This essay traces the development of the two principal forms of literary bilingualism currently practiced by Scottish poets and notes that parallel production in English is a more recent phenomenon among Gaelic poets than those writing in Scots. The nature of poetic bilingualism is explored, with particular attention paid to the role of poetic form in the different parts of a poet’s output. The essay argues that bilingualism in Scottish poetry is less widespread than is often supposed and suggest that the current practice of self-translation by Gaelic poets might have an inhibiting effect on the development of certain kinds of verse. It then looks in detail at the work of two truly bilingual Scottish poets – Iain Crichton Smith and W. N. Herbert – and in particular at their ‘double’ collections: Na h-Eilthirich / The Exiles (1983–4) and Omnesia (2013). These works are presented as striking examples of literary bilingualism in which the relationship between a poet’s languages is mutually beneficial. The author revises his previous criticism of Crichton Smith’s publishing strategies in favour of a more sympathetic view, taking into account the history of his poetic output in both Gaelic and English, and considers the alternatives it might offer to Gaelic poets in the twenty-first century.

To examine the extent and consistency of the influence of Samuel Beckett on Swedish playwright Lars Norén, the present essay describes their form literally, in geometric terms. Like Beckett, Norén insists on negativity and incompletion; both writers replace development and resolution with repetition and stasis, here referred to as circles and squares. A combination of the two is particularly present in Norén’s work, which gives it a paradoxical geometry. The circular square is an image of infinite, unresolved conflict. Repetition of stasis is an impossible condition for the narrative arts, embodied in this figure. At the same time, the circle and square texts offer a certain resistance to their own formal condition, in the act of beginning and ending at all.

This article interrogates the role of comparative literature in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. What can comparative literature do against the genocide? I answer this question with reference to the work of Refaat Alareer. Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, Alareer was killed by a targeted Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023. I argue that Alareer’s scholarship should be understood as part of the militant anticolonial genealogy of ‘Global South comparatism’ that Hala Halim traces back to the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings. Alareer builds on the three models of literary comparison pursued by one of Lotus’s most famous contributors, Ghassan Kanafani: comparison as conflict, comparison as solidarity, and comparison as reattachment. Each of these three models illustrates how comparative literature can resist colonial violence. UK Higher Education institutions are complicit in endorsing and enforcing Israel’s colonial violence, and therefore also in Israel’s attempts to destroy Kanafani’s and Alareer’s tradition of anticolonial comparatism. The project of ‘Global South comparatism’ lives on close to the sites of struggle that have developed despite and against the (Western) academy: in Palestine itself, and in the Palestine solidarity movement worldwide.