Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh

Surely Cymru and Wales are two different places. They must be, for the languages that contain them, Welsh and English, hold such vastly different memories. In Wales the shorn flanks of the great, catapulting hills and the mottled pasturelands of the valleys are a consolation prize; in Cymru they’re home. To be a traveller in this place I love, which is all I claim to be – I’m hardly a linguist, I’m not even good at languages – it’s not enough to be led by the senses as I was in my tourist guise in Brazil. I want to break through the space – time continuum too, the way Tom did on his computer in New York, and travel into Wales’s past, its humour, its spirit, as well as its landscape. The only way I can think to do that, to get beyond Wales into Cymru, is to have a command of the Welsh language and the memories it holds within it.

Cue back to the god of Irony. To accomplish this, for me, the language coward, means leaving the geographic country behind in search of its invisible, verbal progeny in Europe, Asia and South America. Only by travelling everywhere but Wales can I hope to find my way to Cymru.

Equally ironic, however, is the fact that the Welsh language is in no way mine to have. There simply is no verb meaning ‘to have’, in the sense of ‘to possess’, in Welsh. Plane tickets, maps, languages even, are only ‘with you’, as if by their consent, implying that they, like much of the isle of Britain, are perhaps once and future possessions to be taken away at a moment’s notice. To say ‘I have language’ is to mean, ‘There is language with me’ – Mae iaith gyda fi. This pattern of having things ‘with you’ seems to me a grammar built on loss and impermanence, the linguistic heritage of the defeated. English, by comparison, is supremely confident in its sense of possession.

Which one will I use, I wonder uneasily, as Marguerite and I hoist our packs and slip on our sensible German walking shoes and begin searching the world for Cymru?

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