Poetry
Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym
Dafydd ap Gwilym · 1370
Synopsis
About one hundred and fifty poems, half of which speak of love and the other half of nature, often of both at once. The poet sends a bird, a wind or a mist to carry a message to a woman; he hides in a bush and gets caught; he spends a whole night in an inn bumping into every piece of furniture. Two women return from one poem to the next, a blonde and a brunette. Churches serve there as meeting places.
Context
None of these pieces is dated and their author published nothing: they circulated from memory and in copies, and the corpus was only established in the twentieth century, one hundred and fifty pieces retained out of the four hundred attributed to him. The form he devised, made of short lines and a system of obligatory alliterations, is still used at the country's annual competitions. His European contemporaries did not know him: the language kept him enclosed, and he was only translated in the twentieth century, six hundred years later.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages in Welsh, translated into French in extracts. The sound system carries over into no language, and that is half of what is there.
Prizes and reception
Regarded in Wales as the greatest of its poets, and remained unknown outside his language for six centuries.