This splendid book shows Gaelic verse alive and kicking. It’s an anthology of work by eighteen poets, which is a good number. There have been anthologies of Gaelic verse by four poets (too few) and a hundred (too many). What’s more, I dislike anthologies that divide poems into categories like ‘Elegy’, ‘Eulogy’, ‘Love’, ‘Satire’. These are obviously designed for students, to make them think inside the box, not outside it. But this one divides the poems into sections like ‘Detritus of the Centuries’, ‘Rocked by the Waters’, ‘Highland Tapestry’ or ‘The Big Smoke’, making one’s little grey cells jump up and down in excitement, for example: “What’s this one doing in ‘New Day Dawning?’? I thought ‘New Day Dawning’ must be about ‘hope’. Maybe it’s about ‘change’? Or maybe …”
Here’s another good thing. The Gaelic is on every left-hand page, with a translation facing it on the right-hand page. So common sense applies. I remember collections of Gaelic verse that relegated translations (when there were any) to small type at the end of the book, just to show who’s boss. But that’s inconvenient. I also remember collections that put the translation on the left and the original on the right, from some notion that the right-hand page has priority over the left. I never understood that. Debates raged! But it’s all been settled now, for there’s a consensus that translations are not foreign to the creative process, but part of it. This is acknowledged in the ‘Contents’, where the translations are listed as poems in their own right.
I can cite loads of examples. Not all the translations are in English. Some are in Scots, French or Spanish, thanks to Sheila Templeton and Mark Turner. There’s one that reproduces quite a lot of Gaelic – the one by Eoghan Stewart called ‘’s dìomhainn dhuinn a bhith cho faoin’, where the ‘English’ title is the same – it means something like ‘it’s daft for us to be so daft’. Some are in prose. Not stodgy prose, but poetic prose. Some are by the makers of the originals, others by somebody else. In many cases ‘somebody else’ is one of the band of eighteen, so giving the reader a sense of teamwork. There are some lovely tricks, too. Stewart has a poem called ‘Dante air an C1144 agus U1207’, ‘Dante on the C114 and U1207’, with a wonderful subtitle on the English side only, Signor Aligheri’s Campervan Trip to Kinloch Hourn. On the left-hand side he comes to a verse which, having a tedious old twentieth-century mindset, I might have translated like this, trying to mirror the original:
the burn going rushing, flowing, pale-berried, white
the streamlet curvy, dun, red-berried through the gap
the waterspout roaring, howling, merry-berried, high
and the road a twisty ladder coming down to a lochan
but Stewart translates it like this:
the fair flowing fruit burn the hidden twisted dark berry stream through the gap the high bellowing roaring juicy torrent and the road
like a twisted
ladder
descending
to
LOCH BEAG
Sometimes the translator goes even further. In ‘Balbh’, ‘Dumb’, Kevin MacNeil begins and ends his translation by translating, but there’s something odd in the middle. The poem is about bumping into an old friend or lover, and the original leads us to expect ‘I learned in an instant what it is like every time you see a map and I don’t see anything but myself swimming slowly through the green rooms of your mind …’ But instead of ‘I don’t see anything but myself …’ we are given: ‘your mind sees nothing but this is where they found his boat. I see myself …’ Is this a memory of a drowning, real or metaphorical, to which the key is supplied only in the translation? Anyway, it reminds me of Iain Crichton Smith’s Gun fhios dhomh tha thu air m’ aigeann m’ inntinn … ’s mise slaodadh ’s a slaodadh air uachdar cuain. “Without my knowing it you are at the bottom of my mind … and I hauling and hauling on the surface.”
Of course, once you allow translations to deviate, there’s a loss of control, which may be unsettling to some readers, fun to others. Deviations can be deliberate or accidental. When Mary Ann Kennedy translates her own Cois laimrig as ‘By the deck’ I’m sure she means it, although Cois laimrig means ‘By the harbour’. But when Peter Mackay talks of iorghail bhalbh mo chànain / a’ snàmh gu sìorraidh gu dachaigh chaillte, and Ciaran Carson translates it as ‘the dumb babble of my languages / swimming forever towards their lost ground’, I wonder about ‘languages’ and ‘towards their lost ground’. To my mind, Mackay has spoken of ‘my language’ and ‘to a lost home’. If Carson has made a mistake, he’s traduced the poem.
Again, to a wonderful rhymed poem by Niall O’Gallagher called ‘A’ Chlàrsach Bhriste’, ‘The Broken Harp’, Mackay contributes a splendid rhymed translation. But Mackay has missed a stanza! Did the task defeat him? Surely not.
cnagan cnàmha
chaill an craiceann
air an seargadh leis an spàirn.some bony pins
have lost their skins
worn thin by tough demands
There, that’s the translation completed, though not as well as Mackay would have done it.
Of course translation has its limits. For example, in most cases the English-only reader can’t necessarily know if the original is in rhyme – as with Flora MacPhail’s traditionally-structured ‘An Coileach Coigreach’, ‘The Alien Cockerel’. But before I leave the translation issue I want to mention Sandy Donaldson Jones’s clever ‘Easgann Loch Nis’, ‘The Loch Ness Eel’. Apparently, she says, Nessie has been scientifically identified as an ‘ancient huge European eel’ (seann easgann mòr Eòrpach). The poem ends:
Ach tha an fhìrinn
nas èibhinn na uirsgeul:
nise ar fàilt’ air
an easgann Eòrpach
annasach aibhseach.
Annsachd ùr na h-Albann:
Fuirich!
I read this and understood the last word as ‘Wait!’ Or ‘Hold on!’ But then I glanced across and found:
But truth is
stranger than fiction:
so now welcome to
the strange, enormous
European eel.
Scotland’s new darling:
remain!
It turns out to be a political statement to which the English reader is privy, and the Gaelic reader is not. Yup, translations can be useful. Value added.
I mentioned Iain Crichton Smith. It’s good to see occasional echoes of the twentieth-century greats. Sorley MacLean in Jones’s ‘Ortha Crann nan Teud’, ‘Incantation of the Harp-Strings-Tree’, and Maggie Rabatski’s ‘Naidheachd’, ‘News’. Derick Thomson in Mackay’s ‘An Tobar’, ‘The Well’, and Marion F. Morrison’s ‘Cha bu Mhise Sgeulachd mo Mhàthar’, ‘I am Not My Mother’s Story’.
I also mentioned the fun to be had from the sections the book is divided into. I was intrigued to assess what bits of our history are tackled in ‘The Detritus of the Centuries’. Well, in chronological order they turn out to be: Eve in Eden, the Celtic saints, the Vikings, the Union, the Jacobites, St Kilda, crofting, emigration, and Margaret Fay Shaw. Mackay’s ‘An Tunail Seumasach’, ‘The Jacobite Wormhole’, is the weirdest Jacobite poem you’ve ever read. But I can’t resist commenting on Babs Macgregor’s point (in her subtitle to ‘Clann a’ Cheò’, ‘Children of the Smoke’) that ‘Children of the Mist’ was a name attributed by Scott to the MacGregors. Indeed it was, but the names Clann a’ Cheathaich and Coire a’ Cheathaich are old. I believe that the translations ‘Children of the Mist’ and ‘Misty Corry’ are folk etymologies, and that these names really mean ‘Eochaidh’s Tribe’ and ‘Eochaidh’s Corry’. Eochaidh was king of the Picts.
There are some outstandingly good poems in the collection. Maletta MacPhail’s ‘Leòmainn’, ‘Moths’, and Mark Turner’s ‘Briathrachas’, ‘Lexicon’, are profound reflections on the rural roots of the modern Gaelic language. Marion F. Morrison’s ‘Màiri à Magdala, na h-Aonar le a Smuaintean’, ‘Mary of Magdala, by Herself’, is a delicate portrait of Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Christ. Mackay’s ‘Sìoda’, ‘Silk’, is an astonishing description of a manufacturing process. His ‘Geographical Exclusions Apply’, ‘Geographical Exclusions Apply’ (sic), is the first Gaelic poem I know of that deals with the genocide perpetrated by the Skyeman Angus MacMillan on the aborigines of Gippsland in Australia. And there is a very good poem about the sea by Anne Frater.
Maggie Rabatski’s ‘Litir chun na Nighinn agam’ is a love-song to Spring with a surprising ending. Marion F. Morrison’s ‘Macan aig Trì (Uairean sa Mhadainn)’, ‘Little Boy at 3 (a.m.)’ is a beautiful poem about childhood (and parenthood). Niall Gordon’s ‘Gnùis Shoilleir’, ‘Clear Complexion’, describes the unalloyed delight of an old person at being spoken to by a younger person in Gaelic. Calum L. MacLeod’s ‘Clach-bhleith’, ‘Whet’, brings us on an intriguing journey into a madman’s stomach. And two poems especially seem to point us to a better future – Marion F. Morrison’s ‘Moire Mhàthair ’s a Pàiste fon Turaid Faire’, ‘Madonna and Child of the Rocket Range’, and Martin MacIntyre’s ‘Aogasg na h-Ighinn Uibhistich’, ‘Faces of a Uist Girl’.
On the burning issues of the day, there are poems on Ukraine by Martin MacIntyre and on Black Lives Matter by Sandy Donaldson Jones. And ‘An Gàidheal’ by Babs Macgregor is an important poem about inclusiveness. It’s important because Macgregor’s translation reflects the original exactly, with one exception, and because it is clearly about the experience of the Gael as a big-city exile, and how he is kept going by his faith. So what is the exception? The title of the translation is ‘The Pakistani’.
Reading this book gives me a great sense of hope that Gaelic language and literature will survive the twenty-first century after all. When people can make poems as good as this, there must be a lot of good stuff going on underneath.
Sradagan san Iarmailt: Ginealach Ùr Bhàrd Gàidhealach / Sparks in the Firmament: A New Generation of Gaelic Poets is published by Francis Boutle.
