Europe East and West by Norman Davies

Author:Norman Davies [Norman Davies]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

O Ri’ y’ Ryri yw’r oera – o’r âr

Ar oror wir arwa;

O’r awyr a yr Eira,

O’i ryw i roi rew a’r ia.1

Cold is the snow on Snowdon’s brow

It makes the air so chill . . .

From Snowdon’s hill the breezes chill

Can freeze the very snow.

Such was ‘the harangue’ which Borrow ‘uttered’ on the summit of Y Wyddfa, adding when he noted the ‘grinning scorn’ of some passing English tourists, ‘I am ashamed to say that I am an Englishman.’2 Borrow’s sense of outrage has stayed with me. In my list of deadly sins, there are few things worse than pouring scorn on other people’s cultures through ignorance.

Around the time that I encountered Borrow, I also came across an unusual form of the French language. I had already started to learn French at school, and I belonged to a generation which was sent to church twice every Sunday and was expected to sit for forty-five or fifty minutes through incredibly tedious and verbose sermons. I was saved by a small black volume which someone had left in our family pew box long before. It was La Sainte Bible, published in a late-nineteenth-century Protestant edition, either in Grenoble or Geneva. Twice a week I would pore over its tiny print, comparing its stilted cadences with passages that I knew from the King James Bible and wrestling with its fondness for things like the past subjunctive. Bit by bit, as the booming sermons bounced off my lowered head, I made sense of it. At school I had benefited from the direct method as invented by an enterprising Bolton teacher called Emma Saxelby and from her textbook called En route. But it was the little black book in the pew box which taught me another important lesson. The funny foreign sounds and strange words that we practised in class were tiny cogs in a much bigger machine. They were steps leading to a much wider world still to be experienced. Somewhere out there were other intriguing countries with languages and literatures and histories of their own.

Heureux les pauvres en esprit, car le royaume des cieux est à eux:

Heureux ceux qui sont dans l’affliction, car ils seront consolés:

Heureux les débonnaires: car ils hériteront la terre.

Heureux ceux qui ont faim et soif de la justice, car ils seront raissaisiés:

Heureux les miséricordieux: car ils obtiendront la miséricorde.

Heureux ceux qui ont le coeur pur: car ils verront Dieu.

Heureux ceux qui procurent la paix, car ils seront appelés enfants de Dieu.

Heureux ceux qui sont persécutés pour la justice: car le royaume des cieux est à eux.

Vous serez heureux lorsqu’à cause de moi on vous dira des injures, qu’on vous persécutera, et qu’on dira faussement contre vous toute sorte de mal.

Rejouissez-vous alors, et tressaillez de joie, parce que votre récompense sera grande . . .3

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

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