Another unfamiliar translated classic this month, but this time it’s from my home country. Retranslated into English by Katie Gramich in 2012, Kate Roberts’s 1936 novel Feet in Chains is acknowledged to be a masterpiece, albeit one likely to be unfamiliar to many speakers of the UK’s majority language.
Set in rural north Wales, the novel follows the fortunes of the Gruffydd family of Fridd Felen, a farm in the hills of Snowdonia, in the decades after Jane marries Ifan up until midway through the first world war. Drawing on Roberts’s observations and research during her time living in the region, it reveals the economic and social injustices that entrench and deepen inequality, leading many of the local quarrymen and their families to be crushed (literally and figuratively) by forces beyond their control.
Yet, although the subject matter is grim, this is not a relentlessly depressing novel. There is humour in the interactions between the characters and their jockeying for position in the local hierarchy. The opening, where newly married Jane attends chapel in her new community and nearly faints during the preacher’s longwinded sermon, sets up a series of rivalries and tensions that plays out beautifully in small domestic details, snide comments and telling looks over the following chapters.
Language is a central theme. Jane and Ifan do not speak English, although several of their sons go on to learn it when they win scholarships, and this provides the source for much discussion about identity and belonging over the course of the novel. Here’s an example from when Jane attends the prizegiving at her son Owen’s school:
‘I wish I could have understood what that man who was giving out the prizes was saying,’ said Jane Gruffydd, ‘didn’t he look like a nice man? Did he give a good speech, Owen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t it a shame we don’t understand a bit of English, Ann Ifans?’
‘I don’t know, indeed; you understand quite enough in this old world as it is. Who knows how much pain you manage to avoid by not knowing English?’
Owen and Jane Gruffydd laughed heartily.
Yet not knowing the language turns out to be a source of suffering in many situations. It is the ability to speak English that awakens the younger generation to some of the injustices built into their society. Through reading books in English, they learn about the political ideas of the left and are inspired to start unionising and agitating for better working conditions.
And it is Jane’s inability to speak the language of the national administration that leads to the cruellest scene in the book, when she receives a letter about her son, Twm, who is away fighting in the trenches in France.
These papers were in English. She saw Twm’s name on them and his army number, and there was another thick sheet of white paper with just a small bit of English on it.
She ran to the shop with the letter.
‘Richard Huws, here’s an old letter in English come. Can you tell me what it is? It’s something to do with Twm at any rate.’
The shopkeeper read it, and held it in his hand for a moment, saying nothing.
‘Sit down, Jane Gruffydd,’ he said, tenderly.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ he said.
‘Is he still alive?’
‘No he isn’t, I’m afraid. Ann!’ he called from the shop into the kitchen, ‘bring a glass of water here now!’
At such moments, the reticence and understatement in the writing is extraordinarily powerful. Roberts brings us so close to her characters’ experiences that language of any kind is almost redundant (although the effect also relies on distance – the assumption that the reader, with the benefit of historical hindsight, will have a more accurate estimation than Jane of the realities of life in the trenches and understand the contents of the letter before she does). The dignity and spareness in the prose packs a punch that no amount of description could achieve.
That Roberts has made a deliberate choice to hold back at these points becomes clear when you set them against her meditations on the political and economic context of the characters’ lives. Perhaps more didactic than we are used to seeing in English-language British novels, these passages expand on the causes of the personal dramas we watch play out, making no secret of the author’s views on where the blame lies.
To those used to reading UK literature in English, this perspective and approach may feel unsettling and strange. The choice of what to explain and what to leave implicit may jar or surprise.
To me, however, as the grandchild of a bilingual Welsh speaker, there is something compellingly familiar about this narrative. In the rhythms and cadences Katie Gramich has achieved in her translation, I hear my grandfather’s voice. His startling directness, his mischievous humour. The story feels true and close in a way I don’t quite have the language to explain. For the first time, it has made me think about the realities of the lives of my great-great-uncles, who were at work down the mines in the same period as Ifan works in the quarry. They died long before I was born and spoke a different language to me, but through this story I was able to enter into something of their experience. Much as I found when I encountered my first book in translation from Welsh at the end of my 2012 year of reading the world, reading this novel felt like coming home.
Feet in Chains (Traed mewn Cyffion) by Kate Roberts, translated from the Welsh by Katie Gramich (Parthian Books, 2012)
Picture: ‘View‘ by Hefin Owen on flickr.com