Aristophanes and the Modernism of Douglas Young1

chapter 15 “Attic Salt into an Undiluted Scots”: Aristophanes and the Modernism of Douglas Young1 Gregory Baker No bein’ fit to write in Greek, I wrote in Lallan; Dear to my heart as the peat-reek, Auld as Tantallon. Robert Louis Stevenson, excerpted from “The Maker to Posterity” After performing an “exacting part” in Robinson Jeffers’ free adaptation of Medea at the 1948 Festival, a Glaswegian actress named Eileen Herlie (1918– 2008) amused local reporters with her thoughts on the dramatic merit of Scots vernacular, also known as Lallans.2 Though “overcome with exhaustion,” Herlie was eager “to discuss the possibilities of translating Greek tragedy into braid Scots shortly after she left the stage.”3 She wanted to know above all “how her tragic lines would sound in Scots but had decided that Greek tragedy did not lend itself to Scots.”4 Herlie’s interest in the creative potential of Lallans was not unusual that summer. Perhaps at no other time had there been such broad, public interest in Scots literature than at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival. Its most stirring event had been, after all, a popular revival of David Lyndsay’s satirical Scots drama, Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1540). The adaptation of this play, completed by Robert Kemp (1908–67) and directed by Tyrone Guthrie (1900–71), was acclaimed a triumph by local newspapers, a triumph because it demonstrated before a wide audience the semantic richness and range of literary register still alive in Scots vernacular. This success led many to wonder 1 I am grateful to Clara Young and the estate of Douglas Young for allowing me to quote from his unpublished correspondence held at the National Library of Scotland. Citation informa- tion for these letters and others can be found at the end of the chapter. Thanks are due also to Margery Palmer McCulloch, Kenneth Haynes, Philip Walsh, and Taryn Okuma, each of whom offered helpful comments and suggestions for revising this piece. 2 Anon. (1948) 4. 3 Anon. (1948) 4. 4 Anon. (1948) 4. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�4657_0�6 308 Baker what else Lallans might do for modern drama. The day following the staging of Medea, the report which appeared in The Scotsman readily took up Herlie’s discussion of Scots and its dramatic potential. The language of Attic tragedy was indeed a poor match for Scots translation, the editor noted: “One must agree with Miss Herlie there, but would the same hold true of comedy? Would it, for instance, be possible to render Aristophanes into Scots?”5 According to The Scotsman, Greek comedy could be effectively performed before audiences at future festivals in Edinburgh, for there was renewed desire for Scots translations of the classics. When Aristophanes did finally appear before Scottish audiences in the late 1950s, however, his work emerged as a contested site, a site in which powerful political as well as linguistic forces from the contempo- rary moment were at work. Marked indelibly with the ideological disputes of modern nationalism, Scotland’s Aristophanes was caught in a struggle of style and politics, a struggle that enmeshed him in the country’s complex relation- ship with international modernism and the literary avant-garde. For Aristophanes to arise in modern Britain—for him to find voice in twentieth-century poetry—a capable translator conversant in both Attic Greek and braid Scots was required. The Scotsman insisted on only one man: Douglas Cuthbert Colquhoun Young (1913–73), the scholar; Lallanophone poet; one-time chairman of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and at the time a lec- turer in Latin at University College, Dundee: “Mr. Douglas Young, who converts Attic into the Doric with great assiduity, might have a shot at presenting us with a Lallans version of the Birds or the Thesmaforiazusae.”6 Young’s reputation as a poet preceded him. His verse had first appeared in the early 1940s, emerging in a second wave of interest in the revival of literary Scots. From the beginning, Young attempted—like many of his Scottish contemporaries, among them Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–75), George Campbell Hay (1915–84), Robert McLellan (1907–85), Robert Garioch (1909–81) and William Soutar (1898–1943)—to write in an experimental, synthetic form of Scots, a language which had its first, and perhaps most innovative expression in the poetry of 5 Anon. (1948) 4. On 3 September 1948, The Scotsman issued a correction noting the suggestion “that Aristophanes might go rather well into Braid Scots was belated.” The English barrister and scholar, Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1828–1919) had already used the language in his 1910 edition of Acharnians. Rogers employed Scots vernacular, however, only in the dialogue of the Megarian. His translation, though now regarded as “prudishly Victorian,” was well-known at the time, being part of a six-volume edition which eventually served as the basis for the 1924 Loeb Aristophanes. On Rogers’ translations and reputation, see Van Steen (2014) 437; and Robson and Walsh in this volume. 6 Anon. (1948) 4..

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