Wednesday, 3 April 2013

How bible was my black

I found an old Welsh Bible in a bookshop a few weeks back, going for 50p, who could resist that? And here, picked for its sheer, eerie weirdness, is a verse: 

A'r pedwar anifail oedd ganddynt, bob un o honynt, chwech o adenydd o'u hamgylch ; ac yr oeddynt oddi fewn yn llawn llygaid : ac nid oeddynt yn gorphwys ddydd a nos, gan ddywedyd, Sanct, Sanct, Sanct, Arglwydd Dduw Hollalluog, yr hwn oedd, a'r hwn sydd, a'r hwn sydd i ddyfod.

A little bit of vocabulary to help you out. I've got a feeling Welsh spelling might have been revised at some point since this Bible was printed (an inscription by a D. H. Thomas of Treorchy gives us a terminus ante quem of 1915).

pedwar - four

chwech - six
llygad - eye
aden - wing

2 comments:

  1. Black indeed. Here's something a bit lighter. By lighter I mean Deteronomy. It fitted exactly what I wanted to say. And if I was in any way a man of God I'd probably say that's how yer average sermon is cobbled together. I'll get my cassock.

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  2. I love the smell of churches, and I'm often tempted to pop inside. I always feel too self conscious though to hang around for the sermons. Picking the bit to quote I went for one of the maddest verses I could remember - what the fuck is it all about? When I was younger I just assumed that it was based on the hallucinations of men who'd spent too long in the desert with only a few dates and locusts to eat. And actually that still sounds plausible. And it's the culmination of the judeo-christian narrative that supposedly forms the bedrock of our society.

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