A conversation with Ian MacDonald
A conversation with Ian MacDonald about the poetics and politics of Sorley MacLean and the experience of editing his work (published as part of the proceedings of the 2011 Ainmeil Thar Cheudan conference at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. Skye)
Christopher Whyte’s contribution to the 2011 conference corresponded very closely with his introductory essay in the book An Cuilithionn 1939 and Unpublished Poems, which was launched as part of the conference. He preferred to make his contribution to this book via an interview, and an edited transcript of a conversation with Ian MacDonald follows.
IMD Christopher, when did you first come across the poetry of Sorley MacLean?
CW While I was still studying at Cambridge, very, very late one night in somebody’s flat close to Glasgow University, I spoke to a man called John Manson, from Coatbridge (not, I think, the John Manson who subsequently became known as working on MacDiarmid). He had retained his class and his nationalist affiliations despite three years at Cambridge. He told me that MacDiarmid had read more than either Pound or Eliot and that I had to read MacDiarmid’s Lucky Poet. That was the book that unlocked the whole treasure-chest of modern Scottish literature for me. I wasn’t particularly aware of it, but I’m sure that’s where the first mention of Sorley MacLean came to me. I actually read some of the poems, in Iain Crichton Smith’s translations, in a bookshop in Gower Street in London in 1974 or 1975, and decided I really had to learn Gaelic, in order to have direct access to MacLean. In the spring of 1975 I went regularly to the Mitchell Library with a notebook and copied out large swathes of the 1943 book, not really understanding very much – it was a kind of hieroglyphics to me at the time. That’s when I noticed that, infuriatingly, there were gaps in the numbering of the poems and that the original text as published was incomplete. It sowed the seeds of a curiosity which led me to produce, nearly thirty years later, the edition that was published by the ASLS in 2002.
IMD Well, you’ve done more than anyone to fill the gaps. When did you actually first meet Sorley MacLean himself?
CW It was in August 1984, in the staff club in Edinburgh University. I had been in Italy for some ten years at that point. I knew very few people in Scotland, and was trying to translate the fullest possible text of the Dàin do Eimhir into Italian. About twelve of these poems were published in a literary review called Linea d’Ombra, based in Milan. The problem was that I was working with Dwelly, Roderick MacKinnon’s Teach Yourself Gaelic and MacLaren’s book on Gaelic. There were passages I just could not understand. I wrote to Sorley MacLean and Derick Thomson, asking to see them, so that I could get more information. Sorley arranged for us to meet late one afternoon – for some reason I think it was a Thursday – in the Edinburgh University Staff Club, Adam House, which at that time was the Festival Club.
It was a very strange occasion, because we were completely at cross‑purposes. All I wanted was to show him the problematic passages, so that he could explain the idioms and give me a literal English translation. But it became clear that Sorley’s intention was very different: he wanted to tell me the story behind the poems. I was distinctly embarrassed and felt it was slightly inappropriate, because I thought: “Who am I to for him to be sharing this apparently very intimate material with?” And a part of me couldn’t help thinking: “Well, clearly I’m not the first neophyte to present himself and to be initiated into the mysteries of the love story.” I went away from that meeting quite frustrated, because I hadn’t got what I wanted. A few days later I went to see Derick Thomson in his office at Glasgow University. Derick explained the passages to me perfectly well, which was what I was looking for, and sent me away.
That meeting with MacLean was an odd one. I didn’t get what I was looking for, I got something I wasn’t looking for and, at the time, wasn’t particularly interested in. I don’t know what account Sorley would have given of the meeting – probably it didn’t register very strongly in his memory. But for me it has a haunting quality, even over thirty years later. That was my first encounter with MacLean.
In the course of it he actually told me that one of the two men associated with the Scottish Eimhir had been ‘a notorious homosexual’ – his very words. It didn’t occur to him that the person he was speaking to might be homosexual, too! For me, it was very peculiar, coming on another gay man at the heart of the tangled web which had given rise to the greatest Gaelic love poetry of the 20th century.
In 1990 I published an essay called ‘The Cohesion of Dàin do Eimhir’ (of course, Sorley was still alive at the time) which very much went in the face of his own presentation of the cycle after 1977, because the essay said that this was really a complete work with its own organic structure and meaning, and that the poems needed to be put back together as a sequence. I never heard anything about his own reaction. By that stage, I was somebody who had a strong association with Derick Thomson. This may have coloured his attitude to me on the few other occasions when we did meet.
IMD Well, even in those days when you first encountered MacLean, there were still gaps in the published material. We now have An Cuilithionn 1939, which is the original version and which is fairly different from the version which was published much later, first of all, partly in Gairm, then in Chapman and then as part of the collected poems, O Choille gu Bearradh, shorn of about a quarter of its length. Why do you think it’s important to have that first version of An Cuilithionn?
CW My own feeling is that MacLean was undisputedly a genius. He was a poet of such stature that everything he wrote needs to come into the public domain. And as an editor, for example of the unpublished poems, I don’t feel like saying I saw 45 poems and, in my opinion, these are the ones that deserve to get into print. I think it is standard practice for writers of this stature (it is happening quite early with MacLean) for everything to come into the public domain, with the idea that within twenty or thirty years some sort of a consensus will be reached about the quality and the importance of this material. The later An Cuilithionn is an abridgement. That is an absolutely accurate statement. MacLean went in for cutting and pasting. The additional material doesn’t go much over twenty lines, mostly in dribs and drabs here and there. So it’s fair to say that everything that’s there in 1989 was already there in 1939.
IMD You’re saying there’s been almost no rewriting?
CW A very little rewriting, but it’s basically an abridgement. The person who reviewed Caoir Gheal Leumraich for the Edinburgh Review got the wrong end of the stick. The original version was never published. The reviewer speaks of the newly published materials as if it were a question of prologues, which it’s not. It was a matter of putting back the bits that had been cut out. Almost everyone who has read one of these sections, which Emma Dymock, my co-editor on the collected poems, speaks of as ‘the Cuilinn praise song’ (it’s part of Section VII), seems to agree it is one of the pinnacles of MacLean’s achievement. Until June 2011 this was unpublished; it simply had not got into print. There is little room for argument about the importance of bringing the original version into the public domain so that discussion can start. It’s a very different poem architecturally.
One issue is MacLean’s subsequent claims that An Cuilithionn was unfinished. It’s hard to find evidence from around the time of writing that this was the case. When I originally asked MacLean, at that first meeting, about the missing Dàin do Eimhir, he spoke of a lost notebook. But the material was available in the special collections at Aberdeen University Library. There were also various copies among MacLean’s papers, and so it’s almost like – how can I say this? – coming across someone who wants to give a different version of himself four decades later. The two versions of An Cuilithionn, if you like, reflect two very different MacLeans, with the added fact of the second version being an abridgement. The architecture of the 1939 poem suggests to me a completed whole with its own echoes and anticipations, its own verbal echoes and key words.
IMD And I think at one point, decades ago, when he was writing to Douglas Young, he did use the words “when I finished ‘The Cuillin’ about New Year 1940”.
CW Yes. Yes.
IMD And at the same time, in the newest collected poems (Caoir Gheal Leumraich) you’ve published what you might call the 1989 version of An Cuilithionn, and you’re giving that, as it were, its own status as almost a different kind of artefact, although they are clearly closely related.
CW I think that’s a diplomatic position, correct and appropriate at the present moment. My own gut feeling is that the 1939 poem should take precedence. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in forty or fifty years’ time, that will be the text that is given central place, rather than the 1989 abridgement. But the 1939 poem entered the public domain in June 2011. The new Collected was published in November 2011. It’s far too early to make that substitution. There needs to be an ongoing critical debate and then, within twenty or thirty years, some sort of a consensus may emerge – as I think a consensus has emerged to the effect that Dàin do Eimhir should be read as a sequence, rather than as scattered, unconnected individual poems.
IMD Just for clarity: you said there was very little rewriting or new material in the 1989 An Cuilithionn. Is there much in the way of rearrangement?
CW No. There’s no change to the order of the passages. Passages haven’t been moved around. Simply, passages have been cut – that’s all. Some of the most topical passages which were cut are at this distance of time absolutely fascinating – for example, attacks on individual figures. It would appear that one of these was the headmaster of Portree High School – the new headmaster who was one of the reasons why MacLean went to Mull. Then there’s Flora MacLeod of Dunvegan. It’s understandable that, in 1989, MacLean should have felt a degree of embarrassment, but nowadays I think this adds to our fascination, because it’s very much a poem of its time, of those months preceding the outbreak of war and immediately following it, which in terms of European history constitute a crucial moment.
IMD I suppose he was under pressure from other individuals too, as well as from his own feelings to do with the politics of the poem. For example, I think that at one point Robin Lorimer said to Sorley in writing: “Do you believe this now? If not, should you excise these lines? The test is do you want to say this now?” So there were pressures.
CW For me you are connecting to another very important aspect of An Cuilithionn, namely, that the poem was disowned by MacLean as early, probably, as 1944‑45, partly under the influence of Sydney Goodsir Smith, with whom MacLean and his wife shared a flat in Edinburgh. Goodsir Smith had taught English to members of the Polish army in exile, and so had direct information about the behaviour of the Soviet troops when they approached Warsaw. This would appear to have had a ricochet effect on MacLean, who felt the need to distance himself from what he himself had written about Stalin and the Red Army.
But the poem brings us face to face with the whole issue, during the preceding two decades, of the collusion of Western intellectuals and writers in the Bolshevik and, more particularly, the Stalinist experiment in Soviet Russia. That’s a hugely important issue, particularly now that Soviet Russia no longer exists. How could so many brilliant men – principally males, because there’s a gender aspect to this too, of ‘macho’ toughness – knowingly, or unknowingly, lend their support to an absolutely criminal regime which was one of the victors in the war (one more reason why it was so difficult to say the truth about them). Now, I think this is a source of profound embarrassment when one reads An Cuilithionn. It’s certainly a source of embarrassment for me. I believe that embarrassment to be, potentially, very fruitful. It connects us to something that goes way beyond the field of Gaelic writing, or even Scottish writing, to what I would call ‘leftism’, namely the enthusiastic support offered by people, by intellectuals, living in western parliamentary democracies for a totalitarian regime operating on the far side of Europe. Almost nobody put their ideas into practice and went to live under that regime. The turn of the century German painter Heinrich Vogeler was one. But there were remarkably few.
IMD Ironically, I suppose the point might be made, though I’m not sure that any of those people you mention made it, that the Russian contribution to the victory over Germany in the Second World War was a crucial one. But I don’t recall hearing that that was said, even though, as I understand it, a lot of barbarity was involved as well as a kind of by-product of that.
CW I think that these are very interesting questions. Ian, you’ll know that for the last seven years I’ve lived in Hungary, in Budapest, and let’s say that in that context the heroic discourse about the Red Army’s liberation of Eastern Europe doesn’t really hold, it doesn’t ring true – because this was perceived as one more catastrophe (though at the same time, it has to be said that it ensured the survival of a significant proportion of Budapest’s Jewish population). There’s a joke that, in Vienna, people are supposed to have said they could survive a Third World War but they could never survive a third liberation! There are whole areas here that have been comparatively unexplored – for example, in Germany in the last five years people have begun to talk about the systematic raping of German women that took place at the hands of Russian soldiers. There are associated questions, such as “Can a German civilian be a victim?” and “Can a German soldier be a victim?” Then there is the vexed question of which was worse: Bolshevism or Nazism? I don’t think it’s useful to try and answer it. I do think the fact that the Red Army defeated the Nazi army in Eastern Europe doesn’t justify any of the things that went on. MacLean’s later attitude to An Cuilithionn suggests that he was for a while of the same opinion.
While I was working on the edition of An Cuilithionn 1939, I was also translating the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) from Russian into English. This was very reassuring for me. Although I was very keen to do the edition, to some extent for me it meant looking backwards to something I had left behind – Scotland and academic life. I needed to have a foot in both camps, if you like: a foot in Gaelic Scotland and a foot in something much broader. I could say translating Marina Tsvetaeva offered me a balance. It even kept me sane, given that returning to work on MacLean’s poetry, five years after abandoning Scotland, felt like being dragged back into the past – not quite kicking and screaming, but nearly!
After seventeen years in emigration, Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union in June 1939, very much against her better judgement. Within four months, both her husband and her daughter, enthusiastic supporters of Stalin, had been arrested. Her daughter was pregnant, by a man who turned out to have been an informer for the regime. She was so badly beaten with rubber truncheons during interrogation that she lost her child. This happened precisely while MacLean was working on An Cuilithionn. It was standard practice at the time. The daughter was rehabilitated in 1956 – in other words, she got a certificate saying the charges against her were totally unfounded, even though she had signed a full confession.
It’s a small detail, concerning one woman out of thousands, but it should be sufficient to make any of us read An Cuilithionn with profound discomfort. The discomfort provoked is what makes this poem so important. Placing that event beside the idealisation of Stalin in MacLean’s poem sets all sorts of crucial questions resonating. It raises the hugely disturbing question of the prolonged support offered by writers and intellectuals in the West for a regime characterised by an appalling degree of criminality systematically applied. The fact that Stalin’s armies defeated Hitler’s does nothing to change the nature of the regime he headed. Within five years of writing An Cuilithionn, MacLean became totally alienated from his poem for these very reasons. It would be wonderful if they made it a bad poem, but they don’t. You can write splendid poetry in support of a mistaken political cause. MacLean was not the only one to get it wrong – far from it.
I don’t think we should try to avoid this paradox, that it was Stalin’s Russia that defeated Hitler. We need to look it in the face.
The most surprising thing about the 2011 conference for me was the violent reaction provoked by anyone daring to criticise MacLean’s leftist affiliations – as if that were still unacceptable in Scotland today, for men of my own age or slightly older. I’m not sure, but I suspect this may be what led Aonghas MacNeacail to speak of my introduction as “tendentious” when he reviewed the edition. I say ‘men’ deliberately, because MacLean’s sympathies for Soviet Russia have a decidedly ‘macho’ tinge. Showing how tough you are by backing, even in retrospect, a supposedly tough regime (“inhuman”, “criminal” or “amoral” might be more appropriate words) still holds its charms for some people today. An Cuilithionn is an aggressively masculine poem. Apart from a reference to the Eimhir figure and Màiri Mhòr, given third place among its patrons, the only other female presence, Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, was rapidly excised.
IMD The book An Cuilithionn 1939 and Unpublished Poems was launched at the conference and you spoke very eloquently about it in a way reminiscent of the way you’re speaking now. Caoir Gheal Leumraich, the latest and largest collected edition, which is fairly close to being complete, came out in November 2011, some five months after the conference on MacLean, and it’s interesting that the photographs of MacLean which we see on the front and on the back cover show him as a fairly young man. Now, we’ve become used to these superb photographs by Jessie Anne Mathew and Sam Maynard and Timothy Neat and various other people – memorable photographs of him in his late middle age or old age – but I take it that here the policy is to remind us that most of the great poetry was composed by a much younger MacLean. Where did the idea of using the youthful photographs come from?
CW It came from the poet’s daughter, Ishbel Maclean, and it seems to me a splendid idea because it underlines the fact that, when you approach MacLean’s poetry now, you are confronted by two different people. The young man who wrote the poetry, he says in a letter to Douglas Young, was near suicidal much of the time because of his emotional involvement with the Scottish Eimhir. He had a strong sympathy for Bolshevism, and saw it, if you like, as the only hope of defeating Fascism, as did many intellectuals of the time. I’m also pretty sure that when he went to fight in the war he believed he wouldn’t come back. And if that creates desperation, it also certainly loosens your tongue because, if death is round the corner, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go to the heart of the matter and say everything that needs to be said.
The older MacLean was, I think, embarrassed to a certain extent by the younger figure, and embarrassed by some of the things that he had said. He was a very respected member of a Highland community, a headmaster with a crucial role there – a totally different set of circumstances. He had been unjustly denied recognition and celebration for three or four decades and finally he was getting something of what he deserved. So his attitude to the material and to that younger man was very ambivalent. My own experience as editor involved having to confront these two figures. Because the older MacLean, if you like, had had his say, for me as editor it was important to bring the younger MacLean out in all his uncomfortable, sometimes scandalous sincerity. That’s why the photographs on the cover of the book are so splendid and convey something of the same message – that sense of an edge of danger.
IMD I think that one thing no‑one would dispute is MacLean’s courage and the depth of his feelings for people’s suffering, and I must say that I found it moving when in the National Library to be able to handle some of the material that he actually had with him in the desert and wrote on – some of the notebooks.
CW Something that’s worth broaching is the knotty question of a biography of MacLean, and certainly, as far as I can see, MacLean’s conduct regarding each of the two women he bracketed underneath the name of Eimhir was impeccable. What brings this to mind when you talk about the war is that it’s clear MacLean would have loved to go to fight in Spain but for family reasons was unable to go. I hope I’m getting my facts right here. He asked to be released from his teaching job at Boroughmuir and go and fight, but he was told that, if he did, his salary would no longer be paid, and he was supporting his family to a significant extent. And so, in the midst of this maelstrom of emotional and political affiliations, MacLean also shouldered responsibility for his siblings, and, as I say, his conduct was exemplary.
The whole story around the Scottish Eimhir is a rather murky affair. She would seem to have been what they call in French a mythomane, a mythomaniac, a woman who invented fascinating stories about what was happening to her. And one hopes that, when a biography is eventually written, shame can be overcome, the unneeded shame, and we can simply be told the truth, for the actual facts are the raw material from which the poetry was made and that transmuting is a crucial process. But the facts are important; they are of interest. In the introduction to the new collected poems, Caoir Gheal Leumraich, I quoted a Hungarian author speaking about Goethe and Thomas Mann who said that geniuses are not just important for their work. The way he or she acts from day to day has an effect on the people around and on the society – what I have in mind is the socially performative aspect of genius: the people they talk to, the things they say, the sexual and other relations they establish. And unfortunately, if you are a genius of this stature, all of that is part of the larger picture, so that I hope that when a biography of MacLean has to be written it will be an absolutely open one.
This is a very problematic area in Scotland. Alan Bold’s biography of MacDiarmid constitutes a model because MacDiarmid’s conduct was repeatedly shameful in a number of situations and this doesn’t lessen the poetry, but Bold faces this head‑on. And I hope that MacLean’s biographer will simply tell the truth about the lived material from which this wonderful poetry was made.
In the introduction to Caoir Gheal Leumraich there’s quite a lot about a concert in December 1939 where Beethoven’s 8th was played, which would appear to have given direct inspiration for Dàin do Eimhir XXIII, a very important poem. In the Aberdeen manuscript, it carries a subtitle: ‘Eimhir and Beethoven’s 8th’. One of the reasons that that concert is so significant is that so far it is the only documentary evidence for the name of the Scottish Eimhir. We know from the letters that MacLean considered dedicating the volume to AM, and – not in that concert programme but in a programme from the same series given by the same orchestra – someone whose name matches these initials appears among the second violins. The same name is still current in oral discourse in Edinburgh, and so quite a lot of people would associate it with the Scottish Eimhir. I don’t know if that’s enough to clinch the matter.
Another name current in oral discourse in Edinburgh is that of the other man, the ‘gille-mirein’. And I hope that whoever decides to do the biography will succeed in unearthing this rather lurid but very fascinating story about the kind of goings‑on that were happening because, if the Scottish Eimhir was associating with a man who was a notorious homosexual in Edinburgh society, was she covering up for him? Exactly what was going on? Exactly what sort of hands did this poor, passionate highly strung and rather naive Highlander from Raasay fall into? And in spite of all the suffering it caused him I can’t find it in myself to regret this happening because of the poetry which emerged as a result.
IMD You yourself have used the term fabula, as in ‘a poet’s fabula’. When I first came across MacLean’s poetry when I was a schoolboy there seemed to be a fair consensus that the situation was, as might be thought from a reading of the poems, that he couldn’t go to Spain because of his love for Eimhir. We then realised that there were more pressing reasons, in some ways more everyday reasons – economic reasons, because he was supporting his family. And you yourself have taken the debate a bit further – in that, clearly, these are love poems, love poems to an individual, in this case two individuals at least (maybe three!), but there is also something else involved, to do with the poet’s realisation of himself as a poet, and to some extent this comes through in the poems as well.
CW I absolutely agree with you that one of the dominant themes of the sequence is: ‘I became a great poet by writing this piece of work.’ That modelling oneself as a poet, as a figure, through the poems (Douglas Young refers to this too), is almost as important as the love story itself.
Patrick Crotty, in a very welcome and beautifully written review in the TLS, suggests that the sequence isn’t so fundamental as a much larger group of Eimhir poems generally, and that it’s not useful to reconstruct the sequence or pick it out. I think this is wrong. I believe MacLean had clear criteria for what could go into the sequence and couldn’t. Any poem that reflected poorly on the Eimhir figure needed to be excluded. Poems expressing his subsequent disillusionment also couldn’t find their way into the Dàin do Eimhir proper. It’s also worth saying, still on this point, that it would appear that as MacLean was writing the poems he numbered them, so that when he composed a poem he knew this was Poem XXXVI or Poem LII. But he did make mistakes. There is no evidence that he actually destroyed anything. The missing VII, if you ask me, could be a simple oversight. Thanks to your own discovery of an unpublished poem among the Aberdeen papers, we now know he wrote two poems for No. XLVI. At quite an early stage he also started removing poems, but I think there are still huge arguments for reading the Eimhir sequence primarily as a unit, as a whole, and then having a larger, surrounding field, as it were, of connected and supporting poems still focusing on the love theme.
IMD Yes, and there are several memorable poems on the same topic which are outwith the sequence. I think the one which starts ‘An tè dhan tug mi uile ghaol’ is an extraordinarily fine and beautiful poem. There are others too. But I’m not sure myself that what we now know as Poems XLVI and XLVII might not have sat more comfortably outside the sequence, as they bring in the personal to a very considerable degree. But that’s just a thought.
CW They are poems that express, in a very uncomfortable way, the erotic tension of the relationship, a suppressed erotic tension, and as you remember, there are three poems that appear to be closely related, Nos. XL, XLVI and XLVII – and in No. XL it is ‘Mo Rùn Geal Dìleas’ which he is rewriting.
IMD Yes, these seem to have been regarded as particularly sensitive by MacLean and they weren’t published until 1970 (in Lines Review). I don’t have the same problem with XL as I do with XLVI and XLVII. In those it’s as if a certain kind of autobiographical reality has broken in, broken through the sheen of the rest of the sequence. The sequence is influenced by what used to be called ‘the Allegory of Love’; it has that behind it. You yourself have shown it has many other things behind it too.
CW There’s also the early poem, No. VI, which has been restored to the sequence, but was presumably removed because it makes explicit reference to the fact of there being at least two women behind the Eimhir figure. When he was preparing the sequence for publication, MacLean may have thought that was too dissonant, and so he pushed it into the Dàin Eile.
IMD Another term you have used is psychomachia. How would you define that?
CW I define that as personifying different elements of the poet’s psyche and transcribing the dialogue between them – the way they speak to one another. The famous poem that begins ‘Choisich mi cuide ri mo thuigse’ is an example. There’s a terrible sense of an eternal dividedness that cannot be overcome, and it’s almost like staging the psychological conflict, making a play of it, making theatre of it. And, of course, it’s a term that goes back to the study of medieval literature, doesn’t it?
IMD All that said, I think we can hardly be surprised that MacLean wondered about which poems to put in. He was corresponding with Douglas Young, who was a friend and advisor, and to some extent a mentor, I think – a sounding‑board and, on the whole, a wonderful support for him – but MacLean kept changing his mind about the poetry: “We’ll put that one in …” “No, keep these out …”, and so on. I think that in view of the turbulence of his personal circumstances and the European situation and the depth of his feelings about all these matters, it’s not surprising that he was pulled one way and then another. I wonder now if, looking down from wherever he is, he is probably on the whole happy that the whole sequence has been reconstituted and that all but one of the gaps that were there for a considerable time have been filled. And in addition, of course, a fair number of poems that had never seen the light of day have been published in An Cuilithionn 1939 and Unpublished Poems – 45 of them, of which 28 are reprinted in the new collected volume. And so we have a very full picture now.
CW You’ve touched on a lot of different points. The MacLean-Young correspondence, of which Emma Dymock is preparing an edition, which is eagerly awaited – that’s a milestone in twentieth-century Scottish literature. But by the time MacLean was writing to Young about the sequence he already knew how much he had been lied to by the Scottish Eimhir, and he would have been inhuman if this had not affected his attitude. The other thorny point is that we cannot honestly rely on MacLean’s judgement of which are the best poems, because several that he wanted to exclude would now be regarded as high points of the sequence. I think No. XXII (‘Choisich mi cuide ri mo thuigse’) is one of them, and No. XIX (‘Thug mise dhut biothbhuantachd’) doesn’t appear in O Choille gu Bearradh.
IMD I found that quite extraordinary myself.
CW This would imply that we cannot take MacLean as a reliable guide, that the choice, the exclusions, were not made on criteria of quality that we could subscribe to. And you’re in a very difficult position when you’re editing somebody’s poems and you find yourself saying that the poet was wrong about what was good and what was bad. I don’t really see how we can get round this, as with the wonderful Cuillin praise poem in Section VII of An Cuilithionn I’ve already mentioned. How could he possibly allow that to remain in manuscript! And so you do find yourself, if you like, correcting the poet willy‑nilly.
Another problem is this whole issue of allowing your complete works to appear in parallel texts – Gaelic facing English. Now, it’s possible that pragmatically, in 1989, this was the right thing to do, but retrospectively it can seem like a huge mistake. It’s possible for poets on a world or European level to gain an audience in translation. The Greek poet Cavafy is a very good example – hugely read, hugely respected, and only a small proportion of the audience reads him in Modern Greek. But with MacLean it’s different. If you read MacLean in English, you are reading him in the language which is suffocating and crushing the language of his poetry. That can never be innocent. And when MacLean allowed everything to appear, not just with a facing English translation but with his own English translation, he played into the hands of people who, for various reasons – laziness being one of them! – did not want to learn Gaelic, and also feel that the Gaelic text can be overlooked because he made his English translations for us; he made the job much easier – let’s focus on the English poems.
Now in 1989‑90, when it was important to gain a space for MacLean, this may have been a wise tactic. But I think we need to do some very, very strong back‑pedalling now, both about the quality of MacLean’s translations and about the whole issue of self-translation, when the language you are translating from is a threatened language, a language that is facing extinction. That is another reason why O Choille gu Bearradh is a very ambivalent book.
IMD I suppose the poet is under pressure from the publishers. The template was set to some extent with Reothairt is Contraigh, the selected poems which came out in 1977, which did have parallel translations, many of the poems there having not been published with translation before. The 1943 Dàin do Eimhir has got a fairly small number of translations but they are tucked in at the back. And so one would make the point that, of course, he was probably under pressure from publishers.
CW I do think that MacLean’s practice then led to a number of other poets producing poems which are almost Gaelic and English done at the same time; and there’s a huge temptation for a poet who is doing that to then move over to English, for all sorts of reasons. It’s almost like a rolling ball that takes you in that direction. I consider that the vesture in which MacLean’s poetry was presented is in part responsible for that tendency, which I would see as very detrimental to Gaelic poetry – Gaelic poetry in Gaelic, I want to say! – actually having a long‑term future.
IMD I think the poet himself was conscious of this because more than once a few years before he died I heard him saying – once on a Gaelic radio programme – that what mattered most to him was the reaction to his poems and the appreciation of them by native speakers of Gaelic, which was interesting. He seemed a little uneasy about the way things had gone.
CW I hope you wouldn’t exclude those of us who have learned Gaelic?
IMD No, no, no! He referred to native speakers but let’s just leave it at ‘speakers’! What is the future of what you might call MacLean studies? How would you like to see these develop?
CW I think the issue of the status of the English translation within the larger cultural picture and the picture of power relations is something that needs to be discussed.
Something else that would be wonderful to have would be a complete concordance of the Dàin do Eimhir, as MacLean writes his own special idiolect of Gaelic – in which a word like leug (‘jewel’), for example, is fascinatingly important. A stage that needs to be gone through with Dàin do Eimhir is for someone to sit down and look at all the occurrences of, let’s say, the twenty crucial terms in those sixty poems, and draw conclusions from that about the particular personal dialect that MacLean forged for himself from the Gaelic that was available to him.
IMD Well, John MacInnes has made the point that the English translations give no indication of the sheer variety and range of registers of MacLean’s Gaelic. It seems to me that sometimes MacLean’s own translations follow the Gaelic so faithfully – so literally – that they give a slightly false idea of the Gaelic, and that the Gaelic may be thought to be more lumbering and more convoluted than in fact it is, whereas, as we know, it has a wonderful range and wonderful rhythm and just hits you between the eyes.
CW It’s a blindingly simple point, but this lovely word àlainn (‘beautiful’ in English) is a valid instance. Does it mean ‘lovely’, ‘attractive’, or ‘appealing’? Gaelic has certain words that are not devalued, that have not lost their force, and they’re crucially simple terms. That means that to some extent English is a very difficult language into which to translate Gaelic. I would feel much calmer if MacLean was gaining his reputation, like Cavafy’s, through translation into seven or eight different languages. But that’s not the case, and the English translations are almost like a mould or a growth on the plant which in the end will suffocate it and kill it. I’m sorry – this is my own feeling.
IMD And, of course, you said at the beginning that you translated some poems into Italian.
CW Yes, yes. That was a very important stage in my own approach to Gaelic because I lived in Italy for more than ten years. When I came back to Scotland I couldn’t write good English prose and I remember teaching in Edinburgh and sometimes I knew exactly what I wanted to say in Italian and I used to think: “How can I put this in English?” Even today, I occasionally suffer interference from Italian when using English. Translating MacLean’s Gaelic into what was then my everyday language was a very important move.
I just have to say that my own involvement has been with the original Gaelic text. I think MacLean’s English translations deserve prolonged consideration. It’s not something I have been able to do – I have never really sat down and looked at the English translation and evaluated it as a rendering of the Gaelic. My task – and it’s finished now, I think – has been getting the body of Gaelic work into the public domain. Having an English translation was a practical necessity for publication reasons but I think that’s another area that needs opening up. I would be happy to see two further translations of An Cuilithionn done by completely different hands. The more translations into English the merrier, and the more translations into different languages the merrier. What is very problematic is giving MacLean’s English translations some kind of canonical status, simply because they were done by the man who wrote the original. In the preface to the 2002 Dàin do Eimhir I quoted Paul Valery as saying that the last person to translate a poem is the person who wrote it. But that would connect with my earlier point about what happens to poets in this very, very complex relationship between the Gaelic poem and its English equivalent, and the question of whether they actually have equal status, whether one can stand without the other. All of that needs talking about and clarifying. In MacLean’s case, I look forward to the time when it will be possible to publish his poetry in a Gaelic‑only edition. The fact that that’s not possible and doesn’t happen says a huge amount about the conditions under which I have been working, and the conditions under which MacLean is being read.
As I’ve said, we need a concordance, a study of MacLean’s vocabulary, and an honest and exhaustive biography, so that the raw material is available to us. We need those letters to Douglas Young, which are on the way, and more of MacLean’s letters.
I would also like to see a development of George Campbell Hay studies because I think that the two met more than once at a crucial time, and MacLean felt a real affinity for Campbell Hay and felt he could talk to him. That would enlighten us as to the ambience in which MacLean was writing and would help to fill in the background. Developing MacLean studies is also about looking at the environment surrounding him – I mean, MacLean was in regular contact with George Davie, a hugely important intellectual. The intellectual environment he was moving in at that time – it’s just a brief thing, a matter of a year or a year and a half – with people like James Caird – it’s absolutely enthralling. We need a study of the intellectual stimuli which were there around the time the Dàin do Eimhir were written.
If I can move to a slightly different point, an important one is MacLean’s bilingualism. The choice to write in Gaelic in 1939 has to be seen in terms of the languages that were available. Gaelic no longer subsisted in a monolingual context, so that MacLean’s choice of Gaelic and use of Gaelic has to be conceptualised within a framework where writing in English was also possible. So what does it mean for a literary genius and an intellectual of huge importance to choose to write in Gaelic in 1939? Obviously there is the gut feeling of “This is my true language”, but it’s also a strategy. I can’t really say much more about it than that, but that’s the context within which it has to be seen.
A while ago I read a lot about the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, writing under the Soviet regime, and about the importance of ironic speech when you were writing in a context where language is so controlled and so loaded with implications of power. I think we need to develop some kind of an understanding of the multilingual possibilities in Scotland. And that’s not just about English being stronger; it’s about the meaning of the choice of a particular language. And, of course, the huge unacknowledged presence here is Scots, which would be the majority language – which has been the majority language in this country for the last two to three hundred years, a fact which is talked about so little. And so MacLean’s choice of Gaelic has to be discussed. Studying Campbell Hay is useful because he wrote in all three languages and he modulates between them. This could shed a lot of light on the vexed question of the need to provide English translation. Self-translation is symptomatic of poets who are really pushed to the edge. Marina Tsvetaeva lived in Paris for fourteen years, and she was effectively a minority language writer, even though she was writing in Russian. French was all around her and she wrote in French and tried to translate herself into French – so there are parallels with what MacLean was doing.
All of these issues need to be brought into the open, and the kind of honesty that is essential when dealing with the antics of the Scottish Eimhir needs to be directed towards the linguistic behaviour (that’s a good word, I think) around the emergence of these wonderful poems.
IMD Would you like to say a little about the new collected poems published late in 2011, Caoir Gheal Leumraich?
CW As you said, An Cuilithionn 1939 and Unpublished Poems had 45 unpublished poems, but a selection only is provided in Caoir. And that was partly dictated by reasons of publishing Realpolitik because, if a book comes out in June, you don’t render it obsolescent in November by putting everything in another book.
But it also includes the uncollected poems, poems that were published in MacLean’s lifetime but didn’t find their way into O Choille gu Bearradh. And some of these Emma and I had to translate (‘Ach an Dà Theàrnaidh’ is one example) because, I think I’m right in saying, there wasn’t an extant translation by MacLean. These poems struck me as very fine indeed. It was a surprise to me that the ‘written to order’ poems, such as those for the Gaelic Society of Inverness, were so good. And it’s a quite different MacLean from the MacLean of Dàin do Eimhir, the private writing. I would simply say that the difficulty of coming up with an English version took Emma and me into the complexities of these poems, and to me they are significant additions to the published corpus. This is another plus, and an advantage that Caoir Gheal Leumraich has over O Choille gu Bearradh.
There’s also a poem you like very much, the last of the unpublished poems in Caoir, ‘Tha na beanntan gun bhruidhinn’.
IMD Yes, it’s a classic statement, and I find it very moving. I’m very glad that’s been published.
Now, it’s common enough to gather up published but uncollected poems in a collected edition, but though it’s not unknown, it’s less usual to publish poems that have not appeared at all. How would you characterise your decisions about the poems that were in the notebook and had not seen the light of day at all?
CW Well, again, some misleading comments have been made. It’s not as if the poet’s family took us to Sorley’s private desk and opened the drawers and let us leaf through these papers! In fact, for I don’t know how many years – but it must be five or six – these unpublished poems have been in the National Library of Scotland. Anybody who gets a ticket can walk in off the street and look at them, so that in that sense they were already in the public domain. I touched on this earlier. I think that MacLean is such a fine writer that everything that we have is deserving of attention. And an editor’s job is not evaluative. It’s not his or her job to say, “I looked through the unpublished poems and I think these are the ones which are worthy of attention.” An editor’s job is to get a reliable text of everything into the public domain so that discussion can start. The unpublished poems had to appear. At the very lowest level they give us more information about what MacLean wrote, but there are several items there that can also give great pleasure. There’s one poem which I had to edit in two versions because all we have are sketches, and it’s almost like a combinatory problem. And that in its way is absolutely fascinating, as it does show us MacLean at work, not yet having reached a definitive version.
I also think that MacLean was quite chaotic with his papers. This is my impression. I believe the family was astonished at just how much material he had hung on to. A lot of things that we want to interpret as intentional were simply this brilliant man with so much going on in his head that he wasn’t quite sure which poems were where. He wrote to Douglas Young in 1968 looking for some of the unpublished Dàin do Eimhir because he wanted to rework them. I don’t know why Douglas didn’t say, “Everything is in Aberdeen University Library.” Had they forgotten? Had Douglas forgotten? MacLean had clearly forgotten.
IMD I suppose it’s just possible, yes.
CW Or did Douglas think, “If I tell him they’re there, God knows what he will do with them, so let’s just leave them where they are”?!
IMD We’re always hearing how poets like Auden, say, have re-worked early poems. It’s interesting that MacLean never, as far as I know, re-worked the Dàin do Eimhir. He left them strictly alone, I think.
CW There are some papers in the NLS that show him – in the 1943 Dàin do Eimhir – actually rewriting. I can’t remember which one offhand.
IMD And, of course, he did revise some of them before publication. ‘Ùrnaigh’ (No. XVIII) is the obvious example, with the change in the first line.
What about any influence from MacLean on your own poetry? Would you say the work you have put in on editing him has affected the way you write yourself?
CW I’m not sure that my own poetry as such is very connected with Sorley MacLean. It was a crucial step for me in 1984-85 when I put all of the Dàin do Eimhir that I knew at the time into Italian, which had been for about ten years my language of daily conversation and communication. And translation is a wonderful way of studying and analysing anyone’s poetry, so to that extent I could say I learned Gaelic in order to read Sorley and Sorley brought me much closer to Gaelic. That being so, it’s paradoxical that, of all the poets in my generation, I am probably the one least influenced by MacLean. I’ve certainly not made any conscious effort to imitate him or take up his heritage. I have a feeling that my own poetry comes from somewhere quite different and owes rather less to Sorley than, say, the work of Aonghas MacNeacail or Meg Bateman does – partly because my own poetry tends to be very personal in nature.
My poetry has very different roots. A Catholic upbringing amidst the rampant prejudice of Glasgow in the 1950s and 1960s, along with conscious assumption of the implications of my sexual orientation, meant I approached the language from a very different direction. Moving abroad aged 21 offered me a safe place to find out about being gay. In a parallel way, I looked to figures like Rilke, Baudelaire or Pasolini for guidance about creating an expressive medium I did not believe was available back home in Scotland. Whereas MacLean was born at the heart of Gaelic society and could identify with it, while at the same time criticising, even rejecting it, I was someone trying to heal a wound, to repair the damage inflicted by a series of historical tragedies, as a result of which I grew up a monoglot in a language that meant nothing to my forebears.
IMD Christopher, thank you very much.
Editing MacLean