Why Tesni loves this book
I loved the way Pamela Petro engages with, and understands, Cymraeg. She is American and studied in Cymru/Wales, learning the language as she went along. She really gets the animistic nature of Cymraeg, the way it is intimately bound to place and nature. Her exposition of words like hiraeth and cynefin is the best that I have found, and I learned so much from the book.
2 authors picked The Long Field as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer's life. Petro, author of Travels in an Old Tongue, twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate. It literally means "long field," but is also more than the English approximation of "homesickness." It's a name for the bone-deep longing felt for someone or something--a home, culture, language, a younger self--that you've lost or left behind. Hiraeth is embodied by Arthur, King of…
