Cymraeg & English...translation...bilingualism...how to melt the two languages, how to make something that is not a direct translation - always two lines of either/or; not to split it. I am not a fluent speaker of Cymraeg - I get by. My Grandad spoke it, he learnt it as a boy when he ran away from Cardiff and ended up on a farm in Treletert, Sir Benfro. The language is around me where I live. Some words or phrases are so embedded that I know I don't translate them.
I have learnt from my collecting of plants names in English and the Brythonic languages [and the scientific names], that I can flounder over a noun, a name, when I look at a plant with so many names in my head - cat got your tongue?...fur in the throat?...
I can't do it, the thing that I want - some things just can't occupy the same space at the same time and be clear, be understood, be read.
But...Howard Gardens the art school - the Cardiff School of art, the Howard Garden's campus of South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education, of UWIC...that was there and isn't now, and the empty space is filled with new rooms, corridors, stairwells, my memory overlays what was with what is. The impossibility of walking the corridors of my memory, of touching the plastic covered handrails of stair rails, of wedging myself up by the ceiling of the lift...
black & white photo: Dave Daggers, Cardiff/Caerdydd
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