animals). I think it shows how a literary trend which was just about holding on in 2016 (this was published in mid 2017) already looks a little passé in 2020, because there have been such rapid cultural changes.
Somewhere along the way I realised that the intense descriptions of the natural world could perhaps be seen as part of the adaptation's modernity, even whilst they make the reader feel a vivid sense of 'the past'. Is it part of the 150+ year divorce from the land of the majority in Britain - longer than other countries due to the Industrial Revolution and faster urbanisation - that we need this vividness of description? That these things are novel enough and deeply-felt enough to inspire this kind of writing? (Though a few writers also describe city landscapes with similar sensuous detail.) Medieval writing was a different beast, and thick description wasn't really part of it, it grew with novels as a form, but this sort of thing was probably too commonplace then to need saying:
They’ve only known the top few inches of land.
It’s deep, and loves them glutinously.
They sense its puddingy dark
under hoofs and feet.
Continued below in comment field.
(read & reviewed Sept 2020.)
I am part Welsh (North Welsh) but I have a very hazy sense of the culture and never met the few Welsh-born elderly relatives whose lifetimes just overlapped mine, and had much less contact with that side of the family anyway. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, hearing in the news of Welsh protest against English incomers, including the burning of cottages, and the views of respected figures like R.S. Thomas, it felt clear to me that to them I would be an English person and should keep a respectful distance. I used to be quite apprehensive about visiting Wales, even by staying in hotels or hostels, which don't have the same adverse effect on locals' housing as holiday cottages. I can empathise to an extent with awkward white American liberals who have a bit of Native or PoC ancestry but neither the appearance nor the cultural upbringing. And true to form for such types, I have since heard that, genetically, I appear to be slightly more North Welsh than English (when results are compared with data including the 2015 study that produced this map that some UK readers will have seen before).
(The last paragraph should be seen as reflecting the language (incl "white settlers") and vehemence of protest used by these Welsh groups of the late 20th century, rather than that I myself am now totally equating the English-Welsh situation with First Nations in the New World. In the 80s and 90s there hadn't been a widely-available public discussion in which PoC and Native writers & activists pointed out how the UK's Celtic fringe nations have benefited from the spoils of imperialism that were sucked out of other countries further afield. They had also been oppressed, culturally, economically and violently, by the English/London for centuries - and some of their own settler colonialism abroad was a domino effect from that - but that was not the full story. In those days, the papers and TV didn't ask Black British scholars like Paul Gilroy for their views on these statements which now looks like an oversight. [Imagining an alternative-history news where they did.] That kind of crossover largely had to wait for the era of social media.)
Anyway, I'd always felt awkward about Welsh mythology and culture, that I was simultaneously sort-of trespassing but also ought to have always known the folklore. (I didn't - it's easy to pick up Greco-Roman and Norse mythology growing up in England, but not Welsh, not unless you count children's books that take motifs from it like Alan Garner's and Susan Cooper's.) Also, the old translations - like the Gantz Penguin translation of the Mabinogion, which I think I had a copy of in the early 00s, just weren't that appealing. And how do you even get the Gododdin anyway? Seems like you have to read it online in public domain translations.
I've been looking forward to reading the newer Sioned Davies Mabinogion translation since I became aware of it a few years ago, but still haven't got round to it. So when this short poetry book appeared in my GR feed a few weeks ago, I thought why not. My few experiences of Faber Poetry in these colourful, typography-only covers have all been extremely positive, which made me keener - and this proved to be another wonderful experience with the imprint, like T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain & the Green Knight.
Matthew Francis is himself an English incomer to Wales, and as far as I know (though I haven't machine-translated any Welsh-language reviews) this adaptation has been well received. As Wales has had devolved government for twenty years now, and the Welsh language has been quite successfully revived for regular use, that has probably helped ease some of the tensions that existed thirty years ago.
Quite simply, this is beautiful and often extraordinarily vivid poetry. In the brief introduction, Francis said that it may require a "considerable imaginative leap" for many 21st century readers to connect and empathise with a story that opens with a scene of hunting with hounds. But surely he succeeds as much as anyone possibly could, with lines like these:
warm in his company of noises:
hoofs, hornsqueals, hound- and man-cries.
Trees shed their dry brown.
…
He follows the noise of strife. In the dogs’ falsetto
joy and agony scrape the same fiddlestring.
He hears the forest wrestling itself,
the sigh of something heavy
kneeling to its death.
A beast the colour of bark lies on its flank
in the clearing. He catches its eye
as a parliament of hounds
meets at its belly.
That Chaucerian 'parliament' is the sort of attention to historical detail Francis does superbly. Throughout, he has the specialist terminology down for swords, saddles, types of meat and other medieval commonplaces. There's "a point the size of a farthing" when a lesser writer might have said a penny. Very occasionally there are lapses, which only stand out so much due to their rarity, like the "pumpkin-bellied" pregnant woman. (No pumpkins in the medieval British Isles.) I wasn't sure about calling the plant "cottongrass" - but, I noticed when I watched this brief documentary about the Mabinogion presented by Cerys Matthews, formerly of 90s indie band Catatonia, that Victorian translator Charlotte Guest also used the word.
This is poetry conjuring *what it feels like* (or what it might feel like) and I love that.
What it feels like being a giant:
Or think of the vertigo of standing there
gazing from the parapet of self
he can never climb down from,
the wind in his ears
that his friends must shout to compete with,
a life lived in the weather –
no house will hold him.
He is closer to the birds
than his family.
Francis calls this giant Bran, rather than Bendigeidfran as he is in the original - understandable to make poetry scan. If you remember the name from children's fantasy books that draw on Celtic mythology, and don't know the original Mabinogion it might be a bit disorientating to think you have found the original Bran - I did when I read this and was corrected by the Cerys Matthews documentary.
There is often a soft, hazy dreamlike beauty in these poems, making it disproportionately shocking when graphic violence erupts. Even if you know full well from the Greeks and Norse that mythology is bloody, these Mabinogi poems often lull you.
In many of the anonymous or ancient texts I've read, I've not run into anything that strongly convinced me that, in each specific case, as Virginia Woolf said, "anonymous was often a woman". Here, though, absolutely. Of course I've not read the Mabinogion proper, but the repeated tales centred on wronged princesses (folklore motif 'the calumniated wife') put me in mind of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna and the dramatic, glamorous stories she loved and created. The story of Rhiannon and Pwyll made me think more specifically, an upper class woman - Rhiannon is wronged because lazy servants band together to lie about her. I don't know nearly as much folklore as I'd like, but that doesn't strike me as a theme that would readily emerge from peasant folktales. (Though Rhiannon's strange punishment, as pointed out by Sioned Davies the in notes to her translation - I ended up reading her notes when I was near the end of Francis' adaptation - strengthens her association with horses and the likelihood that she is a transmuted horse goddess: she first appears as a magical swift rider. And, I noticed in Francis', her supernaturally abducted son ends up with a "lord [who] measures his wealth in horses" - how that line resounded when I've been listening to the Rig Veda - and who is trying to stop a foal from being magically snatched. Bran/ Bendigeidfran may also be "a euhemerised deity"; Davies mentions a potential connection between the magical resurrecting cauldron he gifts and illustrations on the 2000-year old Danish Gundestrup Cauldron - and there's an echo of the ancient Celtic veneration of human heads after his death.)
Being familiar with the theory that folklore about changelings or those stolen by fairies was an attempt to explain children with developmental delay, deformities etc, and that various methods recommended in it for getting changelings back to fairies were actually a metaphor for euthanasia/infanticide, it was startling to see both ideas appear simultaneously in Rhiannon's story: her (healthy) son is stolen by a supernatural entity, *and* she is accused of having killed him, complete with fabricated evidence.
Events move oneirically - strikingly often without rites of passage that are big events in many other stories. An aristocratic couple have met. Not long after, she is living with him and their first child is born. A character has disappeared from the scene between the first and second branches; one assumes he has died, but it isn't explicitly mentioned until the fourth branch. People return to their land that had been enchanted; one might assume that meant the enchantment had waned, but it becomes apparent in a while that it had not. It is lifted after an encounter between a hero and a magician - one of a couple of instances in which a protagonist watches and waits to catch a supernatural being in the act - and unusually, turns on such humble creatures as mice. (The absence of large non-human predators, of wolves and bears - though I gather there is a story about wolves in the Mabinogion which is not adapted in these poems - always reminded me how late the original texts were written down, and seemed to contribute to that odd sense of gentleness in it. There isn't even a fox in these poems.) The decision to use brief marginal notes to explain the current point-of-view character or other potentially opaque events also contributed to the dreamlike quality, as it allowed the poetry to be more flowing and less direct in its explanations. If it weren't so beautiful, one could consider this a copout - that Francis didn't perhaps use subheadings, or even better, integrate this information into the text as was done in, for example, Clive James' 2013 translation of The Divine Comedy, and much of the info is in the original prose text of the Mabinogion, the way it is not in Dante - but the poetry is lovely enough that I felt it was just about excusable.
It is often a story of atmosphere more than personality, but one character stood out in his modernity: Efynisein - what an antisocial psychopath! (I only felt justified in writing this down as a critic quoted in the first lines of the Wikipedia article shares this opinion.) I don't mean like the Hannibal Lecter stock character who's actually a very rare, or outright fictional, type, but disruptively violent, reckless and inconsistent, closer to a real case-study.
One change made in the poem which I wasn't quite sure about after I looked through the Davies translation - curious about what was in the 'original' of the Fourth Branch - was that Francis centred it on Gwydion, made him the narrator, and had Gwydion do most of the magic that he either did jointly with Math, or which Math alone did. (Math is left passive, which initially puzzled me, as I remembered from some children's fantasy novel that he was significant - maybe it's partly that his name is striking.) This does have similarities to the way folklore can change in the oral tradition, but I was always conscious of it as a rather late-20th century literary device, in which the author as in-universe narrator comments in playfully postmodern fashion on his creation and control of the characters. At one point in this he introduces a 19th-century element - this sounds like an evocation of Frankenstein:
They were both my fault,
these crude experiments in human.
I can understand using this, as a satisfying way for a writer to wrap up the work - and a focus on Gwydion may be meaningful, as according to Davies, "surviving poetry seems to suggest that there was once a large body of literature surrounding him". But in a contemporary literary context it felt slightly dated. Especially as it diverts attention away from the female characters in general (and omits an intriguing story from the original in which Math promises to compensate and marry a young woman who was raped by his nephews, and turns the nephews into animals). I think it shows how a literary trend which was just about holding on in 2016 (this was published in mid 2017) already looks a little passé in 2020, because there have been such rapid cultural changes.
Somewhere along the way I realised that the intense descriptions of the natural world could perhaps be seen as part of the adaptation's modernity, even whilst they make the reader feel a vivid sense of 'the past'. Is it part of the 150+ year divorce from the land of the majority in Britain - longer than other countries due to the Industrial Revolution and faster urbanisation - that we need this vividness of description? That these things are novel enough and deeply-felt enough to inspire this kind of writing? (Though a few writers also describe city landscapes with similar sensuous detail.) Medieval writing was a different beast, and thick description wasn't really part of it, it grew with novels as a form, but this sort of thing was probably too commonplace then to need saying:
They’ve only known the top few inches of land.
It’s deep, and loves them glutinously.
They sense its puddingy dark
under hoofs and feet.
Continued below in comment field.
(read & reviewed Sept 2020.)
December 9, 2019
I'm ashamed to have not read The Mabinogi sooner, given its status as a Welsh (where I hail from!) national epic and the length of time it has been on my tbr. I had highly placed hopes for this one and I am glad it competed with these expectations.
This features the first four stories, or the first four branches, of the Mabinogi. These were somewhat disjointed sections but they essentially followed the same narrative. Folklore, magic, and whimsy abounded, and I was captivated by every implausible section of it!
This features the first four stories, or the first four branches, of the Mabinogi. These were somewhat disjointed sections but they essentially followed the same narrative. Folklore, magic, and whimsy abounded, and I was captivated by every implausible section of it!
Read
December 5, 2018Поетичний переказ перших чотирьох частин-“гілок” середньовічного валлійського епосу “Мабіногіон”. Очевидно, звучить переказ не як епос, а як модернізм – з висоти ХХІ ст. підкреслено свідомий літературної сконструйованої природи всіх цих історій, що колись функціонували, очевидно, як легітимації політичного і екзистенційного світопорядку – з уважністю до ролі оповідача і т.д. Красиво до чортиків.
Трошки красивих цитат урозсип (зверніть увагу, скільки разів персонажів і ландшафти описано як написи й малюнки, ага?):
Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding / through the space between one world and another
***
In the dogs’ falsetto / joy and agony scrape the same fiddlestring.
***
the strange boots love him, clinging to his calves, / in the in-between room where boots sleep
***
It’s little more than a bump in the land, a footnote / in the catalogue of hills, crags and ridges, / felt as an ache in the thighs, the heart’s / flip and gulp, by those heavy / with mutton and wine
***
She slips into yesterday without being now.
***
She is a brushstroke / on the stillness of the facing page / illuminated in gold / on a green background / and there is always a white space between them.
***
staring for hours at something behind the air, / the way animals do.
***
He thinks with his legs, will run away in mid-sentence / as if the next field were an idea. He eats / head down, studying the book of food. / He is growing on purpose. / He loves the moist gloom / of the stables, intimate as a nostril.
***
He is the capital at the start of the sentence, / a tree, a crow’s nest, a furlong of a man. / You cannot think of him all at once. / Picture his scrubland of beard, / his battlement teeth.
***
Prince of the West, who’d lived all his life / on the forested border / of what can’t be true, / he lay in the swirling place / where stories begin.
Трошки красивих цитат урозсип (зверніть увагу, скільки разів персонажів і ландшафти описано як написи й малюнки, ага?):
Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding / through the space between one world and another
***
In the dogs’ falsetto / joy and agony scrape the same fiddlestring.
***
the strange boots love him, clinging to his calves, / in the in-between room where boots sleep
***
It’s little more than a bump in the land, a footnote / in the catalogue of hills, crags and ridges, / felt as an ache in the thighs, the heart’s / flip and gulp, by those heavy / with mutton and wine
***
She slips into yesterday without being now.
***
She is a brushstroke / on the stillness of the facing page / illuminated in gold / on a green background / and there is always a white space between them.
***
staring for hours at something behind the air, / the way animals do.
***
He thinks with his legs, will run away in mid-sentence / as if the next field were an idea. He eats / head down, studying the book of food. / He is growing on purpose. / He loves the moist gloom / of the stables, intimate as a nostril.
***
He is the capital at the start of the sentence, / a tree, a crow’s nest, a furlong of a man. / You cannot think of him all at once. / Picture his scrubland of beard, / his battlement teeth.
***
Prince of the West, who’d lived all his life / on the forested border / of what can’t be true, / he lay in the swirling place / where stories begin.
May 17, 2022
We have a new baby in the family, and so it has taken me over two weeks to read a single short book of poetry in a fractured way, but it has at least allowed me to enjoy this in all it's colourful strangeness.
This is the first four stories or "branches" of the Welsh national epic The Mabinogian and it is not a translation or even a versification so much as a retelling, as poet Matthew Francis makes clear in his preface. He is not a Welsh speaker but was commissioned to work from an existing translation and put the stories into poetry, but in doing so he has also cut bits, done some restructuring and even changed a character's motive at one point. So this is not a "faithful" version of the stories, although all the main elements seem to be there.
Francis seems to feel that poetry allows readers to suspend disbelief at magic and non-sequitors more readily; I'm not sure about that (not having a problem with magic in prose) but the result is absolutely gorgeous images and textures:
Branwen goes to Ireland to be married:
What has the morning put on for the queen's arrival?
Chiffon, muslin, cotton and lace, white, white, white,
sky flouncing its hefty petticoats,
waves breaking in their new tops,
ships in their aprons
or, a prince hunting:
He follows the noise of strife. In the dogs' falsetto
joy and agony scrape the same fiddlestring.
He hears the forest wrestling itself,
the sigh of something heavy
kneeling to its death.
A magician creates a woman out of flowers:
The air was golden with her pollen
as I heaped her on the bed
in frilly armfulls,
til a million petals fused
into a woman
This style can occasionally get to be too much, and I found the third branch (which is rather less eventful than the others) weighed down by it, but in general the stories are so thrilling, so strange and surreal, that poetic description doesn't slow it down in the least. A baby is kidnapped by a claw. A war between Wales and Ireland features a giant wading across the Irish sea with only his head above the water, a man who leaps into a cauldron that brings the dead back to life, the giant's head transported, still speaking, to London in a cart... it's a thrill a minute, gloriously told.
And the fourth story was particular fun for me, telling of the magician Gwydion and the flower woman, which was the basis for Alan Garner's wonderful The Owl Service (for some reason not linking but something of a classic).
I think my overall memory of this book will be of shards of colour. The gorgeous yellow cover (I love Faber's poetry editions), an image of Rhiannon riding her horse along an endless road, growing further away as the prince pursuing her rides faster, of the grizzly scenes of the Irish war, of newborn babies -- there are many in the text, and of course there was one out of the text too.
This is the first four stories or "branches" of the Welsh national epic The Mabinogian and it is not a translation or even a versification so much as a retelling, as poet Matthew Francis makes clear in his preface. He is not a Welsh speaker but was commissioned to work from an existing translation and put the stories into poetry, but in doing so he has also cut bits, done some restructuring and even changed a character's motive at one point. So this is not a "faithful" version of the stories, although all the main elements seem to be there.
Francis seems to feel that poetry allows readers to suspend disbelief at magic and non-sequitors more readily; I'm not sure about that (not having a problem with magic in prose) but the result is absolutely gorgeous images and textures:
Branwen goes to Ireland to be married:
What has the morning put on for the queen's arrival?
Chiffon, muslin, cotton and lace, white, white, white,
sky flouncing its hefty petticoats,
waves breaking in their new tops,
ships in their aprons
or, a prince hunting:
He follows the noise of strife. In the dogs' falsetto
joy and agony scrape the same fiddlestring.
He hears the forest wrestling itself,
the sigh of something heavy
kneeling to its death.
A magician creates a woman out of flowers:
The air was golden with her pollen
as I heaped her on the bed
in frilly armfulls,
til a million petals fused
into a woman
This style can occasionally get to be too much, and I found the third branch (which is rather less eventful than the others) weighed down by it, but in general the stories are so thrilling, so strange and surreal, that poetic description doesn't slow it down in the least. A baby is kidnapped by a claw. A war between Wales and Ireland features a giant wading across the Irish sea with only his head above the water, a man who leaps into a cauldron that brings the dead back to life, the giant's head transported, still speaking, to London in a cart... it's a thrill a minute, gloriously told.
And the fourth story was particular fun for me, telling of the magician Gwydion and the flower woman, which was the basis for Alan Garner's wonderful The Owl Service (for some reason not linking but something of a classic).
I think my overall memory of this book will be of shards of colour. The gorgeous yellow cover (I love Faber's poetry editions), an image of Rhiannon riding her horse along an endless road, growing further away as the prince pursuing her rides faster, of the grizzly scenes of the Irish war, of newborn babies -- there are many in the text, and of course there was one out of the text too.
September 10, 2020
A superb poetic retelling of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi.
In his introduction, Francis says that he's streamlined and slightly reorganised the stories to fit his verse and to promote a greater sense of narrative flow than is present in the originals. Something of a concern before I read the poem itself, but in making these changes to the stories he has retained both their charm and their gnomic otherworldliness.
I always feel grounded when I read the Mabinogi, despite the fantastical, magical and unearthly elements. The stories seem so rooted in the soil, growing organically out of the landscape. They are simultaneously earthy, earthly and cthonic, linking the realm of the everyday to the mystical and numinous worlds of the unconscious. Francis has captured that in his poems.
In his introduction, Francis says that he's streamlined and slightly reorganised the stories to fit his verse and to promote a greater sense of narrative flow than is present in the originals. Something of a concern before I read the poem itself, but in making these changes to the stories he has retained both their charm and their gnomic otherworldliness.
I always feel grounded when I read the Mabinogi, despite the fantastical, magical and unearthly elements. The stories seem so rooted in the soil, growing organically out of the landscape. They are simultaneously earthy, earthly and cthonic, linking the realm of the everyday to the mystical and numinous worlds of the unconscious. Francis has captured that in his poems.
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August 24, 2022Wonderful stories told in the most beautiful language.
December 17, 2019
Opening lines: ‘Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding through the space between one world and another, warm in his company of noises: hoofs, hornsqueals, hound- and man-cries.
September 9, 2020
This is excellent...my review is too long to post here:
https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/...
https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/...
June 25, 2017
I really enjoyed this. I struggle to like reading myth and legend in general, and have even less parience with most film verisons. But this verison of The Mabinogi, like me, loves the vitality of language, and is pithy and to the point. It covers the first four branches of "The Mabinogion", successfully editted to cohere these into a whole greater than the sum of their parts. Exactly what I needed, this does for The Mabinogi what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf.
May 28, 2018
Brilliant retelling of the first four parts of the Welsh epic. A bit of judicious reshaping gives it coherence without losing the delightful weirdness of these myths. And the language is gorgeous.
May 20, 2021
The stories of the Mabinogi can be difficult to understand for the modern reader. There is magic, an unknown social code, and the narrative can be jarring. All this makes it necessary to suspend a lot of disbelief in order to appreciate the stories.
I recognise this - for a long time, I didn't find them very appealing because of this. And yet, they are wonderful stories in their own right. And that's exactly why a poetry is so well suited to it, Francis says: "... I began to see how the very aspects that made a prose treatment difficult could prove a strength for poetry, which has never had much of a problem with magic. Poets spend their lives transforming things into other things." To my slight surprise, I must admit, he is right. In poetry, and certainly in Francis' style of poetry, there are far fewer details needed for the reader to visualise the story. Francis pays attention to elements that I would never have noticed in the original, or hadn't thought about. And that makes me experience the story and its characters so much more intensely.
He takes the liberty of making major changes to the stories here and there, though. In the first branch (Pwyll Pendeuic Dyued), for instance, the passage in which Pwyll and Rhiannon deceive Gwawl ap Clud is missing, and in the fourth branch (Math uab Mathonwy), the structure has been changed completely. The main character Gwydion tells the story, and the order of certain events has been changed. The effect is interesting: on the one hand, I feel slight indignation that the original sequence is different (and the fourth branch is my personal favourite!), but it is, I admit, incredibly well done. The suggestion is made that Gwydion has also told the first three stories, which makes for a cathartic ending. So all in all, I forgive Francis these artistic liberties, and the result is one of my favourite poetry collections I have ever read.
Francis shows the original stories through a kind of kaleidoscope and allows the reader to lose themselves in them. It is no exaggeration to say that I came to know and appreciate the stories better, presented as modern poetry. In my copy, almost every page has a circled passage, or underlined phrase, that I found so beautiful that just reading it didn't feel like enough. I read some of it out loud to myself, and for a moment I disappeared into medieval Wales, as if it were the Otherworld, where I too take on the form of Pwyll, and the other characters. Francis has taken many artistic liberties, but in doing so has also created a wonderful adaptation.
I recognise this - for a long time, I didn't find them very appealing because of this. And yet, they are wonderful stories in their own right. And that's exactly why a poetry is so well suited to it, Francis says: "... I began to see how the very aspects that made a prose treatment difficult could prove a strength for poetry, which has never had much of a problem with magic. Poets spend their lives transforming things into other things." To my slight surprise, I must admit, he is right. In poetry, and certainly in Francis' style of poetry, there are far fewer details needed for the reader to visualise the story. Francis pays attention to elements that I would never have noticed in the original, or hadn't thought about. And that makes me experience the story and its characters so much more intensely.
He takes the liberty of making major changes to the stories here and there, though. In the first branch (Pwyll Pendeuic Dyued), for instance, the passage in which Pwyll and Rhiannon deceive Gwawl ap Clud is missing, and in the fourth branch (Math uab Mathonwy), the structure has been changed completely. The main character Gwydion tells the story, and the order of certain events has been changed. The effect is interesting: on the one hand, I feel slight indignation that the original sequence is different (and the fourth branch is my personal favourite!), but it is, I admit, incredibly well done. The suggestion is made that Gwydion has also told the first three stories, which makes for a cathartic ending. So all in all, I forgive Francis these artistic liberties, and the result is one of my favourite poetry collections I have ever read.
Francis shows the original stories through a kind of kaleidoscope and allows the reader to lose themselves in them. It is no exaggeration to say that I came to know and appreciate the stories better, presented as modern poetry. In my copy, almost every page has a circled passage, or underlined phrase, that I found so beautiful that just reading it didn't feel like enough. I read some of it out loud to myself, and for a moment I disappeared into medieval Wales, as if it were the Otherworld, where I too take on the form of Pwyll, and the other characters. Francis has taken many artistic liberties, but in doing so has also created a wonderful adaptation.
September 28, 2021
This poetic interpretation of the Mabinogi is intriguing, emotional and wonderful. The language is delightful, it rolls around the mind like the tides brushing the beaches of Wales, it recalls dreams and half remembered fragments of childhod memories. I loved it.
May 20, 2020
I enjoyed reading this a lot.
It is Matthew Francis take on four branches of the Welsh folk tales called the Mabinogion. He tells each branch, ending with perhaps the best-known story - that of Bloduedd, magically created out of flowers. That final branch also calls back to the earlier stories as a story-teller magician tells his stories.
It's neat.
It's also lovely writing. Poetic without being fancy. Hard when it needs to be and soft when soft is best. There's one particular passage in the Fourth Branch, which begins -
"Did she remember as she sat at her tapestry
stitching its marginalia of flowers,
or when she squeezed in between her sheets
and the scent of meadowsweet
haunted the darkness..."
- that is utterly haunting. But this book is full of moments like this. It's also got humour, magic, war, death and love scattered throughout its pages.
This from the First Branch
"She is woman and horse. She rides slower than daydreams.
She is what you've forgotten, where the time went.
Singleminded as the sun, she rides
always one way, and the air's warmed by her passing.
....
She slips into yesterday
without being now."
It has a dreamlike quality to it. As you pick up a thread of a story, that leads to another story and to another story. Where women are blamed for crimes committed by their relatives. Where mothers curse their sons. Where magicians play tricks and where this world meets the Unland.
This would make an interesting double-bill with Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood. The thread of mythology that leads us from the present to the past. From the solid now to the more malleable past, where the real and the unreal were all true. And a triple-bill with Alan Garner's The Owl Service.
It is Matthew Francis take on four branches of the Welsh folk tales called the Mabinogion. He tells each branch, ending with perhaps the best-known story - that of Bloduedd, magically created out of flowers. That final branch also calls back to the earlier stories as a story-teller magician tells his stories.
It's neat.
It's also lovely writing. Poetic without being fancy. Hard when it needs to be and soft when soft is best. There's one particular passage in the Fourth Branch, which begins -
"Did she remember as she sat at her tapestry
stitching its marginalia of flowers,
or when she squeezed in between her sheets
and the scent of meadowsweet
haunted the darkness..."
- that is utterly haunting. But this book is full of moments like this. It's also got humour, magic, war, death and love scattered throughout its pages.
This from the First Branch
"She is woman and horse. She rides slower than daydreams.
She is what you've forgotten, where the time went.
Singleminded as the sun, she rides
always one way, and the air's warmed by her passing.
....
She slips into yesterday
without being now."
It has a dreamlike quality to it. As you pick up a thread of a story, that leads to another story and to another story. Where women are blamed for crimes committed by their relatives. Where mothers curse their sons. Where magicians play tricks and where this world meets the Unland.
This would make an interesting double-bill with Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood. The thread of mythology that leads us from the present to the past. From the solid now to the more malleable past, where the real and the unreal were all true. And a triple-bill with Alan Garner's The Owl Service.
October 27, 2023
An 89-page volume of epic poetry, translating two Welsh myths from the 1300s. I knew nothing about these fabulous stories and was very grateful for the author's prologue, which essentially provided a road map for what came next. There are notes in the margins to guide the reader along, avoiding the necessity of complex exegesis. And the poetry is set out to resemble illuminated medieval manuscripts, with the dropped Capital letter signaling significantly different directions along the way.
The stories are the very definition of fabulous, as fantastical as though the original authors were accustomed to eating psilocybin mushrooms--they flow so casually between, as just one example, visualizing a woman walking very fast down a trail, and then realizing she is actually a horse, who promptly gallops out of sight.* (This is Rhiannon, in Celtic religion, the Welsh manifestation of the Gaulish horse goddess Epona and the Irish goddess Macha.) Or watching a mist devolve into a portal between two worlds. I especially LOVED the description of Bran, the giant king of England:
"He is the capital at the start of the sentence,
a tree, a crow's nest, a furlong of a man.
You cannot think of him all at
once.
Picture his scrubland of beard,
his battlement teeth.
Or think of the vertigo of
standing there
gazing from the parapet of self
he can never climb down
from,
the wind in his ears
that his friends must shout to
compete with
a life in the weather--
no house will hold him."
This is the stuff I craved in childhood, when every week for 11 years my father's librarian (as though he owned her, but no, she was simply devoted to her career) at the NYC Public Library gave him a pile of books she'd selected just for me. (At 3, those were folk stories from around the world. By 3rd grade, I was reading at 12th grade levels.) Even though this is for adults, I think it could be read in some parts to children, with a Q & A to follow to develop critical thinking skills.
*In Rhiannon's tale, she gives birth to a prince who vanishes. She is then unjustly accused of killing him and is "forced to act as a horse and to carry visitors to the royal court. According to another story, she was made to wear the collars of asses about her neck in the manner of a beast." (quoted from the Encyclopedia Britannica) In another story in the Mabinogi, another queen is abandoned and made to work in the scullery for similar reasons--in this one, however, she is betrayed by other women. Both stories give rise to the original author or authors' gender. Were these tales written by a woman?? They don't seem to be the kind of material that mattered at all to men of the Middle Ages!
For the rest, this is a must-read for anyone who appreciates poetry, or fairy/folk tales, or medieval times. A wondrously beautiful series of stories to take us away from the real world and into the delectable world of the imagination--for a little while.
The stories are the very definition of fabulous, as fantastical as though the original authors were accustomed to eating psilocybin mushrooms--they flow so casually between, as just one example, visualizing a woman walking very fast down a trail, and then realizing she is actually a horse, who promptly gallops out of sight.* (This is Rhiannon, in Celtic religion, the Welsh manifestation of the Gaulish horse goddess Epona and the Irish goddess Macha.) Or watching a mist devolve into a portal between two worlds. I especially LOVED the description of Bran, the giant king of England:
"He is the capital at the start of the sentence,
a tree, a crow's nest, a furlong of a man.
You cannot think of him all at
once.
Picture his scrubland of beard,
his battlement teeth.
Or think of the vertigo of
standing there
gazing from the parapet of self
he can never climb down
from,
the wind in his ears
that his friends must shout to
compete with
a life in the weather--
no house will hold him."
This is the stuff I craved in childhood, when every week for 11 years my father's librarian (as though he owned her, but no, she was simply devoted to her career) at the NYC Public Library gave him a pile of books she'd selected just for me. (At 3, those were folk stories from around the world. By 3rd grade, I was reading at 12th grade levels.) Even though this is for adults, I think it could be read in some parts to children, with a Q & A to follow to develop critical thinking skills.
*In Rhiannon's tale, she gives birth to a prince who vanishes. She is then unjustly accused of killing him and is "forced to act as a horse and to carry visitors to the royal court. According to another story, she was made to wear the collars of asses about her neck in the manner of a beast." (quoted from the Encyclopedia Britannica) In another story in the Mabinogi, another queen is abandoned and made to work in the scullery for similar reasons--in this one, however, she is betrayed by other women. Both stories give rise to the original author or authors' gender. Were these tales written by a woman?? They don't seem to be the kind of material that mattered at all to men of the Middle Ages!
For the rest, this is a must-read for anyone who appreciates poetry, or fairy/folk tales, or medieval times. A wondrously beautiful series of stories to take us away from the real world and into the delectable world of the imagination--for a little while.
August 22, 2025
A wonderful poetic retelling of Welsh Mythology. Matthew Francis does the unenviable job of trying to bring this ancient epic into a modern poetic style - and incredibly he manages to capture the wonder and joy of the mabinogi.
The stories are weird and magical and that remains in this retelling - whilst at the same time Francis is able to write some incredible lines of poetry all within the form of the sonnet.
I thoroughly enjoyed all of the book, but naturally found the first branch story the most enjoyable. I also found myself appreciating the changes Francis has made to the last branch, as it brought the whole collection together in a more coherent sense.
I would recommend this to all interested in Mythology and or Poetry. Get your teeth into some fun Welsh Myths!
The stories are weird and magical and that remains in this retelling - whilst at the same time Francis is able to write some incredible lines of poetry all within the form of the sonnet.
I thoroughly enjoyed all of the book, but naturally found the first branch story the most enjoyable. I also found myself appreciating the changes Francis has made to the last branch, as it brought the whole collection together in a more coherent sense.
I would recommend this to all interested in Mythology and or Poetry. Get your teeth into some fun Welsh Myths!
May 26, 2020
Excellent read
This was an enjoyable read. I don't usually read poetry but I listened to the Hay podcast with Matthew Francis and the excerpts he read sounded intriguing. The imagery and language are exquisite and I read it in one sitting. It helped that I read the intro first and the short notes in the text also helped me follow the narrative. I enjoyed all the preposterous magic and odd twists of the tale. I recommend it for its uniqueness and wonderful language or if you're interested in myths, particularly Welsh. Superb.
This was an enjoyable read. I don't usually read poetry but I listened to the Hay podcast with Matthew Francis and the excerpts he read sounded intriguing. The imagery and language are exquisite and I read it in one sitting. It helped that I read the intro first and the short notes in the text also helped me follow the narrative. I enjoyed all the preposterous magic and odd twists of the tale. I recommend it for its uniqueness and wonderful language or if you're interested in myths, particularly Welsh. Superb.
October 16, 2021
Having read a short segment of the version of the Mabinogi in “The Map and the Clock”, I had to buy the complete poem. The use of language is just beautiful. If you don’t know the stories from other versions, as I didn’t, the notes are essential to follow the action, but it is all about the images and use of words.
To be read and reread.
To be read and reread.
September 18, 2025
A gem of a book. Ancient stories that blend magic and reality with such natural ease, told in masterful, lyrical language. Whole scenes come alive with just a couplet, the story gliding along the page like it's spilling from the communal tongue of the thousands of folk who kept it alive through the ages. Honed with every telling, and honed again with this one.
December 1, 2025
Loved this. The poetic form really suited the wonder tales, it's somehow easier to accept the unexplained magical events when the author isn't having to spell out the details in prose. My only criticism is that I would have happily read a longer version!
June 24, 2020
brilliant. instant re-read. almost as good as Wing.
February 13, 2022
A simply excellent retelling of "The Mabinogion"
April 16, 2022
I really enjoyed this book. Francis’ use of the English language is just beautiful. Just wish he’d done more of the Mabinogion.
June 27, 2022
Genuinely unique and beautiful. I don't recall a word out of place.
July 3, 2023
Not only something to inspire the imagination, but some beautifully described scenery.
May 19, 2024
A delightful and skillful retelling. A wonderful way to access these tales.
August 30, 2019
"so, do you fight, or slip out
the tradesmen's entrance?"
the tradesmen's entrance?"
January 24, 2022
this is a brilliant poetic retelling of the first Four Branches of the Mabinogi.
i read it after Sioned Davies' prose translation, in the same summer, while wandering/wondering Wales.
Matthew Francis retains the essence and substance of the stories, even with omissions and changes to some.
i love the use of language and how it creates both the imagery and magic of the stories, and holds a rhythm that feels really right for the tales.
i read it after Sioned Davies' prose translation, in the same summer, while wandering/wondering Wales.
Matthew Francis retains the essence and substance of the stories, even with omissions and changes to some.
i love the use of language and how it creates both the imagery and magic of the stories, and holds a rhythm that feels really right for the tales.
September 4, 2022
Given to me by a friend. I enjoyed the freedom of this translation and interpretation. Less formal than previous translations, less academic, less precise perhaps. However more enjoyable as a result and more poetic…….
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March 2, 2018821.92 F8191m 2017
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