Argraffiad o farddoniaeth Dafydd ap Gwilym (bl. 1340-1370), yn cynnwys cyfieithiadau Saesneg gan Gwyn Thomas o gant chwe deg o'i gerddi yn dyrchafu harddwch a chyfoeth natur a serch, ynghyd â rhagarweiniad i waith y bardd.

An edition of the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. 1340-1370), comprising English translations by Gwyn Thomas of one hundred and sixty poems extolling the beauty and richness of nature and courtly love, together with an introduction to the work of the poet.

According to the American deconstructionist, Harold Bloom, the secular idea of the canon was not created until the eighteenth century. It was engineered in that period to produce an artificial standard which would delineate the boundaries of literary taste and admonish any intransigent authors who did not wish to conform to the era's prescriptive standards.

Dafydd ap Gwilym's name was never at any time cast out of the Welsh literary flock but, despite his prominent position, doubts still remain about how much work he actually produced. Gwyn Thomas's volume of translations contains the 154 poems originally attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym by Thomas Parry, together with an additional six poems which reflect the work of such recent scholars as R. Geraint Gruffydd, Dafydd Johnston and Ann Parry Owen.

In addition to its sound academic base, the volume also benefits from Gwyn Thomas's ability and insight as a modern Welsh poet, a vocation which has enabled him to understand that a translated poem can provide only a glimpse of the original composition. He has understood in full measure that translation often reduces the number, and sometimes changes the nature, of the original's nuances. He has also realised that one of the great challenges facing the translator of Dafydd ap Gwilym's work is how to present and explain the ambiguity of his poetry to a modern, non-Welsh-speaking readership.

Dafydd ap Gwilym's work can never be labelled as staid or one-track. His style, for instance, varies virtually from poem to poem, from the syntactically-challenged odes to the almost throwaway, singsong metre of the traethodl. Even for a Welsh-speaking scholar, Dafydd's work can sometimes approach the opacity of the verse of the Poets of the Princes, and these translations are indispensable for Welsh-speakers and non-Welsh-speakers alike. This volume is the culmination of many years of musing and it is a great tribute to Gwyn Thomas that his work refreshes the verses that other translators did not include in their anthologies.

Owen Thomas

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