A Peek into the Process: Tools

Susan Walton on Translating Repetitions in Owain Owain’s Wild Geese

Variations of a certain theme—recurring words or phrases, whether identical or nearly so—are a narrative technique often employed to unsettle the reader, make them lose their footing, and pull them into a dizzying whirl. Here, Susan Walton shares her approach to translating such recurring phrases in Owain Owain’s Wild Geese.

I noticed as I was typing that words and phrases kept repeating, or near-repeating. These repetitions underscore the state of mind of the person who’s addressing the reader—or talking to themself. I made a table to try and work out how best to treat the repetitions that occur in the Welsh. It was a working tool, so there may be discrepancies between this and the final text.

Several of the phrases in the table could go in more than one progression cell. For example, “listened to them” and “go past” both have progressions, so the sentence: “Only listened to them going past.” contains two progression patterns.

The table helped me choose between possible interchangeable wordings in English. For example, I could have translated: Mae ’na ddeufis wedi mynd as “Two months have gone by,” but instead I made it: “Two months have passed.” The table helped me decide the wording that would best maintain the mannered writing style.

Some phrases don’t fall neatly into patterns, of course. For example, the adjective cywir (mutated to gywir in the contexts that occur in the text) means “correct” but is also used in the conventional wording equivalent to “Yours sincerely” in English. We have first: ei “Annwyl Gyfaill” a’i “gywir iawn,” meaning: “its ‘Dear Friend’ and its ‘sincerely’.” So in a’r “Annwyl Gyfaill”, yn gywir iawn, I thought it better to go with “and the ‘Dear Friend,’ very sincere” rather than “and the ‘Dear Friend,’ very correct.”

I also couldn’t make the repetition of llwyd (“grey”) and llwydo, which is the verb from “grey”—“to go grey”—work in English. Llwydo is how you say “to go mouldy” in Welsh. In English, “to go grey” usually applies to hair, whereas in Welsh, britho, i.e., “to variegate/speckle”, is used for hair going grey.

Notes on the Repeated Words Table

Owain Owain (1929–1993) was a writer, physicist, and language activist. He founded Tafod Y Ddraig, the Welsh Language Society newspaper, which remains a cornerstone of Welsh-language activism, and designed the ubiquitous “Dragon’s Tongue” logo. A prolific and eclectic writer, his biography Mical (Gwasg Gomer, 1976) won Literature Wales’s Book of the Year award. His novel Y Dydd Olaf (“The Last Day”) was the inspiration for musical artist Gwenno Saunders’s 2014 album of the same name. Since then, it has been translated into Polish and Cornish and was republished in Welsh in 2021 by Gwasg y Bwthyn.

Susan Walton translates from Welsh/Cymraeg to English. She has published fifteen translated books with Gwasg Carreg Gwalch: nine historical novels for older children, the rest poetry and nonfiction.

In 2020, Susan was mentored as an emerging literary translator on a scheme arranged by Wales Literature Exchange, Literature Wales, and the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, England. The outcome was This House, a translation of the novella Yn y Tŷ Hwn by Sian Northey, published in the UK in 2024 by 3TimesRebel Press. Susan also occasionally writes original pieces; the first of these to be published is a poem called “Culverted Memories” in the anthology Afonydd (Arachne Press, 2025).

Her translation of another Sian Northey piece—the essay “How Are You?” “I’m Fine.”—represented Welsh/Cymraeg in the 2026 Words Without Borders suite of translations from the extant Celtic languages, The Beating Heart: New Celtic Writing.

Susan is currently involved in the “Colli Llais” project with the Theatr Bara Caws theater company, with an eye to translating drama in the future.

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