Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick offers his thoughts on the interplay between contemporary language, literature and culture in Wales:

I was brought up in a politically concerned household in which an ‘independent Wales’ was never considered a possibility. Family members spoke some Welsh, everyone learned Welsh in school, but there could only be one language of artistic expression - English.

For me, as a teenager, Pink Floyd playing ‘Astronomy Domine’ at Bridgend’s Kee Club, and the visit of the Beatles to Bangor, both in 1967, were far more significant, for example, than the investiture of Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son as ‘Prince of Wales’ in 1969. (The Beatles in Bangor was the first occasion I realised there was a ‘north’, i.e. a ‘different’ Wales. My mother at 78 has never been to that different Wales, only 120 miles away.)

But, with exceptions such as the poetry magazine Second Aeon, the revolutions supposedly brought about by pop culture were slow to appear in Welsh literatures. Indeed, the post-War but pre- ‘liberation’ period continued longer in Wales than most places. For some, it was an eternity. Duncan Bush brilliantly invokes the mood in his collection, Midway (1998), which also deals with some of the ‘multiple-personality’ dilemmas - urban/rural, north/south, monolingual/bilingual - and class issues of being Welsh.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Poet Bobi Jones speaks for many in asserting that knowledge of Welsh is an essential part of ‘a basic civilised education’. Bilingualism for Welsh people ensures confidence in identity and interest ‘in the roots of one’s own country, its recent society, the explanation of so much in the national psyche and history, the environment of places and their names’. Such knowledge helps people resist ‘the pressures of uniformity that prevent [the] understanding [of the] multiform international world of relationships’.

Compounding these internal misreadings has been the lack of adequate translation of literature from ‘Cymraeg’ into English. Too often translation has been seen as a dutiful process rather than a creative delight [...] This situation is gradually changing, however. A recent event was the appearance of The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) which seeks to represent in English the highlights of the twentieth-century’s Welsh poetry.

It is thus from real tragedies of cultural incomprehension that Wales has sought to emerge since the 1960s. The catalyst for new-found tolerance and self-awareness was inevitably, if ironically, globalisation. Yet with this have come the interruption of rural and industrial continuities, family and neighbourhood solidarity, and the transformation of Welsh speaking Wales into what is in danger of becoming a series of pockets and enclaves threatened with inundation.

Despite globalisation, Welsh language writers remain intimately in touch with their roots. Strict metre poetry, for example, with its unique sonic rules, some of them fifteen hundred years old, does not merely offer writing opportunities. For some, it confers spiritual value and is proof of irreducible national distinctiveness. And nothing is ruled out, with poetry written to rules of strict metre just as frequently heard chanted over a trip-hop beat.

In literary terms Wales has been famous for the legend of Dylan Thomas - the hard-drinking poet who toured the USA like a rock star and was due to work with Stravinsky, but died in New York in 1953, aged 39. Some readers will know the flinty parables of R.S. Thomas, whose poetry flourished later in the century. As for writers in the Welsh language, many remain a mystery, although this is gradually changing through the work of Welsh Literature Abroad, an agency established in 2000 to facilitate translation of Welsh literatures worldwide.

Wales today is officially a bilingual country with a population of some three million which covers an area of 21,000 square kilometres. Its population density is half that of the UK average. One of its chief glories is its coastline, 1200 kilometres long. As to its landscape, no other European country of its size can match its variety. Everyone speaks English, whilst 21% of the population also speak Welsh, many as a first language, a Celtic language unrelated to English.

Though these statistics indicate that Welsh language writers might be handicapped, the irony is that because of subsidised media, and the loyalty of the Welsh market, they might be better read in their communities than English language writers in theirs. Indeed, for a host of reasons, artistic activity amongst Welsh speakers seems more intense.

With the exceptions of the south Wales seaports, Wales is remarkably homogeneous. Most in-migration is from England. Yet what stands out is the contribution made by descendants of Italian, Chinese and Bangladeshi migrants. As for writers, a surprisingly high proportion of English language authors were either brought up or now live outside Wales. This has broadened the question of whether a distinctively ‘Welsh’ literature can be produced in the English language. Yet no matter how literature in Wales is defined, today it certainly exists in a greater variety than ever before.

• Robert Minhinnick's writing above is excerpted from his introduction to Turning Tides: Contemporary Writing from Wales, a publication by Wales Arts International and Welsh Literature Abroad (2004).