Re-Thinking Literary Identities E-Book

AAVV

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 372

Beschreibung

Great Britain is changing, and so is Europe. The aim of this book, therefore, is to reflect upon the processes of (re)creation of art and literature within and against the backdrop of the shifting paradigms of the world as we know it. At a time when the political relations between Great Britain, Europe and the rest of the world are being redefined, this book examines the (de)construction of modern identities through the (de)codification of classical and contemporary mythologies. Gran Bretaña está cambiando, al igual que Europa.

Leseprobe

RE-THINKING LITERARY IDENTITIES

GREAT BRITAIN, EUROPE AND BEYOND

RE-THINKING LITERARYIDENTITIES

GREAT BRITAIN, EUROPE AND BEYOND

Laura Monrós-Gaspar (ed.)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographic rights organization (CEDRO - www.cedro.org).

© The contributors, 2017

© Universitat de València, 2017

Cover illustration:Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula Amstelodami, Gerard van Schagen, 1689

ISBN: 978-84-9134-261-8

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Laura Monrós-Gaspar

Transliterary dialogues in Great Britain and beyond

POLITICS AND POETICS

Miguel Teruel

Anns a’ Chànan Chùbhraidh/En la lengua fragante: Translating Scottish Gaelic Poetry

Stephe Harrop

Staging a Transforming Great Britain: Tamlane, the Social Turn, and the 2014 Referendum

María Gaviña Costero

Brian Friel: the Shaman, the Artist and the Trickster in Northern Ireland

FROM SPAIN TO GREAT BRITAIN AND BACK

Rocío. G. Sumillera

The Myth of Don Juan in Seventeenth-Century England: Shadwell’s The Libertine

Miriam Borham Puyal

Ladies-errant, Visionaries and Romancers: The Quixotic Myth in British Fiction (1614-1818)

PERFORMING SELVES

Ana Fernández-Caparrós Turina

Transformative otherworldly transitions in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice (2003)

Margarete Rubik

Kaspar Hauser in the Twenty-first Century: The Feral Child in Emma Donoghue’s novel Room

INTERROGATING CANONICAL IDENTITIES

Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara

Arthur Machen’s Pan (1894): From the Metaphysical Identity of Evil to the Late-Victorian Canons of Perversity

Lin Petterson

The Neo-Victorian Freak Show: Locus of Power, Desire and Significance

Victoria Puchal Terol

Imperial Travellers: from Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The collaborative project that led to this volume began as an academic discussion about the literary construction of Europe at the Universitat de València in 2015. The conference ‘Global Britannia: Myth, Appropriation and Identity’, from which the preliminary ideas for this volume sprung, was held at the Faculty of Philology, Translation and Media Studies at the UV. The conference benefited from funds kindly granted by the Faculty, the office of the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Culture and Social Equality, and the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat de València. The conference gathered a number of scholars from various European countries to discuss and (re)think modern constructions of literary identities. It also involved several speakers and respondents who have not participated in the volume, yet whose intellectual support has made a valuable contribution to this book. Special thanks are due to the members of the group ‘Literature, Arts and Performance’ at the Universitat de València, who have provided expertise and challenging questions that have enlarged our ideas on adaptation and reception studies. The conference hosted, as well, a stunning performance by Stephe Harrop of her own Janet’s Baby: A New Tamlane.

Several entities provided the financial support that made our research for this book possible. We gratefully acknowledge the Universitat de València for providing funds supporting the research carried out for the project ‘Construyendo Europa: literaturas en contacto y arquetipos literarios’ (V-INV-PRECOMP14-206579). Also the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Government of Spain for granting the project FFI2013-44154-P, ‘Nuevos parámetros críticos en torno al concepto de la huella y su aplicación a la literatura reciente en lengua inglesa’ and the Research Network FFI2015-71025-REDT ‘VINS: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies in Spain Network’ which funded the research presented in Chapter 9. Thanks are also due to the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València for providing the facilities for the conference from which the idea for this volume emerged.

TRANSLITERARY DIALOGUES INGREAT BRITAIN AND BEYOND

Laura Monrós GasparUniversitat de València

The comedy period film Love and Friendship, directed by Whit Stillman and based on Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan (ca.1794) was released in 2016, only a few months before the publication of this book. Stillman’s revisiting of Austen is but one of the latest contributions to what has been recently termed ‘Austenmania’. Together with the myriad adaptations, rewritings, sequels and prequels of the works by Jane Austen, the ‘Austenmania’ industry includes numberless cross-marketing products which range from organized tours on Jane Austen across England, to regency balls, and even dolls of the most famous characters of her novels. In the nature of these cultural products, Pucci and Thompson argue, there is an ‘attempt to promote a sense of unbroken tradition that confirms national identity and ostensibly works to repeat, to remake the past in film or through other objects’ (2003: 2). Indeed, adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels have been variously used to debate national identity and Englishness at various times throughout the history of Great Britain. For example, in the aftermath of World War I, adaptations of Austen’s works spearheaded the nostalgia of the inter-war period and between the 1940s and 1950s they served to define Englishness both in the UK and abroad (Cano 2017: 41-58). Yet for modern audiences, the pleasure in the process of adaptation does not come from the mere repetition of an idealized past alone but also from the Deleuzian ‘repetition with différence’, ‘the repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (Hutcheon 2006: 4).

The coexistence of the past with the present also underlies Ricoeur’s notion of the creative power of repetition which he claims to be contained ‘entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future’ (2004: 380). In looking at the future, the constant migration of stories to new media and cultural forms with new characters, plots and scenarios, is inevitably linked with the proliferation of new channels of mass diffusion. Whether as victims, consumers or producers of such massive re-creation of cultural artefacts, it seems as though we are reproducing the patterns of cultural consumerism reigning in the nineteenth century. The Victorians, Hutcheon contends, ‘had a habit of adapting just about everything—and in just about every possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs and dances, tableaux vivants were constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again’ (2006: xiii) Therefore, Hutcheon’s own analysis of the presence of adaptations in the miniseries and TV movies which won Emmy Awards back in 2006 is easily outdated if one considers the numberless appropriations of the works by Jane Austen on websites, blogs and other new media which have proliferated in the past decade.

This brief account of the widespread phenomenon of Austenmania exemplifies the perlocutionary power of certain canonical writers and literary figures from the Anglophone tradition to create a community of readers which, more often than not, becomes transnational. The chapters gathered in this book reflect on the power of such writers, characters and myths to speak to present-day audiences about the creation of modern identities. Yet the process, as Chapters 4 and 5 of this volume demonstrate, also works inversely, and real-life stories, literary figures and cultural images such as Don Quixote and Don Juan, from the Spanish tradition, or Caspar Hauser from the German, provide as well fruitful ground for cultural products in the Anglophone speaking world.

Julie Sanders manifests that ‘any exploration of intertextuality, and its specific manifestation in the forms of adaptation and appropriation, is inevitably interested in how art creates art, or how literature is made by literature’ (1). Yet adaptation and appropriation, as Emig and others have argued, ‘never happens inside an aesthetic vacuum, but inside ideologies and power structures’ (2012: 16). With these considerations in mind, the aim of this volume is to reflect upon the processes of (re) creation of art and literature within and against the backdrop of the shifting paradigms of Great Britain and Europe. Within this context, the book examines the (de)construction of modern identities through the (de)codification of classical and contemporary mythologies.

Under such premises, and in order to reflect on some of the countless literary interactions which occur between Great Britain and the world, the present book is divided into four sections which delve into the following main topics. First, issues concerning the relation between politics and poetics are raised by Teruel, Harrop and Gaviña in the contexts of contemporary Gaelic poetry in translation, the Scottish border and the social role of the Northern Irish writer. Translation is a key concept when dealing with languages and cultures in contact. On some occasions, global circulation of texts depends on translation, which inevitably constructs a qualitative distinction between languages which mostly responds to publishing and translation markets. Teruel’s approach, rather than focusing on the traditional conflict between a ‘usurper’ major language and a resilient minority one, is aimed at the ‘healthy tension between continuity and innovation’ which springs up between cultures in contact. The result, Teruel contends, is an aesthetic object which effaces political and national boundaries of all kinds for the sake of ‘poetical justice’. Following in the line of the literary interactions between the nations in Great Britain, the socio-cultural and political relationships between England and Scotland are scrutinized by Harrop under the umbrella of theatre and traditional practices of popular songs. At an ebullient historical moment—with Great Britain about to leave the European Union and Scotland demanding a second referendum for independence—Harrop borrows the changing mythic figure of the ballad-hero Tamlane to explore pressing contemporary issues of nation, identity and belonging. When a heated debate on new political realities is currently setting the European political agenda, Harrop turns to convivial and participatory performance to reflect on how contemporary appropriations of traditional songs might help to re-shape the concept of community and nation in a twenty-first century global context. Finally, two other popular myths, the shaman and the trickster, lie behind Gaviña’s approach to Northern Irish identity, which she sees as a central topic in Brian Friel’s drama. As one of the exponents of the Ulster intellectuals who from the 1970s began to be engaged with the problems of the community, Friel makes use of the archetypical figure of the trickster to voice his own political views on Northern Ireland. At the other end is the shaman, Friel’s own objective correlative which speaks for the inner self of the artist, his tribulations and torments when he engages, or not, with the problems of society.

The same principle lies behind the cultural interactions addressed in the ensuing section of the volume. The three chapters in the ‘Politics and Poetics’ section concur with the Bakhtinian premise that the literary process cannot be torn away from the cultural and socio-economic process (Bakhtin 1986: 140). With the title ‘From Spain to Great Britain and back’, the authors of section II in this book focus on the particular phenomenology of two major literary figures of world literature: Don Quixote and Don Juan. For Damrosch, it is only when a certain text moves, ‘when it is translated, when it is read at a remove, that the term “world literature” becomes a relevant descriptor’ (2003: 7). And indeed this is the case with Don Quixote and Don Juan who, as Borham and Sumillera argue in their corresponding chapters, have survived in Great Britain due to the debates on women’s access to knowledge which emerged in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the negative exemplarity of Don Juan in the 1600s. Sumillera recalls in Chapter 4 Salvador de Madariaga’s claim that Faust, Hamlet, Don Quixote and Don Juan are ‘the four greatest characters of European literature’. And indeed, even if Don Quixote and Don Juan were two eminently Spanish characters at the time of their literary birth, the works discussed by Borham and Sumillera provide ample evidence of how the two figures were informed with new cultural networks which in turn transformed them into British literary identities: the Hobbesian rake and the female Quixote.

With the turn of the twenty-first century, an increase in the globalization of the humanities and social sciences has encouraged new cultural negotiations between national particularism and cosmopolitan universalism. As a consequence, literature has become, more than ever, a space for cultural encounters. Streams of migration, artistic exchanges and political movements, for example, determine the export of culture or cultures in this globalized world. Such export of cultures inevitably entails the export of identities which are hunted both by the original and the ‘adapted’ cultures. The term identity, therefore, becomes more polysemic than ever as it is constructed by the tensions and polarities which stem from a globalized world. The chapters by Rubik and Fernández-Caparros in Part III of this volume provide substantial evidence of the literary interactions which emerge in this context of reflection and social performance of the self. The various voices of Eurydice which come together in Sarah Rhul’s homonymous play perform the different ways of overcoming the sense of loss in modern cultures. The death of Eurydice spreads beyond the borders of the Ovidian transformation which serves as its hypotext and transforms the stage into a Foucauldian heterotopia where the Ovidian landscape becomes Ruhl’s own prison of the mind. The process of maturity of the inner selves of both Orpheus and Eurydice is even more dramatic in the case of Emma Donoghue’s ‘Jack’, the feral child in Room (2010).

Jack epitomizes Rubik’s list of feral children who illustrate the embarrassing topicality of the literary lives of Caspar Hauser in the modern world. From Atalanta to Pecos Bill, from Emma Donoghue’s ‘Jack’ to the Fritzl case in Austria, the story of wild children both in Europe and across the Atlantic is endless and heterogeneous. Yet a single common feature dominates in these narratives: the construction and performance of identity of the feral child outside society. And this is what has quite been recently foregrounded with the homonymous film adaptation of Donohue’s novel directed by Lenny Abrahamson in 2015. In 2016, the film was nominated for the Best Screenplay for the Golden Globes, Best Adapted Screenplay for the BAFTA Awards and won, among others, the Canadian Screen Award for the best Adapted screenplay. In their promotional interviews, both Abrahamson and Donohue, who adapted the novel for the screen, remark that the film adaptation relied on the development of the identity of the individuals rather than on the crimes of the Fritzl case which inspired the book.

The focus on the psychological development of the individual is not incidental, as from the early modern period there has been a shift in interest from the ‘sacred to the psychological’ in the mapping of feral children and the delimitation of what a human being is (Newton n.d.: 14). Questions on race and the external definition of individuals which reached their highest peak with the Darwinian controversy gave way in the twentieth century to a psychological turn focused on an internal definition of feral children and identity; two topics which are the main focus of Rubik in her chapter.

Nineteenth-century social constructions of identity are discussed in the last section of this book, which is entitled ‘Interrogating canonical identities’. Post-Darwinian theories on evolution and the representation of the other meet in Pettersson’s account of the performance of freak identities in neo-Victorian narratives. Pettersson takes the case study of the life of Lavinia Warren, a short-statured performer who was exhibited as a ‘dwarf’ in P.T. Barnum’s shows, to explore neo-Victorian adaptations of the freak show. Drawing on Deleuze, Michel Foucault and feminist theoretical approaches, Pettersson revisits two contemporary texts,—Jane Sullivan’s Little People: A Novel (2009) and Jessica Benjamin’s The Autobiography of Mrs Tom Thumb (2012),—to rediscover the freakish body as a site of empowerment, desire and significance. Yet if, with the advent of new disciplines such as neo-Victorianism, both peripheral and canonical identities of the British past are being interrogated, the literature published throughout the nineteenth century itself also provides a wealth of examples which question the prevailing mindset. The chapters by Cantillo and Puchal delve into two figures from the Greek and Roman tradition—Pan and Odysseus—to contest canonical identities in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Arthur Machen’s well-known story The Great God Pan, published in 1890, is the starting point for Cantillo’s analysis on the (de)construction of the identities of the ‘inimical Other’ which haunted the conservative imagination of the fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie. As Cantillo contends, Machen transforms the myth of Pan into a locus horridus where the Apollonian models of divinity are rejected and the peripheral identities of fin-de-siècle London are put into the foreground. Puchal also focuses on non-mainstream culture when she places Odysseus at the centre of the popular entertainment of the mid-nineteenth century. Her analysis focuses on the figures of the Imperial traveller and castaway understood as a commodification of the Greek hero through burlesque appropriations of Robinson Crusoe. As Puchal argues, following in the line of the circuses and minor theatres which billed Victorian dramatizations of epic deeds and battles, the social stereotypes revisited in H. J. Byron’s Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Friday (1860) are perpetuated to test and contest the prevailing identity of the modern hero.

The chapters gathered in this volume substantiate that literature is indeed a space for cultural encounters. As Walter Benjamin manifested, ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories’ (1968: 91) yet the ubiquity of adaptation complicates the process as the new cultural products are not only haunted by the adapted texts but also by the adapted cultures. Such constant and even compulsory fluidity of literary frontiers at present is perhaps yet another example of the widespread cultural cannibalism of postmodern cultures. Yet at a time when the political frontiers of the so-called Western world are being persistently contested, Ricoeur’s often cited approach to modern cultural change is more pertinent than ever:

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with destruction by our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum […].

(1965: 278)

When political frontiers are being constantly challenged, as in present times, adaptation and reception studies enhance the possibilities of Ricoeur’s imaginary museum as a site where intellectual exchange between disciplines and literary traditions emerges. This offers a fruitful forum for cognate areas of scholarship to debate on different types of cultural interactions and literary identities. The present volume intends to present a fresh contribution to such a debate from a European academic context at a time when the political relations between Great Britain, Europe and the rest of the world are being redefined.

POLITICS AND POETICS

ANNS A’ CHÀNAN CHÙBHRAIDH/EN LALENGUA FRAGANTE: TRANSLATINGSCOTTISH GAELIC POETRY

Miguel TeruelUniversitat de València

The purpose of this chapter is to present and describe an experience of translation of contemporary Scottish Gaelic poetry into Spanish, and to discuss a number of theoretical issues encountered during the process, particularly the use of English as mediating language for translation. Additionally, it includes the sketch of a factual and bibliographical outline of the context, and a shortlist of the poets who have written in Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) since the mid-twentieth century to the present.1

Anns a’ Chànan Chùbhraidh/En la lengua fragante is a selection of poems by Anne Frater. This selection, comprising of ten poems, was premiered by the author and myself as a translator in a public reading on 4 March 2016 at the Aula de Poesia at the University of València.2Anne (Anna) Frater’s is one of the most recognised and recognisable voices in contemporary Scottish Gaelic poetry. She published her first poems in Gairm in 1986, the quarterly magazine—and publishing house—founded in 1951 by Derick Thomson (Ruaraidh MacThòmais) and Finlay J. MacDonald (Fionnlagh Domhnallach) that served as the main vehicle for the advancement of Scottish Gaelic Literature in the second half of the twentieth century.3 Her first book, Fon t-Slige/Under the Shell, was also published by Gairm in 1995.

She was born in Stornoway (Steòrnabhagh), in the isle of Lewis (Leòdhas) in the Outer Hebrides or Western Isles (na h-Eileanan Siar) in 1967, and was brought up in the village of Upper Bayble (Pabail Uarach) in the district of Point (An Rubha). This community, small as it is, has also been home to two important poets in the tradition: Derick Thomson and Iain Crichton Smith (Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn).

Frater’s poetry explores identity and nation, love, language and landscape.4 Her style is a clear, clean condensation of everyday Gaelic speech, enriched by irony and allusion, and her natural form is free verse. Anne Frater is also an academic: she read her Ph.D. thesis in Glasgow University in 1995 on Scottish Gaelic women’s poetry up to 1750,5 and she currently lectures at Lews Castle College in Stornoway (UHI, University of the Highlands and Islands/Oilthigh na Gàidhealtachd agus nan Eilean) where she is Programme Leader for the BAH Gaelic Scotland. Her poems have appeared in most anthologies of recent Scottish Gaelic poetry: Whyte 1991a, Kerrigan 1991, Stephen 1993, O’Rourke 1994, Crowe 1997, Black 1999, McMillan and Byrne 2005, MacNeil 2011. She has also published in other magazines, as Chapman, and Verse.

Her writing occurs in a space of course made possible by her predecessors, and enlarged by her contemporaries. This space is a very vibrant tradition, and amazingly so for a language spoken by approximately 60,000 people, as indicated by the 2011 census of Scotland (Murray 2014: 10-12). Their linguistic domain (Gàidhealtachd) has been constantly dwindling during the twentieth century—over 250,000 speakers were recorded in 1891—but the process of devolution (fèin-riaghlaidh) under way since the late 1990s has in fact decelerated the rate of decline. The promulgation of the Gaelic Language Act of 2005 and its effects on education and public life have already produced positive results, for the census shows an increase in the number of speakers under twenty years in age, and the new vitality of the language is now beginning to extend from the traditional strongholds of the Outer Hebrides, the Highlands, and Argyll and Bute to the cities in mainland Scotland.6 The resilience of Gaelic culture, inevitably defined by the contiguity of its bulling, all-too-powerful neighbouring language, is evident in the persistence and the continuity of the practice of poetry. As we are to draw a map of Scottish Gaelic poetry from the mid-twentieth century to the present I suggest three points of reference—three anthologies—that will help us find bearings.

The first anthology, Nua-bhàrdachd Ghàidhlig/Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems, was edited by Donald MacAulay (Dohmnall MacAmhlaigh) and first published in 1976. It includes poems by five authors, and their own translations into English: Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain), George Campbell Hay (Deòrsa Mac Iain Deòrsa), Derick Thomson, Iain Crichton Smith and Donald MacAulay himself, who also provides a substantial introduction and biographical notes on the contributors. This is the backbone of Modernism in the Scottish Gaelic poetical tradition, linking the self-contained bardic and popular past with the wider world of the 1930s and the future.

Sorley MacLean (1911-96) was born in Osgaig, in the isle of Raasay (Ratharsair), off the coast of eastern Skye (an t-Eilean Sgitheanach). He is the central Scottish Gaelic poet in the central decades of the twentieth century. His first collection of poems in Gaelic, the seminal Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems), published in 1943,7 paved the way for the poets to come, showing how the language could be used in poetry for contemporary relevance. He marries love and politics in his writing, with committed views on the Spanish Civil War and the advent of Fascism. His poems are often inhabited by the ghosts of those evicted from their communities in successive clearances, as in the well-known Hallaig, first published in Gairm in 1954. The poem was translated into English by Seamus Heaney in 2002. MacLean selected and collected his work several times during his lifetime with his own English translations,8 and now the standard collection of his poems is Caoir Gheal Leumraich/White Leaping Flame: Collected Poems in Gaelic With English Translations, edited by Christopher Whyte and Emma Dymock in 2011.

George Campbell Hay (1915-84)9 was a multilingual poet and translator. He wrote in Gaelic, Scots, and English, but also in French, Italian and Norwegian, and could speak and read several other languages. Among his many translations into Gaelic stands out his work on the sonnets of Petrarch. His style is imbued with classical, technical prowess. His collection Fuaran Sléibh was hailed with enthusiasm when it was published in 1947. Although born in Elderslie (Ach na Feàrna) in Renfrewshire, his life was connected with Tarbert (Tairbeart Loch Fine) in Argyll, Edinburgh, and the Mediterranean, where he was a soldier in the Second World War. His long poem Mochtàr is Dùghall (composed in the 1940s and published in 1982) is based on his experiences in Algeria and Tunisia. Michel Byrne edited his Collected Poems and Songs in 2000.

Derick Smith Thomson (1921-2012), born in Upper Bayble in the island of Lewis, was the most relevant figure in the field of Gaelic studies and writing in the second half of the twentieth century. His influence as poet, scholar, and publisher and mentor of young writers was crucial for the growth and development of Gaelic culture. As a poet, his own personal evolution from the traditional metres and themes in An Dealbh Briste: Gaelic poems, with Some Translations in English (1951), to the free verse and cosmopolitan views of his later poetry marked the passage from MacLean to the present for Gaelic contemporary poets. He collected his poems up to 1980 in Creachadh na Clàrsaich/Plundering the Harp (1982), and he continued to publish until 2007: Sùil air Fàire: dain ùra/Surveying the Horizon: Recent Poems. In these poems, Glasgow is no longer seen as a place of exile—a recurrent scene in the Gaelic tradition—but ‘like his Glasgow contemporaries Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan’ as ‘a place where heaven and hell can be found together’ (O’Gallagher 2009: 63). His fertile work as a scholar includes An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry (1974) and The Companion to Gaelic Scotland (1983). As a publisher, amongst many other ventures, he co-founded Gairm in 1951 and directed the magazine and the publishing house on his own since 1964. In 1990 he edited Bardachd na Roinn-Eorpa an Gaidhlig/European Poetry in Gaelic. In 2011, in celebration of his 90th birthday, several of the poets he helped and advised (Meg Bateman, Angus Peter Campbell, Jim Carruth, Anna Frater, Rody Gorman, Liz Lochhead, Peter Mackay, Aonghas MacNeacail, Robyn Marsack, and Niall O’Gallagher) chose their own favourite poem by Thomson and the Gaelic Books Council (Comhairle nan Leabhraichean)—which he founded in 1968—and the Scottish Poetry Library published Mar Chomharra. Ruaraidh MacThòmais aig 90/Derick Thomson at 90: A Celebration.10

Iain Crichton Smith (1928-98) was born in Glasgow (Glaschu), and reared in Upper Bayble, Lewis. He was a prolific writer, both in Gaelic and English: poems, short stories and novels, plays… ‘It is undoubtedly fair to say that Smith the storyteller has had a greater impact on Gaelic literature than Smith the poet’ (Black 1999: 794), but for his poems in English he is considered amongst the finest Scottish authors of his generation. His 1971 translation of Sorley MacLean’s Poems to Eimhir played a key role in securing MacLean’s reputation for English readers. In 1987 he published his last collection of Gaelic verse, An t-Eilean agus An Cànan. He also wrote essays and criticism, mainly in English. A highly interesting selection, Towards the Human (1986), contains precious autobiographical pieces and articles about Hay, MacAulay, MacLean and Thomson, and several essays on Hugh MacDiarmid and other Scottish poets.

Donald MacAulay was born in 1930 in Bernera (Beàrnaraigh), an island off the west coast of Lewis. He is an academic, a scholar, and a poet, and has had a distinguished career, with numerous official duties. His early poetry was published in Seobhrach ás a’ Chlaich/Primrose from the Stone (1967), and in 2008 he collected his poems in Deilbh is Faileasan. His use of language is as complex as his relationship with his own community.11 Besides this first anthology, he also edited Oighreachd agus Gabhaltas (1980), on the land riots of the late nineteenth century—amongst them, the Bernera riot of 1874—and The Celtic Languages (1992).

An Aghaidh na Sìorraidheachd/In the Face of Eternity: Ochdnar Bhard Gàidhlig/Eight Gaelic Poets is the title of the second anthology, edited by Christopher Whyte (Crìsdean Whyte, Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin) and published in 1991. The collection, which includes an introduction by the editor and short presentations and English translations provided by the poets, gathers authors and poems from the two generations of poets who followed and extended the paths opened by MacLean and Thomson: Meg Bateman, Myles Campbell (Maoilios Caimbeul), Anne Frater, Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh, Aonghas MacNeacail, Catriona Montgomery (Catrìona NicGumaraid), Mary Montgomery (Mairi NicGumaraid), and Christopher Whyte himself.

Donald MacAulay wrote in his review of the anthology in Gairm that he did not think many of the poems included were ‘very Gaelic’ or had ‘much connection with the tradition, with Gaelic convention’ (quoted and translated in Black 1991: lxiii-iv). Indeed, his argument is a mere statement of fact: the younger poets expand their inheritance and find still newer reaches for those same limits that MacAulay and his contemporaries expanded in their turn.

Vivienne Margaret (Meg) Bateman was born in 1959 in Edinburgh (Dùn Èideann), and learnt Gaelic as an adult. Her first book of poems, Òrain Ghaoil/Amhráin Ghrá, appeared in 1990 and was published in Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath) with translations into Irish Gaelic (Gaelige) by Alex Osborne. With her love poems, rhythmical and rhymed, she brought a new, ironic voice to the song tradition of Gaelic women writers. In 1997 she published Aotromachd agus Dàin Eile/Lightness and Other Poems, where she included her two first collections with her own English translations. Her latest collection, intercalating Gaelic poems, their English translations, and poems in English, Transparencies, appeared in 2013.12

Maoilios Caimbeul was born in 1944 in Staffin (Stafain), on the northeastern coast of Skye. He learnt to write his own language in his mid-twenties, after several years in the merchant navy. His first book of poems, Eileanan, appeared in 1980. Of all his collections of poetry only his second book, Bailtean/Villages (1987), has been published with English translations. Breac-a’-Mhuiltein/Spéir Dhroim an Ronnaigh: Selected Poems, 1974-2006 was published in Dublin in 2007 with Irish translations by Rody Gorman. His latest collection is Tro Chloich na Sùla (2014). Female characters, allegorical and real, are quite frequent in his work. He has also written prose fiction, especially for children, and educational material.13

In his ‘Introduction’, Christopher Whyte writes of Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh as the ‘most original’ and ‘in his experimentation with language, the most exciting’ poet in the anthology (xi). Born in 1948 in the Vale of Leven (Magh Leamhna), West Dunbartonshire, he taught himself Gaelic during his teens. His poems blend science and nature, technology and ecology with a daring sense of neologism. He has published three poem sequences: A’ Mheanbhchuileag/The Midge (1980, 1982), Iolair, Brù-Dhearg, Giuthas (1991), and Bogha-Frois san Oidche/Rainbow in the Night (1997).14

Aonghas MacNeacail was born in 1942 in Uig (Ùige), in northern Skye. He presents himself as a ‘poet and songwriter’,15 and also ‘broadcaster, journalist, scriptwriter, librettist and translator’. He wrote his first poems in English, but since the late 1970s he has become a figure of reference in Gaelic culture. His individual voice, inspired by American poets like e e cummings and by Philip Hobsbaum’s Writers’ Group in Glasgow—Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead—is heard with its characteristic repetitions in his first full collection, an seachnadh agus dàin eile/the avoiding and other poems (1986). A Proper Schooling and Other Poems/Oideachadh Ceart agus Dàin Eile was published in 1996, and in 2012 dèanamh gàire ris a’ chloc: dàin ùra agus thaghte/laughing at the clock: new and selected poems. His critical views, in ‘Rage Against the Dying Of…’ (1983), ‘A Long Road to Now: A Snapshot Survey of Gaelic Poetry’ (1994) and on self-translation, ‘Being Gaelic, and Otherwise’ (1998).

Catrìona NicGumaraid was born in Roag (Ròdhag) on the western coast of Skye in 1947, and her sister Mòrag in 1950. Catrìona had been composing Gaelic songs since an early age, and writing poems since her twenties. In 1973 she was the first Writer in Residence (filidh, sgrìobhadair or Sgrìobhaiche) at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig,16 and in 1974 she published her first collection of poetry, A’ Choille Chiar, including poems by Mòrag. Her definitive collection is Rè na h-Oidhche/The Length of the Night (1994). She has also worked as an actress and as a scriptwriter for radio and television.17

Màiri NicGumaraid was born in 1955 in Arivruaich (Airidh a’ Bhruaich), in the South Lochs (A’ Phàirc) district of Lewis. Her poetry collections Eadar mi ‘s a’ Bhreug (1988), Ruithmean ‘s Neo-Rannan (1997), Rainn agus Neamhrainn (1999) and Fo Stiùir a Faire (2012) have been published in Coiscéim with translations into Irish by Liam Prút and Pádraig Ó Snodaigh. She has also written fiction, and has worked in Lews Castle College and in broadcasting.18

The editor of this anthology, Christopher Whyte, was born in 1952 in Glasgow. His contribution to Scottish Gaelic poetry has been substantial and innovative, and often controversial, as a poet, translator and scholar. He has translated MacLean into Italian, and his Gaelic translations of Cavafy, Ritsos, Ujević, Mörike, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva appeared in Gairm and in Thomson 1990. He has also translated into English: Pasolini and other Italian contemporary poets, short stories and poems by Catalan authors (Monzó, Pàmies; Ferrater, Marçal, Comadira),19 Hungarian poetry, and sequences of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. As a poet, his first collection was Uirsgeul/Myth (1991), published with his own English translations. In 1996 Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria Malibran/From the Diary of Maria Malibran was published in Gairm, and reprinted in 2009 with English versions by several translators.20 Other collections have appeared with Irish translation (Dealbh Athar, 2009)21 or only in Gaelic (An Daolagh Shìonach, 2013). 22 His poetry is complex and ambitious: he tends to use long, narrative sequences, interweaving personal expression and the voices and figures of other artists,23 in an attempt to enlarge the possibilities of Gaelic poetry. As a scholar, he has also edited the work of Sorley MacLean (MacLean 2008 and 2011) and the anthology Dreuchd An Fhigheadair/The Weaver’s Task: A Gaelic Sampler (2007).24 He is the author, amongst several other influential critical studies, of the seminal Modern Scottish Poetry (2004). For its relevance to my argument in this paper, see his articles ‘Translation as Predicament’ (2000b) and ‘Against Self-Translation’ (2002), which I shall discuss next. He has also written fiction in English, and has lived in Italy, Barcelona, Croatia, and Budapest.25

The third point of reference is a definitive bilingual anthology of twentieth-century Scottish Gaelic poetry, An Tuil: Duanaire Gàidhlig an 20mh Ceud, first edited by Ronald Black (Raghnall MacilleDhuibh) in 1991. This is a very comprehensive work, which includes an in-depth introduction, a complete selection of poets and poems—translated into English by the poets themselves or by the editor when translations were not available, and a highly informative background section, with notes on poets and poems that provide a wealth of bio-bibliographical detail.26 Of course all the poets mentioned in this review are present, with Anne Frater’s entry closing the volume. From the other contemporary poets included in the anthology, I choose to add two more names to our shortlist, Angus Peter Campbell (Aonghas P[h]àdraig Caimbeul) and Rody Gorman.

Angus Peter Campbell was born in 1954 in South Boisdale (An Leth Meadhanach), in South Uist (Uibhist a Deas) in the Outer Hebrides. Iain Crichton Smith was his teacher at Oban (An t-Òban) High School. He has worked as a journalist in Gaelic for various media. He has been a lecturer and Writer in Residence at SMO, and also an actor. In 1991 he edited Dàin is Deilbh,27 a celebration of Sorley MacLean’s 80th birthday. As a prose writer, he has written fiction in Gaelic and in English, both for adults and children. As a poet, his first collection was in English, the second included several poems in Gaelic, and in 2007 he published Meas air Chrannaibh/Fruit on Brainches/Fruit on Branches, with his own English translation and a Scots version by J. Derrick McClure. His next volume, Aibisidh, appeared in 2011 with his parallel English translations.28

Rody Gorman was born in Dublin in 1960, and has lived in Scotland since 1987. He has been Writer in Residence at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University College Cork and University of Manitoba, Scottish Writing Fellow at PROGR in Berne, and has held advisory posts in several official institutions. He writes and translates in and between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and English. His first collection of poems in Scottish Gaelic, Fax and Other Poems, was published in 1996. Chernilo (2006) is a selection of his poetry in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, including new poems. In 2011 he published Beartan Briste agus dàin Ghàidhlig eile/Burstbroken Judgementshroudloomdeeds and Other Gaelic Poems, where he uses playfully the space for the conventional English translation.29 He has translated into Scottish Gaelic poems by Cavafy, Yeats, Prévert, Neruda, Kavanagh, Holan, Milosz, Rósewicz, Larkin, Popa, Holub, Aspenstrom, Snyder, Issa, Basho, Busson, Longley and Armitage. His English translations include poems by Donald MacAulay, Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith. Between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, poems by Máirtín Ó Direáin, Sorley MacLean, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Derick Thomson, Seán Ó Tuama, Iain Crichton Smith, Donald MacAulay, Myles Campbell, Aonghas MacNeacail, Gabriel Rosenstock, Michael Davitt, Liam Ó Muirthile, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Meg Bateman. He has also edited the seven issues of An Guth—anthologies of Irish and Scottish Gaelic poetry published by Coiscéim from 2003 to 2012.30

Indeed, this is a lively and vibrant scene, with a healthy tension between continuity and innovation: the liminalities of community and exile, identity and language, home and nation, personal and public voice are traditional themes, but also new challenges. A peculiar trait of the context that has been sketched so far is the generalised presence of translation. The three anthologies we have considered in this chapter are all bilingual Gaelic-English editions, and in fact since the publication of Donald MacAulay’s Nua-bhàrdachd Ghàidhlig/Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems in 1976 this became the predominant tendency, also for individual collections. Alternatively, some collections include Irish Gaelic translations, or even versions in Scots. In comparison, Gaelic-only publications are still rare. Very often, poets combine all of these modes in their work.

In the recent decades there has been critical debate on the question of translation and bilingualism in the publication of Gaelic verse. In 1998, Wilson McLeod voiced in Chapman the first concerns about the consequences of the bilingual ‘packaging’ of Gaelic poetry, ‘usurped’ and ‘over-shadowed’ by the presence of English translations. His line of thought was later taken up and elaborated by Christopher Whyte (2000b) and Corinna Krause (2011, 2013), insisting on the political dynamics entailed in bilingual editing. McLeod’s view31 was contested in the same issue of Chapman by Aonghas MacNeacail (1998: 152-7), who adduced viability and visibility as ‘imperative’ priorities for Gaelic poets.

Evidently, the decisions and choices regarding the format of publication are ultimately personal, part and parcel of the author’s creative drive. The question of translation is further complicated by the fact that most of these bilingual editions of Gaelic poetry are the result of self-translation. Frequently, the English versions are merely semantic transpositions, verse-by-verse formally neutral renderings of the original Gaelic effort for poetical potency. In some cases, when the poet also writes poetry in English, the effort is perhaps visible in both languages. Again, critiques of this practice may be found in Whyte (2002) and in Krause (2013). In ‘Against Self-Translation’, Christopher Whyte fundamentally expounds his own choice and decision, 32 and he has followed his own suit in successive publications. Ronald Black (1999: lxiv-vi) and Peter Mackay (Pàdraig MacAoidh) in his 2008 article have provided assessment of the debate, and creative solutions for the dilemma.

From my humble distance, I perceive a subtly unconscious anglophone bias in the discrediting of the bilingual format for Gaelic poetry. As a translator of poetry myself, I cannot conceive how a translated poem can efface or belittle its original, even when the language of the translation is all-powerful English. Readers of bilingual editions of poetry learn to look at the page where the original and its translation build their own space and to discern their interaction, in a complex reading operation that always goes back to the original. We might speak of substitution if the original texts were absent, but only incuriosity prevents readers from regarding the original in a bilingual edition.

In my own case, my access to Anne Frater’s poems was greatly facilitated by her own English versions. My translating experience, which I shall now describe, is an illustration of the possibilities afforded by a Gaelic-English bilingual edition to those who are not Gaelic native speakers. As Aonghas MacNeacail wrote in ‘Rage Against the Dying Of…’: ‘we also offer yet another door, however narrow, for those who are curious about Gaelic to peer in, and perhaps eventually to step into our world’ (1983: 55).

My knowledge of Gaelic is that of a philologist. I work my way into the poems very slowly, and the act of reading becomes an act of discovery. What I lack in active competence I have tried to compensate by a fresh approach to the words and sentences, which I savour with the relish of first-time encounters. The English version guides me to know what I am looking for, but of course my search takes place in the Gaelic poem, and it is the Gaelic poem that I finally translate. I understand translation as a transformative process, a metamorphosis, even as a transfusion in the case of classical texts. The result is always another text, generated by the original, a new life in a new form with a new set of limits and possibilities, a step forward (ceum air adhart) in the pursuit for meaning. And when the poems are translated, and read or published in a bilingual context, Gaelic-Spanish in this case, it is the English version that is finally effaced, in a quaint instance of poetical justice, and disappears altogether. For an illustration of the process, I will present now the first poem by Anne Frater that I read, and the first of her poems that I translated.

AIG AN FHAING

Nam sheasamh thall aig geat a’ phrèiridh,

feur glan fom bhòtannan,

làmhan fuar nam phòcaidean,

fàileadh an dup

gu fann

gu neo-chinnteach

a’ nochdadh mu mo chuinnlean

‘s mi a’ coimhead càch cruinn

lachanaich le chèile

timcheall air an fhaing:

a’ brùthadh nan caorach,

guthan ard ag èigheachd

‘s a’ gearain, ‘s a’ gàireachdainn

‘s gach druim thugams’

gam ghlasadh a-mach.

Mi seasamh, ‘s a’ coimhead

‘s a’ feitheamh airson facal

mo ghluasad gu feum.

Mi siubhal gu slaodach

a’ cruinneachadh nan uan

‘s gan ruagadh romham

a-steach gu càch;

uain a’ ruith

gu meulaich màth’r.

Boinneagan uisge

mar mhillean mialan

a’ leum às an dup,

agus crathadh cinn nan adharcan

fliuch, fuar, feagalach

a’ dèanamh às.

Ceum no dhà eile

‘s chì mi aodannan nan gàir’.

Mo làmhan fhìn a’ breith air clòimh,

fàileadh an dup air mo chorragan,

peant a’ camharradh mo chasan,

poll dubh bog air mo bhòtannan

‘s mo chànan fhìn nam bheul.

(Anne Frater, Fon t-Slige, 1995)33

AT THE FANK

Standing over by the prairie gate

with clean grass under my wellies,

cold hands in my pockets,

the smell of the sheep dip

faintly

hesitantly

coming to my nostrils

as I watch the others gathered

around the fank

and laughing with each other:

pushing the sheep,

loud voices shouting

and moaning, and laughing

and all with their backs to me

shutting me out.

I stand and watch

and wait for a word

to move me to usefulness.

Moving slowly

gathering the lambs

and driving them before me

in towards the others;

lambs running to a mother’s bleat.

Drops of water

jump from the sheep dip

like millions of fleas

and the horns’ head-shaking,

wet, cold, fearful

running off.

Another step or two

and I can see the laughing faces.

My own hands holding wool,

the smell of sheep dip on my fingers.

Paint marking my legs,

soft black mud on my wellies

and my own language on my tongue.

(Translation by Anne Frater, Fon t-Slige, 1995)

EN EL OVIL

Allí yo, al otro lado de la cerca del prado,

hierba limpia bajo las botas de agua,

las manos frías en los bolsillos,

el olor del baño de las ovejas

levemente

abriéndose paso tentativo

hasta llegarme a la nariz,

viéndoles reunirse

entre risas alrededor del ovil:

empujando a las ovejas,

entre gritos

y maldiciones y carcajadas,

dándome todos la espalda

dejándome fuera.

Y yo, allí, mirando,

esperando una palabra

que me volviera útil.

Caminando lentamente,

recogiendo corderos

y persiguiéndolos

uno contra el otro;

corriendo

al balido de su madre.

Gotas de agua,

como millones de pulgas,

que saltan del baño,

y los cuernos, cabeceando,

húmedos, fríos, temibles,