WRITERS!
New Writing Scotland seeks a new co-editor for English- & Scots-language work. Applicants should be currently based in Scotland & have a strong publishing record, with a focus on poetry. Post is up to 3 years: stipend £1500 per issue.
Pls RT 👇
https://asls.org.uk/new-writing-scotland-seeks-co-editor/
#Scottish #writer #writingcommunity #poet #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage
“Somehow hearing the play in Scots gave Anglophone audiences an insight into Tremblay that had hitherto eluded them”
—Mark Fisher on MICHEL TREMBLAY: PLAYS IN SCOTS – 8 Scots translations of the Québécois playwright’s work
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https://www.critical-stages.org/29/michel-tremblay-plays-in-scots-two-vols/
#Scottish #literature #Scots #Scotslanguage #drama #theatre #Quebec #Tremblay #translation #InternationalTranslationDay
“The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator”
—Edwin Morgan on translating Mayakovsky, in EDWIN MORGAN: In Touch With Language. A New Prose Collection 1950–2005 (ASL, 2020)
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https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/edwin-morgan-in-touch-with-language/
#Scottish #literature #poetry #translation #InternationalTranslationDay #Scots #Scotslanguage #Russian #EdwinMorgan #Mayakovsky
Faar’s Baabie Jeanie’s loon? The aal wife hersel
Stans treeshin hame the milkers at the ley park yett.
Faa caas the mornin cairt an fordals neeps an strae,
Wi waages up an risin an fee’d folk sae ull to get?…
—“War: 1939–1945” by Flora Garry (1900–2000)—born #OTD, 30 September
published in FROM THE LINE: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945
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https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/from_the_line/
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #20thcentury #warpoetry #WW2 #womenwriters
I miss thaim. Miss their quait
haans restin lowssed
oan dusty overalls
deen wi the day’s wark,
wachty buits ackwart
in their sklaik o glaur
or pentit spleiter…
—Sheila Templeton, “Workin Men”
published in 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘈𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘓𝘰𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴: New Writing Scotland 34 (ASL, 2016)
Liz Lochhead’s MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS GOT HER HEAD CHOPPED OFF
13 Feb–6 Mar 2027
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Heaving with theatricality & gallus wit, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off weaves political relevance with fairytale storytelling. 40 years since it first premiered, this major new production brings the Scottish classic to a new generation of audiences.
https://citz.co.uk/whats-on/mary-queen-of-scots-got-her-head-chopped-off/
#Scottish #literature #drama #theatre #CitizensTheatre #Glasgow #WomenWriters #Scots #Scotslanguage
Whan du telt me hoo du thowt o ‘luck’
as nae mair as chance, de happy hubbelskju
o aentropie, I thowt onnly o de ben-end
o my grandmidder’s hoose an aa her talismans
o tat…
—Roseanne Watt, “Lukkie”
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/lukkie/
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Shetland #Shaetlan #Scots #Scotslanguage #grandparents #GrandparentsDay
The Dominie is growin’ grey,
And, feth, he’s keepit thrang
Wi’ counts an’ spellin’ a’ the day,
And liffies when they’re wrang…
—“The Dominie’s Happy Lot”, by poet & schoolmaster Walter Wingate (1865–1918)
Times may have changed, but happy World Teachers’ Day – 5 October – to all who celebrate!
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https://www.unesco.org/en/days/teachers
#Scottish #literature #teachers #teaching #WorldTeachersDay #poem #poetry #19thcentury #Victorian #Scots #Scotslanguage
To Marykirk ye’ll set ye forth.
An’ whustle as ye step alang,
An’ aye the Grampians i’ the North
Are glow’rin’ on ye as ye gang.
By Martin’s Den, through beech an’ birk,
A breith comes soughin’, sweet an’ strang,
Alang the road to Marykirk…
—Violet Jacob, “The Road to Marykirk”
Violet Jacob’s only child, Harry, died aged just 20 at the Battle of the Somme, on 16 July 1916.
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #womenwriters #warpoem #warpoetry #WW1 #RemembranceSunday
Hey Donald, Love and Freedom or Strathmartine Mains was written by Mary Brooksbank (1897-1978), who often told how she was inspired to write this song after hearing a young traveller boy playing the pipes at her door. The song celebrates the Travelling People’s itinerant way of life.
Mary Brooksbank was a jute mill worker born in Aberdeen and raised in Dundee.
The savvy among you will spy that this was recorded at the Laurencekirk viewpoint, and not Strathmartine!
Feel da mareel.
Noo da licht leaves wis aa alone, wi
da mirkin creepin early,
da last o’ da Simmer gone ta rust…
—Nat Hall, “Hairst”
from nobody remembers the birdman: New Writing Scotland 40 (ASL, 2022)
https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/newwriting/nws40/
#Scottish #literature #Scots #Scotslanguage #Shaetlan #poem #poetry #Shetland
Today, October 8, is (naturally) Octopus Day … Hugh MacDiarmid embraced the octopus as a many-branched model of the cosmos in his epic 𝘈 𝘋𝘳𝘶𝘯𝘬 𝘔𝘢𝘯 𝘓𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘦 (1926)
Extract from Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poetry (Carcanet, 2004)
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857547566
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #modernism #modernist #Scots #Scotslanguage #MacDiarmid #HughMacDiarmid #OctopusDay
“The multi-lingual, multi-cultural fabric of this nation is something we need to actively celebrate and explore”
Scotland’s Makar Peter Mackay explores the legacy of Scotland as a multilingual country ahead of his event at Push the Boat Out – Edinburgh’s poetry festival
https://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/peter-mackay-makar-interview
#Scottish #literature #poetry #language #languages #translation #multilingualism #Scots #Scotslanguage #Gaidhlig #Gaelic
WRITERS!
Submissions are invited to NEW WRITING SCOTLAND 45! We want poetry & prose in English, Gaelic, & Scots from writers who are Scottish by residence, birth, or inclination. All successful contributors are paid – deadline 13 December!
Submit free via Submittable 👇
https://nws.submittable.com/submit
#Scottish #literature #writing #WritingCommunity #IAmWriting #poetry #shortfiction #shortstories #Scots #Scotslanguage #Gaelic #Gaidhlig
Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) – poet, playwright, founder of modern #Scots writing, & with a fair claim to be the father of Romanticism – was born #OTD, 15 October. A 🎂 🧵 …
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🖼️ Allan Ramsay, 1684–1758, by William Aikman – Scottish National Portrait Gallery
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/3526
#Scottish #literature #18thcentury #romanticism #Scots #Scotslanguage #poetry #drama #theatre #theatrehistory
Ye’d wonder foo the seasons rin
This side o’ Tweed an’ Tyne;
The hairst’s awa; October-month
Cam’ in a whilie syne…
—Violet Jacob, “The Neep-Fields by the Sea”
published in THE NORTHERN LIGHTS & Other Poems (John Murray, 1927)
Digitised by the National Library of Scotland
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #20thcentury #womenwriters #autumn
Peter Mackay: Gaelic, Makars, St Andrews
20 October, St Andrews Bowling Club. Tickets £5/£7
Scotland’s Makar Peter Mackay will speak on Scots poetry, old and new, in conjunction with the Scots language exhibition Hamewith at the St Andrews Heritage Museum.
https://www.trybooking.com/uk/event/122132
#Scottish #literature #poetry #StAndrews #Scots #Scotslanguage
![2: A note to the translation of Mayakovsky’s ‘Fiddle-Ma-Fidgin’
In the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, the ‘Hell’ panel shows a man crucified on a harp, with the strings passing through his body, but his arms free, embracing it, in an extraordinary image of mingled pain, beauty, and yearning. In the same picture, this man is surrounded by much more grotesque images, where figures of desperation are doing things to and with various musical instruments
Which even to name wad be unlawfu’.
The poetry of Mayakovsky from his futurist period shows a similar conjunction of extreme yearning and coarsely grotesque asseverations, held together in a web of convincing fantasy where animate and inanimate react on one another. In the present poem (actual title The Violin and a Little Nervously, date 1914), written when Mayakovsky was twenty, the poet expresses in miniature the situation of his whole life: loneliness, desire to communicate and ‘contribute’, sympathy towards the outcast and the misunderstood. The potential desperation in this, however, finds voice through fantasy, fun, and caricature. A violin (the word is feminine in Russian) begins to ‘sing’ in such a personal and yearning way that the other instruments in the orchestra get annoyed with it and tell it to shut up until it can control itself; the poet bursts in on the orchestra and despite their ribald laughter embraces the […]](/proxy/post_attachment/1192233/6118b8cd1e6fd144f7283abe21d92a55.webp "2: A note to the translation of Mayakovsky’s ‘Fiddle-Ma-Fidgin’
In the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, the ‘Hell’ panel shows a man crucified on a harp, with the strings passing through his body, but his arms free, embracing it, in an extraordinary image of mingled pain, beauty, and yearning. In the same picture, this man is surrounded by much more grotesque images, where figures of desperation are doing things to and with various musical instruments
Which even to name wad be unlawfu’.
The poetry of Mayakovsky from his futurist period shows a similar conjunction of extreme yearning and coarsely grotesque asseverations, held together in a web of convincing fantasy where animate and inanimate react on one another. In the present poem (actual title The Violin and a Little Nervously, date 1914), written when Mayakovsky was twenty, the poet expresses in miniature the situation of his whole life: loneliness, desire to communicate and ‘contribute’, sympathy towards the outcast and the misunderstood. The potential desperation in this, however, finds voice through fantasy, fun, and caricature. A violin (the word is feminine in Russian) begins to ‘sing’ in such a personal and yearning way that the other instruments in the orchestra get annoyed with it and tell it to shut up until it can control itself; the poet bursts in on the orchestra and despite their ribald laughter embraces the […]")
![[…] violin and proposes to this ‘wooden bride’, which he sees as a kindred soul.
I wanted in my translation to bring out if I could the distinctive Mayakovskian mixture of grotesque high-jinks and underlying seriousness of purpose. To do this, I used Scots, trying to tap an enduring Scottish tradition of grotesque exaggeration or fantasy which is found in Dunbar and the ballads, Burns and MacDiarmid.
They’ll turn me in your arms, lady,
Into an esk and adder;
But haud me fast, and fear me not,
I am your bairn’s father.
The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator. What can only be weakly called ‘expressive’ words tumble from the Caledonian cornucopia: slunkert, daunert, glinkit, sprachlt, crunkelt, yowp and yowl, for which ‘slunk’, ‘wandered’, ‘glanced’, ‘sprawled’, ‘folded’, ‘bawl and howl’ are unimpressive equivalents. The temptation in this is to make the poem look more continuously vivid or ‘strange’ than it really is. Fortunately it is difficult to make Mayakovsky look over-vivid, as his diction employs every liberty the genius of Russian allows, but the method would work only with poets who were similarly inventive and uninhibited in their linguistic texture. I don’t look on Scots as a medium that can now be widely or thoughtlessly used in poetry, but against the argument that we have reached the stage where it should be given up altogether I would offer the evidence of my own experience in translating Mayakovsky (and add to it Sydney Goodsir Smith’s Scottish version of Blok’s The Twelve): Scots gets closer than English to the ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit. If people can be persuaded to read it, it will give them a sensation they cannot at the moment get from English verse.
The Review 1, April/May 1962.](/proxy/post_attachment/1192234/866d8e79d5340b464765a4d23c1132e9.webp "[…] violin and proposes to this ‘wooden bride’, which he sees as a kindred soul.
I wanted in my translation to bring out if I could the distinctive Mayakovskian mixture of grotesque high-jinks and underlying seriousness of purpose. To do this, I used Scots, trying to tap an enduring Scottish tradition of grotesque exaggeration or fantasy which is found in Dunbar and the ballads, Burns and MacDiarmid.
They’ll turn me in your arms, lady,
Into an esk and adder;
But haud me fast, and fear me not,
I am your bairn’s father.
The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator. What can only be weakly called ‘expressive’ words tumble from the Caledonian cornucopia: slunkert, daunert, glinkit, sprachlt, crunkelt, yowp and yowl, for which ‘slunk’, ‘wandered’, ‘glanced’, ‘sprawled’, ‘folded’, ‘bawl and howl’ are unimpressive equivalents. The temptation in this is to make the poem look more continuously vivid or ‘strange’ than it really is. Fortunately it is difficult to make Mayakovsky look over-vivid, as his diction employs every liberty the genius of Russian allows, but the method would work only with poets who were similarly inventive and uninhibited in their linguistic texture. I don’t look on Scots as a medium that can now be widely or thoughtlessly used in poetry, but against the argument that we have reached the stage where it should be given up altogether I would offer the evidence of my own experience in translating Mayakovsky (and add to it Sydney Goodsir Smith’s Scottish version of Blok’s The Twelve): Scots gets closer than English to the ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit. If people can be persuaded to read it, it will give them a sensation they cannot at the moment get from English verse.
The Review 1, April/May 1962.")
