Alan Riach: Favourite Gaelic Poems is packed with delicious delights and dynamite

OVER the last year or more, I’ve been returning to and slowly reading a sturdy big anthology, 100 Dàn As Fhèarr Leinn/ Favourite Gaelic Poems, edited by Peter Mackay and Jo MacDonald, which appeared from Luath Press in 2020. It’s potently packed with delicious delights and dynamite, with great heft and lightness, a pleasing sense of substance conjoined with a dangerous appeal of friendly approachability. Each one of the poems moves fast, but is pondered, weighted and freighted. It repays long attention. Be careful, be curious, be sharp.

In last weekend’s Sunday’s National, Beth Whitelaw cogently summarised an essential quality of the Gaelic language everyone should take into account and think about before we go any further at all: “In Gaelic there is no difference between the accusative case and the nominative case, for example, in English you would say ‘I saw John’ or ‘John saw me’, in Gaelic these two uses are grouped together as a single case we can call the common case. In this sense, you wouldn’t say ‘I am angry at you’, or ‘he is angry at me’ but rather ‘there is anger between us’. Imagine we could adopt similar patterns into our language – imagine how much less inflammatory conversations could be.”

The common case is a common cause. Gaelic scholars and poets Meg Bateman and John Purser in their magnificent work Window to the West (2021, freely available online at www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Window-to-the-West.pdf) put it like this: the Celtic languages “place the verb before the subject” and in this are unlike almost all other European languages. Thus, “I love you” would be given as “love is with me moving towards you”: the verb comes first. The ego is less important than what’s moving it.

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The implication is that “love is in the air between us”. Or in the case of other emotions or priorities, you can understand how the language structure intrinsically gives the meaning of what is said in a different way from English: not “I respect you” but rather “respect is in the air between us”; or “hostility is in the air between us” or “murderous intent is in the air between us”.

You locate the problem or the virtue before you indicate its personal application and predicate its consequence. It’s not just one person and the other person. It’s whatever is moving around between self and others.

Meaning is relational. It doesn’t give supremacy to ego, subject or object. It’s a much more careful way of understanding relations than the crude apportionment of identities fixed by position and secured by power. Position and power are part of the configuration all right, but there’s also an understanding that things are always in motion, always partial, in a process of formation and reformation, changing, an infinite rehearsal, an unending approach.

Isn’t that a more practical way of understanding what life gives us, how we live within it, how we can work together, than the assumption that any powerful ego (single or collective) can dominate, control, exploit and ultimately rule over all others?

That’s a logic with horrific results, as we all see all around us every day. It’s not that the language guarantees utopia, simply that your language gives you particular opportunities to understand the world. And limitations. Which is why poetry is so special: the language of poetry is always suggestive in movement, nuance, in turn and counter-turn, and stand. We live and learn. And now we can come to the poems.

100 Favourite Gaelic Poems/Dàn As Fhèarr Leinn would appeal in any dispensation, to any disposition with a capacity for the passions and delicate senses of loss, resolution, festive release, tragic lament, healthily derisive laughter, the whole phantasmagorical cornucopia of poetic possibilities.

The language has its predicates but with English translations on facing pages, the possibility of comprehending a vast selection of the most immediately accessible, enjoyable, challenging and impressive poems in the Gaelic tradition is available here. Pleasure is the priority, not the chronological account with the heavy scholarly weight of annotation and the jargon of specialists.

Sorley Maclean appears in the anthology

Scholarship and specialism are everywhere deployed, but unobtrusively, led by pleasure. The little biographies are wonderfully curious. But this pleasure is not merely self-indulgence. There are the challenges and difficulties of hard poems dealing with hard things.

The English poet John Dryden suggested there are three kinds of translation: literal (metaphrase), interpretative (paraphrase) and variation (imitation). The first and third are dangerous (first can be dull, third risks minimal relation to the ‘original’): best is second, the middle way. So said Dryden.

THE translations in this anthology allow you to see into the poems without always turning them into fully present English-language poems themselves and there’s a terrific advantage in this. We stand at a respectful distance from the language and the presence of the originals but are permitted to approach them and put our own imaginations to use, to begin to open them, dive into their meanings and sensualities.

It’s risky but intensely active reading. Poems change things. Poems make things happen. That’s what they’re for. This book is a primer for the mind, a challenge to exercise your faculties of understanding.

The poems are not arranged chronologically so you can drop in on any, anywhere, as you used to do on a favourite track on a vinyl LP, with a careful steady hand lifting over arm and needle.

Whether for the singular brilliance of their minds at work, the historical moment of their poems, the personal prompt of unpredicted delight or sudden, violent loss, of longing for the lost or the dance of enjoyment, these poems are all wonders worth seeking out, dwelling in and staying with.

There are the sheer brilliances of the extracts from Duncan MacIntyre’s “Praise of Ben Dorain”, Alexander MacDonald’s “The Galley of Clan Ranald” and Mary MacPherson’s “When I Was Young, “Sorley Maclean’s “Hallaig”, George Campbell Hay’s “Bisearta” and Iain Crichton Smith’s “You Are at the Bottom of My Mind”. Those poems come through the English translations with incredible immediate force and lasting authority. They’re already in my eternal anthology.

Then there are poems whose immediacy has pre-eminent intense resonance because of their historical moment. You could say that about the poems just named too, but these I think possess even greater ferocity because of their location on the clock: John Roy Stuart’s “Another Song About the Day of Culloden”; Angus Campbell’s “Thoughts in Captivity in Poland 1944”; Anne C Frater’s “Mairi Iain Mhurch’ Chalum”, an address to the poet’s grandmother, “who lost her father on the Iolaire; New Year’s Night, 1919”, Meg Bateman’s “Picture of My Mother”; and Donald MacIntyre’s “The Song of the Stone” (about the lifting of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey and what might have become of it. There are poems of perennial application, like Murdo MacFarlane’s “The Language of the Gaels”. This is how it begins:

It wasn’t the snow or frost from the north,

it wasn’t the withering sharp cold from the east,

it wasn’t the rain and the gales from the west

but the disease from the south that weakened

the flower, leaf, trunk and roots,

the language of my kin and my people.

Come to us, come with me to the west

to hear the language of the Fianna.

MacFarlane (1901-82), a Lewis man, taught himself Gaelic and after working on Leverhulme’s schemes emigrated to North America in the 1920s. He returned to Lewis in 1932, working as a crofter and, after a period of military service, opposed the extension of the Nato base at Stornoway, continuing to compose poems and songs widely performed by, for example, Capercaillie.

There are poems with witty immediacy, such as Alasdair A MacRae’s “Song in Praise of Otago, New Zealand”, full of the joys of a bountiful harvest, “mellow mornings” in “a golden land” with “abundant sheep with their fair wool” and lambs gambolling in the sunshine.

Published in 1894, this is a utopian vision of a working economy without the oppressions and exploitations of contemporary Scotland. MacRae’s skill as a whisky distiller in the glens of Hokonui (along with his cousin Mary’s recipe) might have helped his buoyancy.

There are poems that open the door into the natural world, reminding us that in Gaelic there is no word for “wilderness”, no division between “the wild” and “the civilised” or the rural and the urban – we are all of us inhabitants of wilderness. The anonymous “Robin Red-Breast” or “The Wee Mouse and the Cat”.

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Superstructures of cities, technologies of warfare, mechanical machineries, the whole long legacy of terminal industrialisation, is implicitly understood as inhabiting the same world as plants, birds, flowers and natural phenomena. Which makes us responsible for all of it, so far as our consciousness, conscience and language permit.

That prompts me to recommend the great resource of Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches, which gathers a wealth of audio recordings from the 1930s onwards, from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, the Canna Collection and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal, freely available at www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/

Call in here for recordings of birdsong from Canna, the corncrake, seagulls, so forth: www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/track/52210?l=en – or here for the bothy ballad “Drumdelgie” as sung by Jimmy MacBeath recorded by Hamish Henderson in 1952: www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/track/80798

There are unending riches here, as there are in the anthology, both sound archive and published book opening into complementary worlds that any healthy mind with the requisite synapses and the intrinsic optimism of curiosity might spend profitable hours and years wandering happily through and dwelling within. Happy trails.