'Bearing News from the Land of the Dead'

By Liam Gornall

The Green Month

Matthew Francis, Faber & Faber, October 2025

Matthew Francis’ sparkling new anthology The Green Month brings the medieval Welsh poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym to the twenty-first century. Despite the literary neglect of Dafydd and of medieval writing in general, it is invigorating to see them both centre-stage. Yet in the eyes of popular culture, the medieval period still has a somewhat bipolar existence. On the one side is the view that, between the glorious classical world and the Renaissance, this stodgy millennium sat and stagnated. It swarmed with grimy creatures who killed time by sewing bells to hats and inventing torture devices. On the other side are those who see a crystal mirror into our own world – the only things separating us from their lives are that our clothes are far better made and our teeth are shinier. Nuance rarely enters the popular discourse. Those real lives centuries ago become mangled by a stranger’s tongue as an efficient shorthand to support their own comments on the modern world.

As readers, our prejudices and assumptions mustn’t be pandered to – great art can shake these dead leaves from us and expose us to new, often uncomfortable, perspectives on the world. The medieval world was much more in tune with its environmental surroundings than our shrink-wrapped age, but their cruelty to animals is beyond our comprehension. This doesn’t mean we should ignore such beautiful writing, but we should understand it within its context and then make our own judgements - instead of squaring the circle, we should learn to acknowledge its curvature. In order to enjoy medieval writing, we must cleanse ourselves of modern assumptions and dive in headfirst. 

Could a translator ever escape the pressures of the bookselling market, laden with the stereotypes and expectations of not just the medieval period but poetry itself, and come close to the authenticity of its original text? Some of the most profound moments in my life have occurred whilst reading Middle and Old English – moments where my eye is set to the keyhole, and for a brief moment, I glimpse the hem of a dress or the glint of a ring. Then the light is extinguished and I am once again in the present, alone. If reading the original text can produce this unique, stunning effect on a reader, could a modern translation? 

In response to these questions, The Green Month provides a peculiar yet thoroughly entertaining answer. Francis’ lauded translation of The Mabinogi fits well alongside this slim volume of reflective and lyrical verse which holds the lightness and mirth of true escapism, each poem feeling as fresh and relevant as anything written today. Set in a tiny Welsh hamlet, the anthology is based upon the wide-ranging writing of the great medieval poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. 

Here, Francis’ poetic voice is intact and yet Dafydd’s subjects and tone are maintained with the care of one who respects the source of his inspiration. Balancing earthy humour with tenderly pensive reflections on loneliness, passion, and heartbreak requires a refined, complex approach to composition which Francis displays throughout, and this is an achievement which must be sincerely celebrated. In an age of vapid social-media poetry swamping the market, it is remarkably refreshing to discover a writer whose balance of readability and complexity is so well judged. From the original collection of disparate medieval poems, Francis crafts a consistent and arresting character arc for his speaker, whom he interprets as the voice of Dafydd himself, providing an air of confessional authenticity which so suits modern tastes. Although all the poems are arranged in three short stanzas, each one has its own unique silhouette and brims with vivid imagery. 

Francis deftly distils his subjects: a fox is ‘a lick and flicker that would flare up later’ while the uncanny owl of the midnight hour hunches a ‘shrunken angel bearing news from the land of the dead’. Dafydd the speaker merely orbits these beings, unable to impact the ecosystem within which he is an unfortunately house-trained intruder. His pompously eloquent speeches which employ them as assistants in wooing his lover are however met with the ambivalent silence of a natural world that neither cares nor understands his fleeting human passions. 

Yet to the outer-world, all efforts at love and happiness are in vain - winds buffet him, bog-mire sucks at his feet, and unexpected husbands interrupt his trysts leaving him to leap into the night. Each time, he picks himself up and dusts himself off with a resilient pluckiness which would rival Buster Keaton’s most endearing underdogs. Such lessons in hardship cannot fail to mould the sufferer and Dafydd is no exception. The final poems are ordered by Francis with delicate care, revealing by degrees the diffusion of Dafydd’s anger at the natural world, unruly and untameable, and his eventual appreciation of the short-comings of a life revolved around lust and passion.

Francis’ power of wordplay reveals multiple facets to each image, folding from one to another as the world is constantly reshaped through the gaze of the speaker desperate to make sense of his misfortunes. Luxuriating in a sensual dream about his lover, Dafydd is jolted into reality by the village church’s new clock. We see his mind at work as each bitter curse springs from his abundant imagination: the cascade of ‘newfangled minute-mill, nocturnal dawn chorus, sleepmason’s chisel’ transfers the energy of his disrupted sexual passions into that of the storyteller enjoying the fertility of language. The anthology is studded with such instances of romantic plans disastrously halted, and each time the speaker reframes his fate through his linguistic dexterity. 

It is this melancholy tone combined with a bone-dry sense of humour which makes the anthology feel so fresh despite its roots being firmly fixed in the medieval tradition. Francis weds the cruel yet hearty Schadenfreude of the Medieval fabliaux with a more contemporary cynical drollness reminiscent of Eliot and Larkin. Both periods are preoccupied with the futility of worldly actions andDafydd’s peculiarly irreverent subject-matter (the poem ‘Church’ begins ‘I’ve turned my back on God. The priests will take care of him’) means his poems easily blend the medieval and the modern with an uncanny accuracy.

Yet this particular uncanniness in creating palatable medieval poetry is very the snag which threatens to tear Francis’ artwork in two. In many ways, Francis’ Dafydd is a modern man in an alien world and we are led to relate to his perplexed reactions to the environment around him. However, there is also artistic merit in blocking this connection and empathy in a translated text – othering the reader and allowing them to observe the period and its poetry with objectivity. Such an approach curbs our assumptions and halts the temptation to blur the medieval poet’s original meaning by superimposing our own lived experiences onto it. Dafydd’s poetry is ruled by the poetic conventions of his day – conventions which would challenge a modern audience expecting to empathise with the speaker through reading fluid, conversational verse. Indeed, these traditions of Dafydd’s Wales include frequent repetition of subjects and parenthetical tangents which disrupt the poem’s rhythm yet enhance the complexity of its message. In his preface to the anthology, Francis describes his reluctance to adhere to the verse forms of medieval Welsh poetry, preferring instead to write poems ‘after’ Dafydd ap Gwilym which are based on, but not fused with, his source material.

This effort has produced a pleasant collection of poems, yet a text more faithful to Dafydd’s formal restrictions would not appear ‘indigestible’ or ‘a historical oddity’ as Francis states; rather, it might have encouraged further reflection upon the detachment of our modern industrialised world, trapped in a climate crisis, from the medieval society of Dafydd’s time. Through being confronted by the poetic conventions and linguistic peculiarities of the source material, we can also truly engage with the essence of the medieval period and enjoy it on its own merits, rather than equating it with ours. Often, it is the art which stretches our comprehension that allow us to view ourselves in much wider context. 

The translation of The Tain by Ciaron Carson is an excellent example of such useful alienation. The modern reader is jolted into an unfamiliar world of blood-feuds and horror, of great losses and great pain. Yet paradoxically, the text itself remains often opaque. The verse is feverish, confused, and confusing, its dizzying array of disparate images flashing like strobe lighting. References to ancient warriors and landmarks lost to time wash over us and numb us. Carson translated the text faithfully, retaining the formal traditions emerging from centuries of oral culture in medieval Ireland. Such an approach often blurs the text’s meaning and disrupts its flow.  As a result, we deal with the medieval poet on their own terms, aware we are a foreigner in their culture. Yet this experience of battling with the text to find the truth is an invaluable one, as viewing the action in this way makes the moments of revelation and connection viscerally powerful. Here, the alienation caused by traditional poetic form and diction reminds us that we are epochs apart from the medieval world; we are not them and they are not us.

It would be a bold move for a translator to purposely obscure their source material, but such an approach would elevate the pleasing and comforting beauty of Francis’ verse to a higher level of poetic achievement. And, as with anything, a middle ground can be found. While Francis’ poem ‘Fox’ stresses the caddish confidence and aloof beauty of his subject, his omissions from the original text reveal this emphasis on connecting with the modern reader. Here the fox is a beautiful being to be observed. Compared with more literal translations, like those found in Rachel Bromwich’s 1982 collection, Francis’ poem seems ornate yet lacking in emotional and thematic depth. Bromwich’s interpretation retains the stanza in the original Welsh text revealing Dafydd’s initial instinct to kill the creature:

I aimed – [it lay] between my hands –

My yew-tree bow (a costly one) yonder [at him],

Intending, as a well-armed man

On the hill’s brow [to cause] a lively start,

- my weapon speeding on the open land-

To strike him with an arrow broad and long.

I drew, with [over] eager cast

[the bowstring] straight beyond [my] cheek

and - woe is me – a disastrous mishap,

into three fragments broke my bow.

Here, the fox is merely a pelt on legs, frustrating the bored lover. The frenetic action of the brief hunting scene is mirrored excellently by the preservation of the poetic devices sangiadu (parenthetical phrases) and dyflam (varied descriptions of one subject) as Dafydd fumbles with his phallic arrow. Bromwich herself describes the original poems as having ‘abrupt and jerky progression’ as a result ofthe form, leaving the work ‘richly enhanced’. Francis’ anthology certainly contains hints of sangiadu and dyflam, but these are truly just hints which do not trouble the reader and merely polish the verse. In comparison, Francis’ three neat stanzas of finely wrought, crystal clear text sterilises the poem’s impact and removes the sting and tang of Dafydd’s literary might. Quoting this stanza in full reveals the striking effect of maintaining relics of the original poetic traditions despite the reduced comprehensibility. It is understandable that Francis would be queasy about retaining both the subject matter and the form here, but these very aspects of Gwilym’s literature make it his own and roots it in his own age: beauty is often found in the grey areas of meaning and great art blossoms when it tests the reader to stretch their ability to connect with its subject. 

Francis has succeeded where many poets have stumbled by creating a neatly-packed anthology of accessible yet finely wrought poems. The Green Month has an ability to spark a childlike wonder in the reader about topics so familiar to us all: foxes, clocks, and owls are all turned inside out and displayed to us in glorious detail. If through being thrilled by such poems, a reader is encouraged to explore the depths of medieval poetry, they serve an excellent purpose. Francis’ anthology is a warm and reassuring text which dazzles like a peacock. Yet the medieval world, and Daffyd ap Gwilym in particular, has so much more to offer to readers. Dafydd’s poetic voice, when represented faithfully, refuses to be categorised and rejects the labels we may place upon it today. It is a boldly, proudly medieval voice which speaks to us with ringing clarity down the centuries. The difference between a good and a great translator is knowing how to clear the passage through the years and keep this voice alive. 

Art by Bliss Ashley