Our St. David’s Day celebration will be on Zoom, hopefully for the last time, as we begin to get vaccinated and can plan to be together soon.

The featured speaker this year will be none other than Dafydd ap Gwilym! However, because Dafydd is, understandably, unable to attend in person, John Bollard and Margaret Lloyd will be reading some of John's translations of poems by the great fourteenth-century poet.

Dafydd ap Gwilym is widely acknowledged as the greatest poet in a land of poets. He traveled all over Wales and composed poems to his patrons, his friends, and most often to his girlfriends and other women he hoped would be his girlfriend. Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether he was being serious or not, but at other times he was downright hilarious. His poems continue to delight audiences almost 700 years later.

John Bollard earned an MA in Medieval Welsh Language, Literature, and History from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a PhD from the University of Leeds with a comparative study of medieval Welsh and English Arthurian tales. His published studies of the Four Branches of The Mabinogi revolutionized our understanding of that great Welsh classic. He has published five books of translations of medieval Welsh prose and poetry, all with stunning photographs of the Welsh landscape by Anthony Griffiths.

Margaret Lloyd is a poet and painter, also with a PhD in English from the University of Leeds. She has published four books of poetry, including most recently her poetic response to The Mabinogi entitled Travelling on My Own Errands: Voices of Women from The Mabinogi (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2017)

A signed copy of John and Anthony's Cymru Dafydd ap Gwilym: Dafydd ap Gwilym's Wales (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2019), containing over thirty poems and seventy photos of places Dafydd knew, can be yours. Simply send $20 to John Bollard, 17 Lilly St., Florence, MA 01062. And don't forget to let him know to whom it should be signed.

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