He plays through movies that run in our minds and resists our tendencies to view other peoples’ stories in the cinematic simplicity of black and white. We see in a geranium what Ansett describes as “beautiful to me but dying underneath, ” and we know the truth of the flower rings true for the world. He describes in vivid detail those joys that distract like Cadillacs driving past and those joys that offer “a glimpse of glory, something I knew before ”-and the homesick heart feels the pierce of hiraeth everywhere. He writes of marriage, illness, and the breakneck speed of modern life. Would it change who I become? -Joel Ansettįrom this question, an entire album of pictures unfolds: lyrical sketches of life lived between grief and desire, the same loss and longing for home we all know so well. With each song comes different images of people, relationships, and places. It’s little wonder that this first song, “Homesick,” describes the gardens of Manito Park in Spokane through Edenic imagery like “the cool of the day ” and “angels and flames, ” as Ansett wrestles with his own sense of loss and desire. Then the lament turns to a question: I have no idea if Ansett has any Welsh running through his blood, but I can honestly say that keeping his album in my car disk player (because I still have one of those) over the last six months has changed the way I understand hiraeth in my own life. So Denver-based singer-songwriter Joel Ansett writes in the opening track of his sophomore album, aptly-titled A Place I Knew Before. There’s one more definition I’ve recently added to my collection of possible translations, and it may just be my favorite one yet:īut I knew before, I knew before -Joel Ansett It is simultaneously grief and desire-a restless dissatisfaction with what is that comes from a weary confidence that something else used to be.Ĭan you feel the shortcomings of the English language here? Can you grasp the depth of the Welsh-how seven letters could scrawl out so much of what it means to be human? It’s going to take something more creative than a line from Webster to define. It’s most often described as a nostalgia or, better yet, homesickness-but not one that can be easily cured by a plane ticket. It’s a homesickness for a home you’ve never been to, one you’ve never seen or can no longer return to, sometimes even one that never existed at all. I’ve mentioned it here before, as have others. There’s nothing like viewing the world through the lens of another language to show you how limited your own can be. We can’t ever fully merge two lexical frameworks into one, and our translations often fall short of the original concept. Some vocabularies don’t concisely reach into others.Īll this is to say that the Welsh word Hiraeth is one I’m still learning how to wrap my English arms around.
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