Welsh Journals

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The Bilingual Mind (4) HUW MENAI OWING TO A clumsy mishandling of the proofs, I'm afraid I allowed my last article in this series to end on an incomplete sentence. I was speaking at the time of what my old boss, D W Davies in Caer- narvon had called my 'happy knack for tidiness'. This, I'm afraid, has been something of a weakness with me all my life-an itch or phobia, an established habit for better or worse, and the Cynghanedd in my blood may, secretly, have something to do with it. Perhaps I have, subconsciously, been trying to model my life on the pattern of the Englyn, much as A E Housman modelled his poems instinctively on the Latin of which he was a Professor-the Englyn which is so compact, so concise, the very acme of tidiness. And really this sounds fantastic when I think of the Romantic ructions my nature has been capable of through the years. If I had allowed Y Gymraeg to hold its grip upon me throughout my life instead of struggling desperately as I did when yet quite a boy to release myself from it and then set out in another medium on a kind of Vagabondage in the ways of the mind with a strange urgency, restless and inquisitive, I might indeed have known a much more peaceful time. The Welsh language makes of Wales a kind of National Englyn where to function always within its strict, narrow confines makes for a happy life. To ride on the back of another language (English, for inst- ance) into the heart of the great literatures of the world, when the mind and its imagination is so stimulated by a complex of cultures that it at once becomes giddy with wonder is at anyrate to undergo an ex- perience which helps one to grow and expand, to live intensely if somewhat perilously, in a world perhaps that is more accustomed to shades of grief than the sunshine of joy. But for their bilingual or trilingual minds would Joseph Conrad or, on a lower scale, Rafael Sabatini, for instance, have succeeded in impressing the world so much with their marvellous English prose writings ? This is something to wonder at.