Yesterday

Yesterday

Ddoe

 

God was cruel ere yesterday –

Ever Dafydd’s blessed day.

Yesterday – fair nature’s gift –

Gave the day-before short shrift.

How foolish that yesterday

Is brother to lesser days

Before it. Glorious Mair,

Don’t let yesterday expire!

One True God, give me, I pray,

Ere death, one more yesterday!

You surpass that previous day:

Bless you, perfect yesterday!

 

Yesterday, old Dafydd got

His own back on the coarse clot

Who injured him out of wrath.

I’m resilient as a withe

Of apple wood; I bend back,

Flex, thrash out, and do not break.

I have the soul of an old

Cat that shudders with the cold:

No matter how the grey sticks

Of my ribs are beaten, tricks

Always save me: so, I stalk

Slowly. Some cats are too slick

For words, but can’t take the strain.

Screw them. I’ll put up with pain,

Embrace the aches of passion.

I go far, and gold, poison

Or pleasure don’t daunt or gall

Me. Pwyll always badgers Gwawl;

Lovers always trounce the churl

Eventually. Love won’t chill

At coldness. Morfudd’s amends

Did much to massage a man’s

Ego. I shall praise her well –

If I fail, I deserve hell!

 

Good night, girl of the soft voice.

Good day too: you had a choice,

And chose well, upon my life –

Aha! I had Bwa Bach’s wife!

 

Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. This is perhaps Dafydd’s most demanding, triumphant and audacious poem. He claims to have slept with Morfudd, the woman with whom he fell in love in Bangor Cathedral during a mystery play (see his poem, ‘The Spear’: www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/4085337557/). Morfudd subsequently married a churlish wife-beater (by Dafydd’s account), who is consistently called either Eiddig or Bwa Bach by the poet. The latter name appears in a legal document of the later fourteenth century, which may suggest that the affair was not simply a fictional device. There are two particular points of interest in this poem. The first makes it virtually untranslatable in any literal sense: the rhymes in the opening lines hinge on the fact that the Welsh language has a specific word for “the day before yesterday” (echdoe), and Dafydd rhymes this with “yesterday” (ddoe) three times in the first twelve lines. The second is the sustained, punning reference to the first branch of the Mabinogion. In that tale, Pwyll, utterly entranced by the gorgeous horse-riding Rhiannon – who may be a manifestation of the Celtic goddess Epona – is almost beaten to the altar by the trickster Gwawl, but ends up defeating the interloper by engulfing him in a bottomless bag and pummelling him half to death in a game of “Badger in the Bag”. Dafydd deliberately references this story, and puns on Gwawl’s name at line 25, where he describes his feat (of seducing Morfudd) as “dazzling” (wawl). I have reserved the reference until later in the poem. Still more audacious is Dafydd’s invocation of God and the Virgin Mary (rendered untranslated, as “Mair”, the Welsh spelling of her name, in all of these paraphrases), on the assumption that both will approve of the liaison – and, as if that is not enough, his affirmation that he deserves the torments of hell if he does not give sufficient praise to his adulterous lover. Even here, however, the self-irony is inescapable: Dafydd is "old" before he achieves the goal which has been the subject of a multitude of poems.

 

Done