Translation as Predicament

Abstract

The country I come from, Scotland, is waking slowly from a prolonged torpor. Much of what awakens is monstrous, or nearly so. Old explanations, old ideas about ourselves, old prejudices look inadequate in the light of a new situation, the presence of a parliament in Edinburgh and the attainment of a notable degree of governmental autonomy, after an interregnum lasting nearly three centuries. Nationalist rhetoric which appeared to be justified, or at any rate could pass unnoticed, during the years of Thatcherism, acquires disturbing overtones. I am thinking of that well-worn phrase 'the people of Scotland', as in 'the people of Scotland voted to have a parliament of their own'. With its claim to be all-inclusive, it invariably excludes the moment it is pronounced. A significant minority of Scottish people voted against the parliament, and the use of an expression such as 'the people of Scotland' in this context disenfranchises them. By defining the wishes and concerns of 'the people of Scotland', those who employ such rhetoric also tell us which individuals are not or cannot be part of that people, even if they inhabit the same geographical territory. Against this context of disorienting, confusing, unprecedented change (and one of the most disorienting aspects is that, though the parliament has been sitting for well over a year, so little has changed in the way Scotland is run and governed), I would like to focus on a particular aspect of Scottish cultural reality, the presence of at least three literary languages in which poetry can be written (quite a large number, for a population of just over 5,000,000!). I plan to examine how this affects the creation, reading in public, and publication of poetry in one of those languages, which I shall call simply Gaelic. Closely related to Irish, Gaelic is in fact a relatively young language for literature in European terms, having emerged as a separate entity only during the seventeenth century. It is currently spoken by just over 60,000 people in Scotland, though at the beginning of the nineteenth century it is thought to have been the language of one tenth of the population, spoken over a quarter of the Scottish land mass.