Joseph Clancy
American translator of Welsh literature who found Aberystwyth more congenial than New York
J fromOSEPH CLANCY, who has died aged 88, was a translator of Welsh poetry and prose into English and tackled all periods, The Gododdin, written in Old Welsh in the 6th century, to the work of contemporary writers such as Gwyn Thomas, Kate Roberts and Bobi Jones.
Joseph Patrick Clancy was born in New York on March 8 1928, the son of Joseph, a typesetter, and Maude Clancy. For years Joseph’s father was unable to work due to ill health and Maude Clancy supported the family by working as a supervisor in a hotel.
After Fordham High School, in New York, Clancy attended Fordham University in the Bronx and went on to become a lecturer in English at Marymount Manhattan College.
He had discovered the existence of Welsh poetry while reading Gwyn Williams’s book An Introduction to Welsh Poetry in 1953, and decided to devote the rest of his life to interpreting the language and literature of Wales.
After spending several years acquiring a reading knowledge of literary Welsh, he paid his first visit to Wales in 1961 and four years later published Medieval Welsh Lyrics. Even Welsh scholars, not the easiest to please when their literature is turned into “the thin language”, were impressed. For the first time, it seemed that Welsh had found a translator capable of conveying the complexities of its prosody and making it sound like poetry in its own right.
Clancy followed this with The Earliest Welsh Poetry, in which he succeeded in rendering in intelligible modern English the Old Welsh spoken in the northern parts of Britain in the 6th century.
With his election to membership of the Welsh Academy in 1971, Clancy established his reputation as a translator, and in 1982 he published Twentieth Century Welsh Poems, which included work by all the great names of modern Welsh literature.
He also tackled many prose works, his most admired of which was The World of Kate Roberts (1991), a selection of 35 short stories and two novellas of the most celebrated of Welsh prose writers, who took as her subject matter the lives of the quarrymencrofters of north-west Wales and their fortitude in the face of disaster.
Clancy’s move to Aberystwyth in 1990 seemed, he would later recall, like a homecoming. After the metropolitan sprawl of New York, he found the small town on Cardigan Bay a very congenial place to live, with a church, bookshops, libraries, pubs and university all within walking distance from his house.
A genial man, he had made many friends among writers and teachers living in the area and immersed himself in the literary affairs of his adopted country. Curiously, although he would always encourage others to speak Welsh – for he delighted in hearing it used as a living language
– he could not speak it.
After settling in Wales with his wife Gerrie, a children’s author, he continued to write, producing poetry of his own using the traditional Welsh forms. In 1994 he published his second collection of poems, Here and There, in which he explored his American identity and how it had been enriched by living in Wales. A third, Ordinary Time, appeared in 2000, and revealed Clancy as a love poet of great tenderness and passion.
For his work as poet and translator Joe Clancy was awarded an honorary Dlitt by the University of Wales in 1998.
His wife predeceased him and he is survived by his eight children. One of his sons, Thomas Clancy, is Professor of Celtic at Glasgow University.
Joseph Clancy, born March 8 1928, died February 27 2017