My discussion aims not so much to provide an answer to the thorny question of whether Dafydd ap Gwilym was a Europhile - this has been attempted by many a critic — as to examine the way in which this question has become the accepted framework within which to study Dafydd’s work. In my introductory section I discuss the ways in which criticism has investigated Dafydd’s possible debt to Continental traditions, with special reference to love poems (which have most frequently been juxtaposed to French models) ; this is followed by a reading of Morfudd fel yr Haul. Then I outline the case for Dafydd’s possible debt to a sub-literary tradition, before concentrating, in my concluding section, on his so-called ‘fabliau’ poems. In my discussion of Trajferth Mewn Tafarn and Cyfeddach, I explore the implications of using imported frameworks for reading Dafydd’s poetry, and question the appropriateness of the classification of certain of his poems as ‘fabliau type’. I suggest that the investigation of the European dimension, with its necessary bias towards ‘influence’ and ‘source’ studies, is not the only respectable scholarly activity, and is a tendency that has sometimes eclipsed the sophistication of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s individual texts. I end with another type of debt to Europe, that owed by Dafydd ap Gwilym studies today to critics Chotzen and Stern, not only for their painstaking detective work, but for treating him as the equal of his more famous Continental counterparts.

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This article explores the political implications of different types of translation between French and Breton. The bilingual parallel text publication practice of militant poets active in 1960s and 1970s Brittany is discussed in relation to their perception of Brittany as an 'internal colony', and against the French State's attitude towards regional languages. I argue that the Breton versions of these poems that appear alongside the French function as a synecdoche for racial and cultural oppression and injustice across the world. Translations into Breton from other minority cultures are shown to allow the mapping of political allegiances, and a sense of solidarity. The literature produced in the wake of Gwalarn, a periodical which was characterized by its enthusiasm for translation into Breton, is contrasted with the basically Romantic literature produced by nineteenth-century Breton enthusiasts. For Gwalarnistes translation into Breton from world literature was a key in escaping the cliché-ridden Brittany that had become familiar in Breton literature. The article concludes by considering the implications of translation out of a minority language and into the politically dominant language. Drawing on work in postcolonial translation studies, as well as comments by Welsh writers and critics on the issue of translation, I suggest that translation can be complex and indeed dangerous in the case of a minority culture such as Brittany's, and conclude that there can therefore be no all-encompassing theory of translation.keywords Brittany, Translation, Poetry, Internal colonialism, Minority literature All Francophone Breton literature is written between the two main languages of Brittany: Breton, the indigenous Celtic language, and French, the language of the nation-state of which Brittany forms a part. This modern French-language literature of Brittany, born in the wake of Romanticism, 1 was and arguably still is dependent on the Breton language for its existence. Many French-language texts from Brittany are translations in the straightforward sense of being a French version of a text romance studies

The place of Celts and Celticity in the French imagination shifts radically during the course of the nineteenth century. 1 It is widely accepted that Ernest Renan's essay "La poésie des races celtiques" (Poetry of the Celtic Races) of 1854 is key in this development.Renan is often referred to as the point of departure in any investigation of the dominant images that we have of Brittanyindeed of Celticnesstoday. Along with Matthew Arnold's On Celtic Literature (1867), which is indebted to Renan's text, "La poésie des races celtiques" occupies a key position in the development of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline, and has colored views of Celtic lands and people ever since. The discourse inaugurated by Renan and Arnold has been described as a "Celticism," modeled on Edward Said's "Orientalism" (Mc Cormack 1985, 220; Kiberd 1996, 6), and Arnold's work in embellishing and interpreting Renan has been described as "arguably the most influential piece ever written in the field of Celtic studies" (Chapman 1992, 25).However, it is notable that, despite the mention of "race" in the title of Renan's essay, the discussion of poetry contained within seems to be just as much about place, as a passage near the opening demonstrates:"Le sommet des arbres se dépouille et se tord; la bruyère étend au loin sa teinte uniforme; le granit perce à chaque pas un sol trop maigre pour le revêtir; une mer presque toujours sombre forme à l'horizon un cercle d'éternels gémissements" (The treetops lay themselves bare and writhe; the heather extends its unchanging hue into the distance; at every step granite breaks through a topsoil too thin to clothe it; at the horizon an almost-always somber sea forms a circle of eternal sighs) (1928, 375-376). 2 In what is ostensibly a study of literature, we find a landscape conjured up by a vocabulary of human suffering called on to express a psychological state. 3 The present article explores descriptions of Celtic places that foreground the question of poetry and poeticness, with a focus on travel writing about two Celtic places, Brittany and Wales, by Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the foremost historian of his generation in what was a golden age of French history. Michelet's Breton pages are well known, since the notes in his travel journal for August 1831 were reworked to form the Breton section of his Tableau de la France (1833), before being taken up again in La Mer (1861), to be finally published posthumously as part of his Journal ([1828-1848] 1959). 4 His Welsh pages, on the other hand, have been overlooked, but repay close attention, not least

It has rightly been argued that the growth of the cult of the local in France has to do with France's need to re-invent its own past in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. This article suggests the importance of the Industrial Revolution, and changes to physical environments in this same development, by analysing travelogues by Celtomaniac French visitors to Wales in the 1860s. Unlike their own Celtic land, Brittany, Wales was a place where the issues of modernization, industrialization and changes to the local environment met head on with that of the survival of an ancient indigenous culture.