Tony Conran (1931-2013)

With the passing of Tony Conran Wales has lost one of its major writers, and those of us who knew him over many years have lost a man who was both a dear friend and mentor:  Tony was one of the most widely-read men I know and I recall with affection the many hours of thought-provoking and stimulating conversations over the years.  One will miss these.  

Tony’s appointment as a tutor in the English Department by Prof John Danby in the 1950s was an inspired one. (Tony had got a First in English and Philosophy at Bangor, but was at this point working as a clerk at in London.) His teaching ranged over material as diverse as Courtly Love in the Renaissance to Modern poetry; as a young member of staff, indeed, I became a ‘student’ member of his seminar course on the English Ballad, an experience I have never forgotten. He brought the whole stark, mysterious world of those early ballads to life. 

Tony’s Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967), translations into English of Welsh-language poetry from its very beginnings to the present, was of course a landmark in the relationship between Wales’s two literatures.  That book’s brilliant long Introduction opened the eyes of many non-Welsh speakers, including our English-language poets, to the riches of the Welsh poetic tradition. 

In many ways, though, Tony Conran’s presence on the Welsh literary scene as translator, critic and polemicist has been so potent that one sometimes feels that his own remarkable poetry has not received the critical attention it certainly deserves. Castles (1993), rooted in Welsh history but shot through with private experience, is for me one of the finest achievements by an ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poet in the last fifty years. 

It is fair to say that for a couple of generations of Bangor students—from the 1950s till he retired in the 1980s––Tony Conran was a hugely influential part of their university experience.  Tony and his wife Lesley seemed to hold continuous open house for young writers, singers and musicians. In many ways this epitomized Tony’s view of what the poet should be: a figure who was central to, and celebrated, community. In this he was acutely aware, of course, of the Welsh bardic tradition. A number of his poems were to celebrate births and weddings, or simply to express friendship and community.  In what he refers to in one of his poems as our  “fragmentary generations”, such expression is quietly heroic.

Tony Brown

Publication date: 22 January 2013