We can lay claim to nothing

 

Battlefield of Ypres
David Y Cameron, ©IWM ART 2626

It is estimated that 40,000 Welshmen died during the First World War.* One of those was the Welsh shepherd, soldier, and poet Private Ellis Humphrey Evans, better known by his Welsh bardic name, Hedd Wyn. 

Born in Trawsfyndd, Wales on January 13, 1887, Evans was killed on July 31, 1917 at Pilckem Ridge, near Ypres. Less than six weeks after his death, on September 6, 1917, Hedd Wyn was announced as the winner of the Welsh National Eisteddfod’s prestigious poetry chair. Learning that the poet had been killed in Flanders, presenters draped the chair in black, and since then the honor has been referred to as The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair. 

An anthology of Hedd Wyn’s poetry, Cerddi’r Bugail (The Shepherd’s Poems) was published posthumously in 1918. The best-known poem is “Rhyfel” (“War”) and was shared earlier on this blog. Here is another of Hedd Wyn’s war poems: 

The Black Dot         Y Blotyn Du†


We can lay no claim to the stars, Nid oes gennym hawl ar sêr,

Nor a yearning taste of the moon, Na’r lleuad hiraethus chwaith,

Nor the cloud with its gold border Na’r cwmwl o aur a ymylch

In monotonous blue. Yng nghanol y glesni maith.



We can lay claim to nothing Nid oes gennym hawl ar ddim byd

But the tired earth’s story; Ond ar yr hen ddaear wyw;

And the turning of all to disorder A honno sy’n anhrefn i gyd

Amongst God’s glory. Yng nghanol gogoniant Duw.
   
—Translated by Gillian Clarke††    —Hedd Wyn

David Goldie notes that Wyn’s “poems are not so much protests against the atrocities of war as mournful expressions of resignation at its effects.”** The poet writes with longing, but is unable to possess with any permanence the wonders of the stars, moon, and clouds. With poignant grief, the poet bears witness: the beauties of the natural world have been stained, and the chaos of war has disordered the glories of God on the earth. 

David Edward Pike writes, “The death of Hedd Wyn rapidly came to symbolise for Wales the loss of all those Welshmen killed in the war, and perhaps too a sense of the vulnerability of the rich and highly creative and poetic Christian culture of non-conformist Wales before the behemoth of secular, indifferent, mechanistic modernity.”***

For those interested in the art of translation and shaping meaning from one language to another, here are other excellent translations of the poem: “The Black Blot” by Michael Ratcliffe, “The Black Mark” by Ceridwens Soul, “The Black Blot” by Richard B. Gillion, “Black Spot” by A.Z. Foreman, “The Black Spot,” by Alan Lwyd, and “The Black Spot” by David Edward Pike.
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* John Davies, “The legacy of WW1,” BBC Wales History, https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/periods/ww1_background.shtml.
** David Goldie, “Archipelagic Poetry of the First World War,” in Poetry of the First World War, edited by Sananu Das, Cambridge UP, 2013, p. 166.
*** David Edward Pike [Welldigger], “100 Years Ago: Hedd Wyn,” https://daibach-welldigger.blogspot.com/2017/08/100-years-ago-hedd-wyn.html.

† The poem can be listened to in Welsh at this link: https://soundcloud.com/yrysgwrn/edgar-parry-williams-y-blotyn
†† Gillian Clarke in M. Elfyyn and J. Rowlands (editors) The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry, Bloodaxe Books, 2003.