R. S. Thomas @100

We are already more than half way through the centenary year of the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, so just a quick post to mark the events dedicated to celebrating the man and his work. One of the most significant events was the publication of RS Thomas: Serial Obsessive, by CREW’s indefatigable founder, M. Wynn Thomas. This new collection of essays looks at previously unseen poems by Thomas, exploring his various obsessions. It has received wonderful reviews:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/06/rs-thomas-serial-obsessive-review

http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=528

As well as Wynn Thomas’s new book, there have also been many events to mark RST’s centenary. A major event at the Dylan Thomas Centre took place in April, marking not only Wynn Thomas’s new book, but also the Uncollected Poems, edited by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies. Five commemorative poems were also composed in memory of R S Thomas, by some of Wales’s leading contemporary poets (in both Welsh and English). There are still many exciting events coming up to look forward to, including the RST Literary Festival in September, and an evening of conversation on RS’s religious poetry between Wynn Thomas, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr Barry Morgan at the Taliesin Arts Centre on 1^st November. For further information on all the events, see the links below:

http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/143403/

http://rsthomas2013.org/digwyddiadau-events/

Here is a link to an interview with M Wynn Thomas, on his experiences with RS, and his own ‘obsession’ with this fascinating man and his powerful poetry:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/posts/Academics-poets-and-musicians-unite-in-evening-to-mark-RS-Thomas-centenary

(I’ll post reminders of the Swansea-based events closer to the time)

Literature Wales Literary Tourism Programme: Canoeing in Dylan Thomas's Taf Estuary

With next year promising to be a Dylan-fest, why not start celebrating Swansea’s infamous son this July with a day of canoeing, poetry and jazz? Organised by Literature Wales and CREW, the day begins in gorgeous Laugharne with Dylan Thomas experts, Jeff Towns and John Goodby. Enjoy some gentle paddling in the Taf Estuary, before an evening at Wright’s Independent Food Emporium, with New York-themed food and jazz, courtesy of Daniel Williams and his band Burum. For further details, check out the Literature Wales website:

http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/143395/

 Welcome to Literature Wales’ 2013 Literary Tourism Events Programme. Join us on eighteen new literary adventures running from April through to October located across Wales and beyond!  Whether you want to explore the Wild West, the legends of Arthurian and Medieval Wales, Submarine Swansea, Neolithic Anglesey or the ghosts of Ceredigion, there is something for everyone. We will take you to the heart of Welsh worlds and words for totally one-off, unforgettable experiences by bicycle, canoe on horseback and on foot. You don’t have to be experienced at all. If you are interested, visit www.literaturewales.org to view the brochure online...and get ready for a tour to remember or to a request a brochure or book a place, contact Literature Wales on: post@literaturewales.org / 029 2047 2266.

 

Recent releases from CREW staff

 

Staff at CREW just can’t stop publishing great research. Daniel Williams’s pioneering monograph Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845-1945 was published by UWP in September 2012, and has rightly received great acclaim. During my undergraduate studies, I often had to read rather dull scholarly works, but Williams’s book was a delight- highly readable, elegantly written and so thoroughly researched just reading the bibliography made me tired. But don’t just take my word for it, check out these glowing reviews:

http://babylonwales.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=black+skin+blue+books

http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=462

 

CREW’s director, Kirsti Bohata, has also been busy, co-editing (with Katie Gramich) a new collection of wonderful essays on Margiad Evans, one of my favourite writers. Rediscovering Margiad Evans: Marginality, Gender and Illness is a valuable new collection, and features essays by both established and newer critical voices, who explore Evans’s work from a variety of themes and approaches. It has been recently reviewed in the TLS, so if you are a subscriber, take a look. Information on the book can be found here:

http://www.gwales.com/goto/biblio/en/9780708325605/?session_timeout=1

 

 

 

Heather Dohollau (1925-2013)

The Welsh poet Heather Dohollau died on April 30th, 2013 in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, where she had lived since 1959. Arguably a missing chapter in the history of recent Welsh literature, Heather Dohollau remains little-known in the UK because she lived all her adult life in Brittany, and is only published in French at present.

Heather Dohollau was born in 1925 in the Rhondda Valley and raised in Penarth. She left for France after losing her mother as a young woman after the war, and after some years in Paris and London, settled on the small Breton island of Bréhat. There she led an insular, then semi-insular life for almost twenty years, raising seven children in precarious circumstances and running an artshop. For the following twenty years, she worked as a librarian in Saint-Brieuc and became increasingly involved in a literary environment. A close friend of Pierre-Jean Jouve in the mid-1960s until his death in 1976, she developed other literary friendships from the 1980s, when her annual attendance at the colloquiums of Cerisy-la-Salle began. Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Derrida, Salah Stétié and Lorand Gaspar, who handed her the Légion d’honneur in 2000, have been among her friends and correspondents. An international colloquium held in Cerisy in 2005 and its proceedings have further established the significance of her work, as have other publications.

Most of Dohollau’s published writing takes the form of poems (including prose-poems). These are printed in the following collections, published by Éditions Folle Avoine  (my translations):

 Seule enfance / Childhood Alone (1978)

 La Venelle des portes / The Lane of Doors (1981)

 Matière de lumière / Matter of Light (1985)

 L’Adret du jour / The Day’s Declivity (1989)

 Pages aquarellées / Watercoloured Pages (1989)

 Les Portes d’en bas / The Doors Beneath (1992)

 La Terre âgée / Aged Earth (1996)

 Le Point de rosée / Dew Stitch (1999)

 Le Dit des couleurs / The Colours’ Tale (2003)

 Une suite de matins / A Suite for Mornings (2005)

 Un regard d’ambre / An Amber Gaze (2008)

She has also published one novel, La Réponse / The Answer (1982), which is inspired by the philosopher Jules Lequier, and one volume of literary essays, Les Cinq jardins et autres textes / The Five Gardens and Other Texts (1996). The latter focuses chiefly on Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Several of the volumes are illustrated by frontispieces by Heather Dohollau’s son Tanguy Dohollau. 

Heather Dohollau’s poems are powerfully evocative of the significant places in her life, always making allowances for the essentially temporal nature of our encounters with place. An exile who only rarely returned to her lost origins (Wales, Bréhat which was a new origin to her), she perceived that the real talisman, what enfolds us back 'home', is transience itself: changing light and colours, what was only ever seen with the corner of one's eye, the awareness that each return is also a chance of leaving the place 'intact' - only then are its gifts truly received. This is also how she looked at paintings (never trying to describe or map out, but all the more vivid in its translation of visuality) and at the space of the poem itself: a slow, open form, returning, like a wave. Her way of remembering, like her way of returning, was intensely visual, intensely seeking the gifts of transience - with all the complex layering of a consciousness in constant dialogue with literature, philosophy, the visual arts, and of course with another language.

Alongside Heather Dohollau’s writings, we are lucky to have recordings of three poems self-translated into English to remember her by. Additionally, the filmed self-portrait La Promesse des mots / The Promise of Words, by Rolland Savidan and Florence Mahé (Plérin: RS Productions, 2005) gives us a chance to encounter the poet as she retraces her steps to her lost origins (South Wales and Bréhat) and reflects on her past, on returning, loss, ageing, reading and writing, looking at paintings.

Heather Dohollau never spoke Welsh, though it was spoken in her family. Yet Welsh names and places have had an enduring hold over her imagination: they are present in all but one of her twelve collections. Her take on the notions of identity, place, origin, memory, belonging and mother tongue brings fresh and sometimes radical light on problematics that are central to twentieth-century Welsh literary history. She felt close to David Jones’work, partly because his was a Welsh, but outward-looking vision. Her Welsh past may well have played another significant role: it is likely that growing up in the broader context of Welsh-English bilingualism (and perhaps also, to a lesser extent, being aware of Breton-French bilingualism later in life) fed into the double consciousness she writes about compellingly as a writer in English and French. As with Beckett or André du Bouchet, this double consciousness made writing the site of a densely philosophical quest for the Other of language, or as she names it in a poem from her last published collection (p. 101, my translation),

L’autre poésie celle qui n’est pas écrite mais que l’écriture projette. L’herbe transparente d’un semis d’encre

The other poetry that which is not written but which writing projects. The transparent grass sown in ink

Dr Clémence O'Connor,

University of Aberdeen

Picture acknowledgements:
HD and reflection in Alexandra Park, Penarth: *Tanguy Dohollau*
HD on the river Cam: *Geneviève Guétemme*



John Goodby on Dylan Thomas

Details of Dr John Goodby's AHRC-funded work on Dylan Thomas, including project updates, can be found here:

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/riah/research-projects/dylan-thomas/

Under the Spelling Wall (pictured) is due to appear soon from Liverpool University Press.

Long Revolutions in Wales and Japan: Report

Long Revolutions in Wales and Japan: Raymond Williams in Transit 3

November 2nd 2012 saw the third CREW collaboration with the Raymond Williams Kenkyu-kai (Society for Raymond Williams Studies), Japan. The event was funded by JSPS/MEXT Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research, with organisational support from CREW and the Richard Burton Centre, Swansea University. 

Daniel Williams’s opening remarks offered an overview of the reception of Williams’s volume The Long Revolution (1961). He argued that while much in the book prefigures future developments in Williams’s thinking and that it contains some of Williams’s best writing, the central notion of a ‘common culture’ is one that Williams began to overtly question in his later writings, and was already been problematising in his fiction.

Williams’s direct engagements with psychoanalysis are somewhat rare, but the opening sections of The Long Revolution do indeed attempt to engage with some of the developments in the the field at the time. Fuhito Endo developed this thread in Williams’s work to explore the possibility of much stronger connections between Williams’s cultural materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Williams’s concept of the ‘residual’ which ‘has been effectively formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process’, shares some similarities with Freud’s notion of ‘affect’, which Endo suggested has ‘also been formed in the past, but is still active in the psychic process’. The homologous relationships between patterns in Williams thought and psychoanalytic theory were explored in some detail, and while Endo focused on Williams’s criticism, his approach seemed to suggest some particularly fruitful ways of thinking about Williams’s fiction.

Yasuhiro Kondo did turn his attention to the fiction, and discussed the ways in which Williams developed the realist tradition in his second novel Second Generation. Drawing on the argument in the Long Revolution that ‘changes in primary relationships ... will have observable social effects’, Kondo explored the connection between individual and social change in Second Generation. ‘The growth of love and the capacity for loving are fundamental in the development of society’ argued Williams, and Kondo read the novel as a fictional exploration of those ‘fundamental’ relationships. 

The 3/11 of Takashi Onuki’s ‘Culture and Society after 3/11’ referred to the date of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster. The development of the nuclear industry in Japan happened according to the requirements of a rapidly expanding late capitalist system which paid little attention to the real needs of the country’s citizens, The struggle between human needs and capitalist accumulation lies at the heart of Williams’s life-long project, and Onuki drew on the tradition of resistance mapped out in Culture and Society as a resource in the contemporary re-making of social and environmental policies.

Kieron Smith drew on his research on Welsh poet and film-maker John Ormond to explore the values informing the BBC in the 1960s, and the way in which Ormond represented Wales and the idea of an ‘educated democracy’ in his work. The dialogue between Williams’s commitment to an ‘educated democracy informing a common culture’ and Ormond’s more Arnoldian concept of culture as the best that had been thought and said offered an illuminating insight onto Welsh cultural debates and values in the 1960s. 

Onuki, Kono and Williams, all involved in the firs Raymond Williams in transit session, joined each other on stage to consider the relevance of The Long Revolution today. The discussion was chaired by Dai Smith who emphasized the educational imperative informing Williams’s work. The principle of a comprehensive education available to all was established by the time Williams was writing, but the question of what kind of education was, and still is, a hotly contested topic. Williams placed the arts at the centre of his vision. Education should not merely be offering the tools for wealth accumulation and econimic success, it should also offer insights into the reasons for why that life is worth living. Kono expanded on these insights to suggest that the concept of revolution could not be understood in the same ways in different contexts, and as capitalism had proved adept at sublimating and assimilating radical tendencies the idea of revolution had to be continually re-visited and re-invented. 

Each of our Wales-Japan events has featured the application of Williams’s criticism to the reading of Japanese texts. This is what Ryota Nishi achieved in his paper on Kazue Morisaki. Morisaki’s representation of the ‘underground labourer’ opened the possibility of comparative research into the fictions produced by coalfield societies.

It perhaps time now to think back over the three events held so far (in Swansea (twice) and Japan (once)) and to consider which comparative threads are worth developing in the future as this wonderfully rewarding dialogue with colleagues in Japan continues. 

Tony Conran (1931 - 2013)

Tony Conran was different.  He was singular. He was special. And long before the end, his lifetime’s work seemed to me, in the uncompromising monumentality of its inner consistency and completeness, like some kind of towering ancient dolmen on our level post-modern landscape. 

His career spanned more than half a century, during which he was a major contributor to the transformation of the cultural life of anglophone Wales. Translator, cultural interpreter, dramatist, but, supremely, poet, he was blessed with originality in all he did. Underpinning his work was his strong vision of the distinctive social character of Welsh culture, traditionally embodied in the very form of classic Welsh-language poetry. This same distinctiveness was, for him, differently exemplified in what he regarded as the best English-language poetry of modern Wales, of which he was himself one of the most distinguished advocates and practitioners.  

Devoted to his radical cultural vision, he was never clubbable, but was s a cherished collaborator with other poets, musicians and artists, and adored mentor of many young creative and critical talents. 

He was prevented by cerebral palsy from communicating easily with others in talk, and so he invested the written word with a unique intensity. And just as his demanding, densely layered poems mesmerised many readers, his lengthy, fiercely intellectual, letters became legendary to his many correspondents. 

His was a lasting, heroic achievement. 

Requiescat in pace. 

M. Wynn Thomas

First appeared on Literature Wales website:  http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/142467/