Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 19

I’ve been bumped to business class, where there are more distractions than in economy to divert my mind from the unassailable knowledge that we’ll all die if the plane falls out of the sky. I hate flying. A drawback, considering this is the second of the seventeen flights it will take us to get around the world. Marguerite has gone directly from London to Paris – well, directly being dependent on the vagaries of her round-the-world ticket, which has sent her via Zürich – to visit her sister’s family. I’ll join her there in about a week.

So for now I’m on my own, half-heartedly attending to the bones in my salmon steak entrée. Somewhere nearby a young American woman is giddy or drunk, I can’t tell which. From what I’ve heard it sounds like she’s going to Norway to visit relatives and is unsure of her Norwegian, learned from grandparents. ‘I just know I’m gonna forget everything,’ she all but hyperventilates. I can see tinsel strands of blonde hair wrapping over the top of her seat by grace of static electricity.

‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I’d like to say, ‘at least you’re going to Norway to speak Norwegian. I’m going to Norway to speak Welsh. Now there’s a reason to worry.’ And I am. Worried.

The truth is I’m really not alone on this flight. I’m with the mysterious stranger who’s travelling the world with me: the Welsh language. On my lap is Y Trip, ‘The Trip’, Nofel Antur i Ddysgwyr – an adventure novel for learners – that I bought in Aberystwyth. The blurb on the back says it’s about Charles, an alluring and arrogant former secret service type who goes bad, starts a drug empire in Liverpool, and enters a sailing race around the Isle of Britain. Or Ynys Prydain, as it was once known, and in some quarters still is.

Not long ago the only marks I would’ve understood on the page were the periods and quotations. Now Welsh no longer looks like undisciplined gobbledygook. The letters fall into formations that I’ve come to expect, that don’t drive my eyes skittish and shy. The first two sentences of Y Trip read, ‘Roedd y dyn yn sefyll yn llonydd, yn hollol lonydd. Doedd dim swn o gwbl.’ I say it under my breath, which sounds something like ‘Rrroithe uh deen un sevultch un tlchonith, un holtchol lonith. Doithe dim soon o gooble.’ This means, ‘The man was standing still, totally still. There was no noise at all.’

These sounds are aerobics for the American mouth. I barely have to open up to speak the lazy, slightly slurry English that is my birthright. If I look down, I never see my lips protrude beneath my nose when I’m speaking Saesneg, which is the Welsh word for English (Saeson, literally ‘Saxons’, means ‘Englishmen’). But when I’m speaking Welsh I constantly catch glimpses of my lips projecting in and out like feeding sea urchins. It takes smiles, frowns, grimaces and active supporting roles from my jaw and neck muscles to get out just one sentence. It’s so much work that half an hour of Welsh makes my face quiver. But there’s no other way to say a word like gwbl. You’ve got to love a language in which you can make the noise ‘gooble’ and have it actually mean something (cwbl means ‘all’; gwbl is cwbl after it’s mutated, but I refuse to clutter my mind with mutations at the moment).

And then there’s the rhythm. You can’t just speak Welsh, you have to ride its waves. If English is a calm, smooth-as-glass harbour for its nearly four hundred and fifty million native speakers, Welsh is the rough open ocean. It bobs and bounces, I want to say it’s a curly language, a curvy language, with the stress in both words and sentences on the penultimate sound. Listen: Dim o GWB-l. Da-da-daaa-da. It’s incantatory.