on Alcatraz – Poems from the Contemporary Welsh

From the Original

Minhinnick has selected six poets for this anthology that meld the political with the elegiac, the Welsh with the international. The influence of the latter is particularly evident in the work of Menna Elfyn and Iwan Llwyd, two poets Minhinnick revisits from his seminal anthology The Adulterer’s Tongue (2003). Llwyd’s poems are anchored in Welsh culture and myth and pervaded by a sense of heimat for lost cultures, loves and camaraderie from a perch in a US bar, where Llwyd says a prayer for the damned at the Whitehorse tap and crafts a villanelle on a ‘work of words’.

Minhinnick borrows Llwyd’s poem title Alcatraz for this anthology. Although, here, Alcatraz is not merely the penitentiary that held Capone, it is a shuttered ‘immemorial rock’ where ‘the gulls make good guards… obstinate and ferocious’, and the prison is populated with tourists and ‘avatars / haunted by Cherokee drums’. Naturally, there are no avatars in the Welsh original, and this highlights Minhinnick’s approach to translation: he takes the stylistic and formal liberties necessary to make these versions English-language poems in their own right, but he still sticks close enough to the Welsh to capture the spirit of the original.

As for America, Llwyd takes us deeper into its history than the modern republic. He tells us how the prison was first an internment camp for native Americans who resisted the cultural genocide. We are invited to draw a parallel between Alcatraz and Wales, and the places of two indigenous cultures within an alien polity. Llwyd yokes ...