‘On one fair afternoon during a warm long golden summer’: The Visions of the Sleeping Bard (1)
Here we celebrate the podcast’s sixtieth episode by discussing one of the Welsh classics of the early modern period, Gweledigaethau’r Bardd Cwsg (‘The Visions of the Sleeping Bard’), a book published by Ellis Wynne in 1703. Although this amazing work is in a kind of adaptation of English books which were in turn translations of a Spanish text, it’s a very original creation, seeing as the author made his material Welsh in content and context as well as language.
Ellis Wynne was an ardent Anglican and a royalist, but his religious and political conservatism generated an artistic creation which extended the boundaries of Welsh prose with its vivacious style and memorable imagery. And although this book is in the end a moral work discussing sin, it does that in a way which is incredibly witty and funny.
