More than 25 years have passed since the Maastricht treaty and centrifugal urges are provoking a crisis in the project of a Europe with no borders, most recently given clamorous expression by Brexit. In your opinion, what has failed to work  with European integration?

To be honest, I must confess that from the very start – the end of childhood and becoming a teenager – I have been strongly in favour of European integration and Scottish independence. For me these were not contradictory urges, more two aspects of a single urge. And I must specify that for me Europe meant the “real” Europe, in other words, it included the former countries of the Soviet block, which only became part of the European Union we know in 2004. One more observation. I have been living in Budapest, in Hungary, for more than a decade, and have come to realise that each of the countries of “eastern” Europe has a separate story. They cannot be conflated. For example, the processes by which communists came to power in Prague and in Budapest were totally different. And the experiences of the Czech and Slovak republics, during the war and after, were profoundly contrasting, even if the two formed part of a single state before 1939 and from 1945 to 1992.

What do you think is happening in Great Britain? What can account for the drastic decision to exit from the Union? Can you explain what failed to work on the cultural level with European integration?

I wouldn’t so much say what is happening in Great Britain as what is happening more precisely in England and in London. Some years ago I saw a splendid English film featuring Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, The King’s Speech, emerging afterwards from the cinema profoundly troubled. I asked myself: Is it possible that the English imagination has proved incapable of devising a different myth? Of reaching an understanding of its relationship to Europe which does not belong in 1939? Including all the inevitable, obligatory references to the national playwright?

The historian Anthony Judt has written that the fundamental dilemma of British politics since the Second World War has been whether to associate with Europe or with the United States. We may well be watching the final disintegration of a historical entity, the British Empire, which for much of the nineteenth century was the most powerful in the world. Similar “final acts” rarely provide an edifying spectacle, and they can harbour extremely destructive elements.

What is the attitude of the Scots and the Irish?

Like the Czechs and the Slovaks, the Scots and the Irish respectively have two very different stories, two experiences which cannot in any way be conflated with one another. The Scots were in part victims of the imperial enterprise, in part collaborators. For them – for us – detaching from being British is a painful, still uncertain process, even if large sectors of the world of culture and intellectual debate think along the same lines as me.

For years you have written poetry only in Scottish Gaelic. What connection do you see between the use of this language and the political and cultural processes currently taking place in the British Isles?

Where Gaelic is concerned, I think it will be fairer, and more accurate, if I answer on a purely personal basis. I was born and grew up in Glasgow. My mother belonged to the Irish immigrant community and the milieu we lived in was strongly Catholic, rather than Calvinist as would then have been the norm in Scotland. I went to a Jesuit college then straight to Cambridge, where I took a degree in English, that is, in English literature. The two terms were viewed as so equivalent that one effortlessly took the place of the other.

The process according to which promising elements of the subject communities are carefully filtered out and transported to the centre, in order to be absorbed by the dominant culture, is typically imperialist and colonial. Personally I have always perceived the English language and English culture as profoundly alien. I grew up effectively monolingual, even if the Glasgow dialect surrounding us was thoroughly alive, and can reckon today with a distinct literature of its own, yet I had a clear perception that neither the language nor the culture belonged to me.

You are a native speaker of English and yet you chose not to use this “world” language for your poetry… Why?

The gift of the coloniser’s language sticks in your throat and prevents you from speaking or reasoning. It stops you seeing yourself clearly, who you are, what you need. I suspect there are interesting parallels, for example with certain writers of the French “Maghreb”, but I know too little about them to go into detail. I was saved by the fact that still today Scotland is a country with three languages, a cultivated English local in nature, then Scots, then Gaelic. Poetry written in Gaelic will never be sucked into the dominant, destructive culture. Gaelic offered outstanding protection against the imperialist cultural project. At a personal, poetic level, it offered me the chance to say things I could never have understood or articulated if I had been using English.

Would this position be shared by other people speaking or working with Gaelic?

Those who write in Gaelic and who work with our languages and their cultures in Scotland have been overwhelmingly in favour of independence since 1918 if not earlier. Gaelic today is used by fewer than 60,000 people, but it continues to be a national language. If you learn Gaelic then travel across Scotland, it is as if a curtain were lifted on a passionately involving spectacle, partly because so many of our placenames, which sound peculiar in English, are distorted forms of words that in Gaelic are totally clear – the long promontory, the village next to the straits and so on. Learning Gaelic allows you to take possession of the territory and its history, to get access to information that has for long been kept hidden, for reasons there is no need to highlight.

How do you see the near future in Great Britain?

More and more people are realising that Brexit is a huge mistake, potentially a catastrophe for the United Kingdom. I cannot help suspecting that many of those who voted in favour of Brexit did so as a form of protest, and were horrified when they saw the following morning that it had won. The margin was only 4% of those voting, don’t forget.

For a couple of decades Scotland and England, as countries, have been getting more and more different from one another. The Westminster parliament is elected on a first past the post system and in the end offers only a limited reflection of how people actually voted. It is a parliament which lacks a written constitution as a point of reference. The Scottish parliament is elected on a proportional basis and in Nicola Sturgeon Scotland possesses a competent, reasonably professional leader. Political life in the two parliaments proceeds on a different basis, making it harder and harder for them to understand one another.

Do you think that the ambitions for an independent Scotland can become reality?

I believe that Scotland will become independent, and that reunification will happen in Ireland, however reluctantly. But I am optimistic by nature, perhaps excessively so. Beyond doubt the so-called British Isles – the Irish prefer to say, these islands! – face difficult years ahead, filled with uncertainty and sacrifices. That is something I profoundly regret.

Published 2018 in Argo – Confini. Poesia del nostro tempo and here translated from the original Italian