Sanderson, Stewart (2016) Our own language: Scots verse translation and the second-generation Scottish renaissance. PhD thesis https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7541/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Our Own Language: Scots Verse Translation and the Second-Generation Scottish Renaissance Stewart Sanderson Kepand na Sudroun bot our awyn langage Gavin Douglas, Eneados, Prologue 1.111 Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow September 2015 Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction: Verse Translation and the Modern Scottish Renaissance ......................................... 5 Chapter One – Plastic Scots: The Translations of Douglas Young ................................................ 30 Chapter Two – Gangrel Rymour: The Translations of Sydney Goodsir Smith ............................ 58 Chapter Three – A Necessary Mask: The Translations of Robert Garioch .................................. 85 Chapter Four – A Harsklike Singin: The Translations of Tom Scott .......................................... 112 Chapter Five – A Tremendous Project: The Translations of William J. Tait ............................. 138 Conclusion: Beyond the Renaissance – Language as Anti-Hero .................................................. 169 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 196 1 Acknowledgements Thanks to the University of Glasgow for the Edwin Morgan Scholarship, two Colonel Walter Scott Bursaries and various Research Support Awards which made this thesis possible. Generous awards from the Society of Authors and Edwin Morgan Trust, received while working on the thesis, are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks also to the always helpful and knowledgeable staff of the National Library of Scotland and the Shetland Archives in Lerwick. In-progress extracts from this thesis were presented as papers at the following conferences: ‘Scotland in Europe’ (University of Warsaw, 17-19 October 2012); ‘Cross Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies’ (University of Aberdeen, 12-14 August 2013); ‘Cannibal Modernisms’ (Kings College London, 7-8 November 2013); ‘Horizons: College English Association 45th Annual Conference’ (Baltimore, Maryland, 27-29 March 2014); ‘World Congress of Scottish Literatures’ (University of Glasgow, 2-5 July 2014); ‘Scotland in Europe II’ (University of Warsaw, 14-17 October 2014). The School of Critical Studies Work in Progress sessions were a great place to try out material before conference presentations. I’m grateful to everyone involved. So far, three papers relating to this thesis have been published: 1) ‘“The Moon and the Pathetic Fallacy”: Guillaume Apollinaire and the Scottish Renaissance’, in Scotland in Europe/Europe in Scotland: Links – Dialogues – Analogies (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper, 2013), pp. 154-167. 2) ‘Peripheral Centre or Central Periphery: Two Approaches to Modern Scots Translation’, Comparative Critical Studies Electronic Supplement (2014), 93-108. 3) ‘“Pity then those who feel”: European Tragedy in Scots Translation’, in Scottish Culture: Dialogue and Self-Expression (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper, 2016), pp. 133-147. Thanks above all to my parents, siblings, grandparents, other family members, friends and colleagues within and outwith academia. I’m hugely grateful to my first supervisor, Professor Kirsteen McCue, with whom it’s been a joy and privilege to work over the past few years. Thanks also to my second supervisor Dr Wendy Anderson for her invaluable comments and suggestions throughout the research and writing process. Mòran taing to Sheila Kidd, Michel Byrne and everyone else from the Celtic and Gaelic subject area at Glasgow for allowing me to sit in on language classes and generally enlightening me as to all things Q-Celtic. Love and gratitude, as always, to Karen Veitch. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the role of Scots language verse translation in the second-generation or post-war Scottish Renaissance. The translation of European poetry into Scots was of central importance to the first-generation Scottish Renaissance of the nineteen twenties and thirties. As Margery Palmer McCulloch has shown, the wider cultural climate of Anglo-American modernism was key to MacDiarmid’s conception of the interwar Scottish Renaissance. What was the effect on second- generation poet-translators as the modernist moment passed? Are the many translations undertaken by the younger poets who emerged in the course of the nineteen forties and fifties a faithful reflection of this cultural inheritance? To what extent are they indicative of a new set of priorities and international influences? The five principal translators discussed in this thesis are Douglas Young (1913-1973), Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975), Robert Garioch (1909-1981), Tom Scott (1918-1995) and William J. Tait (1918-1992). Each is the subject of a chapter, in many cases providing the first or most extensive treatment of particular translations. While the pioneering work of John Corbett, Bill Findlay and J. Derrick McClure, among other scholars, has drawn attention to the long history of literary translation into Scots, this thesis is the first extended critical work to take the verse translations of the post- MacDiarmid makars as its subject. The nature and extent of MacDiarmid’s influence is considered throughout, as are the wider discourses around language and translation in twentieth-century Scottish poetry. Critical engagement with a number of key insights from theoretical translation studies helps to situate these writers’ work in its global context. This thesis also explores the ways in which the specific context of Scots translation allows scholars to complicate or expand upon theories of translation developed in other cultural situations (notably Lawrence Venuti’s writing on domestication and foreignisation). The five writers upon whom this thesis concentrates were all highly individual, occasionally idiosyncratic personalities. Young’s polyglot ingenuity finds a foil in Garioch’s sharp, humane wit. Goodsir Smith’s romantic ironising meets its match in Scott’s radical certainty of cause. Tait’s use of the Shetlandic tongue sets him apart. Nonetheless, despite the great variety of style, form and tone shown by each of these translators, this thesis demonstrates that there are meaningful links to be made between them and that they form a unified, coherent group in the wider landscape of twentieth- century Scottish poetry. On the linguistic level, each engaged to some extent in the composition of a ‘synthetic’ or ‘plastic’ language deriving partly from literary sources, partly from the spoken language around them. On a more fundamental level, each was committed to enriching this language through translation, within which a number of key areas of interest emerge. One of the most important of these key areas is Gaelic – especially the poetry of Sorley MacLean, which Young, Garioch and Goodsir Smith all translated into Scots. This is to some extent 3 an act of solidarity on the part of these Scots poets, acknowledging a shared history of marginalisation as well as expressing shared hopes for the future. The same is true of Goodsir Smith’s translations from a number of Eastern European poets (and Edwin Morgan’s own versions, slightly later in the century). The translation of verse drama by poets is another key theme sustained throughout the thesis, with Garioch and Young attempting to fill what they perceived as a gap in the Scots tradition through translation from other languages (another aspect of these writers’ legacy continued by Morgan). Beyond this, all of the writers discussed in this thesis translated extensively from European poetries from Ancient Greece to twentieth-century France. Their reasons for doing so were various, but a certain cosmopolitan idealism figures highly among them. So too does a desire to see Scotland interact with other European nations, thus escaping the potentially narrowing influence of post-war British culture. This thesis addresses the legacy of these writers’ translations, which, it argues, continue to exercise a perceptible influence on the course of poetry in Scotland. This work constitutes a significant contribution to a much-needed wider critical re-assessment of this pivotal period in modern Scottish writing, offering a fresh perspective on the formal and linguistic merits of these poets’ verse translations. Drawing upon frequently obscure book, pamphlet and periodical sources, as well as unpublished manuscripts