The Interpreter
"Born in 1780 and still [1971] remembered, Dick of Aberdaron, otherwise Richard Robert Jones, was the son of a carpenter; he had a genius for languages and learned a number of them, fourteen say some, thirty-five say others, but found no useful purpose for his skill and wandered through the country as a tramp, dying in 1843 at St. Asaph."—Sean Jennett, Travellers Guide, North Wales
It had to be a Welshman.
Don't judge them by the ones in jail today For contempt of English-language courts and road signs— Or do, if you perceive such stiff-neckedness At work in his defeat.
They are a tonguey people; It may be that they hear our babbling world As one big polylingual eisteddfod, and like it so, An unpop festival of useless literacy, The ability to spell doom in sixty languages And not believe each other.
But a dream begets responsibilities.
The Welsh dreamed him.
This shining man was evidently sent To test our readiness—the readiness is all— And people saw him coming.
They learned to deflect his gently-winding thrust By casting him as touched, a useless wonder, Perhaps even as a threat, At very best a wandering entertainer.
They are a village people:
The guidebook makes this clear.
Who visited this test upon them, Our world's stalwart villagers? They were the people with the gift to tell us We could talk to ourselves all over and make sense:
He was their gift. But they wouldn't give him to us.
The people with the gab, and the resistance, The intonation, and the unbelief, They were the chosen indicator.
He was our symbol, to fust in them unused. We were not ready yet.
So now that uncommitted energy Hitchhikes through Burundi and Armagh Dreaming the hope of readiness, Dreaming of our dream that we must dream again To call him forth in an embodied form, The son of some new nameless carpenter.
Till then, remembering speechlessly in guidebooks, We drown the great forgotten language in tourist tongues.
How many more prophet tramps must we neglect Before God's skyscraper bites the garbled dust?
