Ancient History & Civilisation

CHAPTER 32

Greek Lyric: A View from the North

William Allan

“Why do you softly, richly speak

Rhythm so sweetly scanned?”

Poverty hath the Gaelic and Greek

In my land.

from “The Princess of Scotland,” Rachel

Annand Taylor (1876–1960)1

This chapter will consider some key moments in the reception of Greek lyric2 in Scotland, with examples from the major linguistic forms of Scottish literature: Gaelic, Scots, Latin, and English.3 Since the publication in 1940 of Hugh MacDiarmid’s The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, it has become a welcome feature of poetry anthologies that they recognize Scotland’s four-language tradition.4 Choice of language has always been a contested issue in Scottish history and literature. Scots replaced Gaelic as the language of the nobility during the reign of James IV (1488–1513), the last Scottish king to speak Gaelic. With the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and James VI’s move to London as James I, standard English began its domination of Scottish literature,5 a process first challenged by Robert Burns’ revolutionary Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and increasingly resisted since the “Scottish Renaissance” of Hugh MacDiarmid and others in the 1930s (to which we shall return). The reception of Greek lyric in English poetry, and especially the translation or adaptation of Pindar, Sappho, and (the) Anacreon(tea), has attracted a good deal of discussion.6 Similarly, the influence of Greek literature, especially epic and tragedy, has been extensively studied with regard to Irish and Northern Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley.7 Greek tragedy has an important place in Scottish literary history too, for George Buchanan’s Neo-Latin translation of the Medea, published in Paris in 1544, marked a key moment in the first Scottish Renaissance.8 Relatively little attention, however, has thus far been paid to the response of Scottish authors to Greek lyric poetry.

Classics and Nationhood

Most European countries have used the translation or adaptation of Classical texts to bolster their own sense of nationhood, and Scotland is no exception. The most famous example is undoubtedly Gavin Douglas’ Eneados (1513), a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, “Writtin in the langage of the Scottis natioun” (Prologue, line 103), which appropriates the most famous classical text of the period for Douglas’ own patriotic agenda.9 This proud translation into Scots was completed at the apogee of James IV’s reign, but in the same year as the king’s disastrous invasion of England, culminating in his defeat and death at the Battle of Flodden. Douglas’ celebration of Scots is a harbinger of one of the most powerful movements in modern Scottish literature, namely the revival of Scots Gaelic and Scots dialect in reaction to long-standing movements that sought to impose linguistic uniformity and standardize English throughout the United Kingdom.

Long before Douglas, late medieval writers had developed an origin legend for the Scots which claimed their descent from Greece itself.10 In opposition to the imperial British myth, most influentially recounted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae (1136), which made the English, Welsh, and Scots all descendants of Troy (under Britain’s first king, the Trojan Brut) and justified English hegemony (as the kingdom bequeathed to Brut’s eldest son Locrinus), the Scottish counter-myth claimed that the Scots were not descended from Troy, but from the union of Scota, the daughter of the Pharaoh Amenhotep, and the Greek Gathelos, son of Cecrops. John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum (1380) and Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon (1449) endorsed the legend of Scota and Gathelus, as did medieval epics such as John Barbour’s The Bruce (1375) and Blind Harry’s Actis and Deids of William Wallace (1476–1478). The influential Scottish Hellenist, Andrew Melville (to whom we shall return), planned an epic on Gathelus, and contributed a 164-line hexameter Gathelus to John Johnston’s series of Latin poems on the Scottish monarchs, Inscriptiones Historicae Regum Scotorum (1602).

Knowledge of Greek in Scotland

There is evidence for the teaching of Greek in Scotland from the mid-sixteenth century. Andrew Melville learned Greek in Montrose in the 1550s from the Frenchman Petrus de Marsiliers, and by the end of the century schoolmasters were expected to offer Greek as well as Latin.11 As Principal of the College of Glasgow from 1574, Melville taught Greek literature, including Theognis, and later as Principal of St. Mary’s College, St. Andrews, he introduced Greek to the curriculum.12 Though Greek was available to some younger students via schoolmasters and private tutors, including to learners in Gaelic-speaking areas, it was much more a University-level language, becoming a compulsory first-year subject from the late sixteenth century, then extended into the second and Honours (third and fourth) years in the nineteenth century.13 But even before Greek’s introduction in the mid-sixteenth century, Scottish poets were learning the tropes of Greek lyric from their study of Latin and Italian poetry. Thus Robert Henryson (c.1425–1506) could write in his Orpheus and Eurydice:

Than Orpheus before Plato sat doun,

And in his handis quhite his harp can ta,white hands; took

And playit mony suete proporcion,sweet harmonies

With base tonys in ypodorica, low notes; hypodorian mode

With gemilling in yperlydica;[doubling in hyperlydian mode]

Till at the last, for reuth and grete piteecompassion

Thay wepit sore that coud hym here and see.

The development of Greek in Scotland, as elsewhere, was fueled by the publication of the first printed editions, translations, and commentaries on Greek literature, including the lyric poets, from the late fifteenth century onward: Theognis (1495, Venice), Solon, Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Simonides (1512, Paris), Pindar (1513, Venice), Anacreon (1554, Paris), Alcaeus, Sappho, Bacchylides, Stesichorus, Ibycus, and Alcman (1560, Paris).14 Editions of Pindar and Theognis predominate, since they were the only poets transmitted in the Middle Ages in their own manuscript tradition, but book-fragments (i.e., quotations) of other poets gave some access to the wider lyric corpus.15

Gaelic Poets

Turning first to Gaelic, the language’s period of maximum influence was from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, when it began to be replaced by Scots in most parts of central and eastern Scotland, and although Gaelic was still spoken at court and the learned circles of nobility until the reign of James IV (1488–1513), this was (as we have seen) before knowledge of Greek spread to Scotland.16 Yet once classical schooling was available in Gaelic-speaking areas in the seventeenth century, signs of its influence begin to appear in Gaelic poetry, especially in praise poetry celebrating the achievements of chiefs and their armies.17 The “panegyric code” of Gaelic court poetry adapts to incorporate frequent references to figures from Greek culture (including Hector, Alexander, Philip, Jason, and Aristotle), especially in Caimbéal (Campbell) classical verse.18 For example, the author of Mó iná ainm Iarrla Gaoidheal compares the chief of clan Campbell19 and his son to Philip and Alexander, who are dismissed as pagans (§§25ad, 26ab):

Fearr tú iná Filib fuair geall …

fearr t’oighre ná Alasdair …

Alasdair do Chríost níor chreid

nó a athair darob ainm Filib.

You are better than Philip who obtained sovereignty …

better is your heir than Alexander …

Neither Alexander nor Philip, his father,

believed in Christ.

Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, c.1615–c.1707) often uses “apple tree” imagery similar to Sappho’s:

Like the sweet-apple that’s shining red on the topmost bough,

right at the very top, which the apple-pickers forgot,

or rather didn’t forget, they just couldn’t reach it.

(Sappho fr. 105a)

Gum bu chubhaidh dhuit siod

Mar a thubhairt iad ris

Bu tu an t-ubhal thar mios àrdchraoibh.

(553–555)20

It was fully your due

How men would speak about your ways,

You were the apple above all the tall tree’s crop.

It has been claimed that “a literary influence reaching from ancient Greece to Gaelic Scotland is … utterly improbable,”21 but this assumption ignores the possibility that Mary MacLeod learned of Sappho’s imagery from the educated chief of the MacLeods of Dunvegan for whom she composed much of her surviving poetry. If Mary MacLeod was influenced in this way, she may also have been attracted by the idea of adapting a fellow female poet, though she does so to suit her own situation, as she addresses a man rather than a young woman and her praise of a former benefactor lacks the erotic element present in Sappho. Female poets are more common in Gaelic society than in ancient Greece, with authors attested from the sixteenth century onward, but Mary MacLeod is the first woman to have a large body of texts ascribed to her, and she may have detected in Sappho a similarly pre-eminent female persona.

Much clearer evidence of Greek influence can be found in the work of Alexander MacDonald (Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, c.1695–c.1770), widely regarded as the greatest Gaelic poet of the eighteenth century.22 Educated like his father at Glasgow University, MacDonald makes frequent use of his classical training.23 His collection Aiseirigh seeks to emphasize Gaelic’s place among the literatures of “cultivated nations.”24 Gaelic may be ancient, he argues, but it is far from primitive, and he uses Gaelic’s ancient history to exalt it above Latin, Greek, and French (65–72):

Tha Laideann coimhliont,

Torrach, teann nas leòr,

Ach ’s sgalag thràilleil

I don Ghàidhlig chòir.

San Athen mhòir

Bha ’Ghreugais còrr ’na tìm,

Ach b’ ion di h-òrdag

Chur fo h-òirchios grinn.

Latin is ripe and massive,

Firm and strong,

But ‘tis a slave

To Gaelic’s noble tongue.

In mighty Athens

Greek prevailed of old,

Just like a thumb

‘Neath Gaelic’s belt of gold.25

In “Guidhe no ùrnaigh an ùghdair don cheòlraidh” (“The Author’s Invocation or Prayer to the Muses”) MacDonald appeals to each of the nine Muses in turn to help him with different aspects of his art. The classical tropes are deployed to suit the Gaelic setting, as MacDonald laments that he lacks the formal training that professional Gaelic bards had in the past (69–80):

Tha speuran mo chomais cumhang nas leòrGe farsaing mo mhiann,

Gu balla thogail air stèidh cho-mhòr

’S clach-shnaighte d’ am dhìth;

Cainnt-shnasda d’am dhìth, ge stracte mo thoil

Tha mi falamh do sgil;’S nì gun susbaint ealain gun sgoil

Air suibseic mar mhil.

The skies of my ability are narrow enough

though my desire is wide,

to build a wall on such a big foundation

I need a chiselled stone;

I need a polished stone, but my will is torn,

I am bereft of skill;

unschooled art is a thing without substance,

even on a subject sweet as honey.

The combination of false modesty with the metaphor of building a poem like a temple or palace is strongly evocative of Pindar (e.g., the beginning of Ol. 6, “Let us set up golden columns to support | the strong-walled porch of our abode | and construct, as it were, a splendid | palace,” trans. Race). Finally, in his “Moladh Mòraig” (“In Praise of Morag”26) MacDonald evokes the nature imagery of Greek erotic lyric (97–112; cf. e.g., Archil. fr. 196a, Ibycus fr. 286, Anacreon fr. 417):

Thogamaid ar fonn

Anns an òg-mhadainn,

’S Phèbus ’dath nan tonn

Air fiamh òrainsein,

Fa ’r cèill cha bhiodh conn

Air sgàth dhoire ’s thom,

Sinn air dàireadh trom

Le ’r cuid gòraileis,

Dìreach mar gum bìodh

Maoiseach ’s boc a’ strì,

Crom-ruaig a chèile dian

Timcheall òganan;

Chailleamaid ar clì

A’ gàireachdaich leinn fhìn

Le bras mhacnas dian sin

Na h-ògalachd.

We’d strike up our tune

in bright morning,

while Phoebus dyes the waves

to an orange hue,

not confined by prudent sense,

in shade of grove and knoll,

heavily entwined

in our dizziness,

just as though we were

buck and doe in pair,

eagerly in chase

among saplings;

laughing till we’re weak,

losing all our strength,

with youth’s joy that’s

urgent and vehement.

Several features here are reminiscent of Greek lyric: the shady grove, the “dizziness” of love (with desire portrayed as an overwhelming external force), and the comparison to animals, especially the depiction of the beloved as a female deer. Yet there is significant contrast too, as MacDonald presents the deer chasing one another, stressing their mutual and consensual pleasure, whereas Greek lyric typically views the female deer as trembling and overpowered (cf. Alcaeus fr. 10b Campbell, Anacreon fr. 408 PMG), mirroring the wider culture’s (and the all-male symposium’s) sexist bias.

Many of the major twentieth-century Gaelic poets left small rural communities to attend University,27 and they use their knowledge of classical material to reflect on their “bicultural” situation.28 Their work is local and traditional, but also shows diverse international influences and looks outward to the wider world.29 Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain, 1911–1996) learned Latin and Greek at school. His use of classical material is often attuned to his socialism, Scottish nationalism, and pride in his Gaelic heritage, as when he writes in his essay “Aspects of Gaelic Poetry” that “I am quite sure that Scottish Gaelic has as much beauty, variety, strength, and magnificence of sounds as ancient Greek or any Western European language.”30 Here the establishment status of ancient Greek makes it a foil to the poet’s choice of a minority language. His long poem “An Cuilithionn” (“The Cuillin”), completed in 1939, reflects on the Fascism engulfing Europe. In Part VI the narrator adopts the persona of Clio, the muse of history, to give a catalog of human suffering, starting in Skye (“S mise Chlio mhór Sgitheanach,” “I am the great Clio of Skye”) and radiating outward as far as India and China, ending “I am the Clio of the world: | my wandering is eternal, and chill with death.”31

More specifically lyrical is MacLean’s sexualized depiction of nature: the Cuillin “like the mother-breasts of the world | erect with the universe’s concupiscence,” or

Bu choille Ratharsair an té

a liubhair pòg mheala réidh,

a’ phòg nach fóghnadh do ’n chré,

a’ phòg chuir luasgan ’sa chléibh.

The wood of Raasay was the one

that gave the smooth honeyed kiss,

the kiss that would not suffice the clay,

the kiss that put unrest in the body.32

In “Am Bàta Dubh” (“The Black Boat”) Greek poetry and myth are used to praise a boat, but the simple object becomes an emblem of the speaker’s pride in his homeland:

A bhàta dhuibh, a Ghreugaich choimhlionta,

cluas siùil, balg siùil làn is geal,

agus tu fhéin gu foirfeach ealanta,

sàmhach uallach gun ghiamh gun ghais;

do chùrsa réidh gun bhròn gun fhaireachadh;

cha b’ iadsan luingis dhubha b’ ealanta

a sheòl Odysseus a nall á Itaca

no Mac Mhic Ailein a nall á Uidhist,

cuid air muir fion-dhorcha

’s cuid air sàl uaine-ghlas.

Black boat, perfect Greek,

sail tack, sail belly full and white,

and you yourself complete in craft,

silent, spirited, flawless;

your course smooth, sorrowless, unfeeling;

they were no more skilled black ships

that Odysseus sailed over from Ithaca,

or Clanranald over from Uist,

those on a wine-dark sea,

these on a grey-green brine.33

In “Mhic Gille-Mhìcheil” (“Carmichael”) MacLean celebrates both the folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912), editor of the monumental Carmina Gadelica, and a moment of poetic inspiration he himself enjoyed:

thàinig gun strì dhomh luathghair

ann an geal mhaise aodann nìghne

a dhaindeoin brìgh a bhuairidh:

agus air latha thàrladh dhomhsa

ealaidheachd òir gun luasgan,

’s i coimhlionta, mar thàinig ortsa

gun mheang, an Ortha Bhuadhach.

there came to me without striving

a paean in the fair beauty of a girl’s face

in spite of its troubling;

and one day there came to me

a peaceful golden lyric,

complete, as came to you,

flawless, the Hymn of the Graces.34

Early Writing in Scots, Latin, and English

Turning now to Scots, it is striking that although it has a long literary history dating back to the early fourteenth century, two periods—the sixteenth century and the 1930s onward—stand out as particularly rich in their engagement with classical literature, the former period being the high point of Scots as a national language (before the Union of the Crowns) and the latter marked by a resurgence of interest in Scots as a legitimate vehicle of artistic expression.35 The development of small-scale lyric poetry by Robert Henryson (c.1425–1506), William Dunbar (c.1460–1520), Gavin Douglas (c.1474–1522), and Sir David Lindsay (c.1486–c.1555), combined with the new educational access to Greek in the later sixteenth century, paved the way for the so-called “Castalian band” of poets at the court of James VI in the 1580s and 1590s. These writers translated key Renaissance texts and forms (especially the sonnet) into Scots, but were also educated in Greek and Latin. In his handbook for would-be poets, Reulis and Cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie (1584), the king himself had emphasized the need to acquire a thorough knowledge of the languages being translated or adapted. Robert Ayton (1570–1638) wrote poems in Latin, Greek, French, Scots, and English, but neither the Greek nor the French have survived: an unfortunate loss, since a poem written in Latin and Greek by his contemporary John Leech puns on “Aytonius” as “aei tónos,” “always tuneful.” William Drummond (1585–1649) composed the Anglicized Teares on the Death of Meliades (1613), a lament for the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, in the style of classical elegy, with the refrain “Meliades sweete courtly Nymphes deplore | From ruddy Hesp’rus rising to Aurore.”

But a richer source for the reception of Greek lyric is the period’s neo-Latin poetry, whose major works were edited by Arthur Johnston as Delitiae poetarum Scotorum huius aevi illustrium (“Delightful Productions of the Illustrious Scottish Poets of this Age,” 1637).36 A cycle of poems by Andrew Melville includes an appeal to Hygieia, daughter of Asclepius, to cure his sickness, and a thank-offering to the Muses for providing poetry with which he can alleviate his insomnia (both poems are in Sapphic stanzas). Adam King’s Ἐπιβατήριον ad Regem in Scotiam redeuntem welcomes James I back to Scotland in 1617. Thomas Maitland promises his doctor “et tua Pindarico carmine facta canam” (“I will sing of your deeds in Pindar’s meter”), while the aptly named Hercules Rollock composes an “Epithalamium” to mark the marriage of James VI to Anna, Princess of Denmark. George Buchanan translated into Latin not only Semonides” iambic “Satire on Women” (fr. 7 W) but also several epigrams of Simonides, including Ut arma fugias, fata non fugies tamen (“A man can flee from fighting, not from fate”) and De luce cassis cor memoriam non supra | Unum tenebit, si cor habeamus, diem (“For just one day, all day, the heart remembers | The dear departed, if the heart is wise”). Finally, John Leech (mentioned above) published two books of Anacreontica (1618, 1620), celebrating a life of sensual hedonism, in titillating defiance of respectable Christian morality.37

Classical authors were studied by all the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. The leading printing press of the 1740s to 1780s, the Glasgow-based Foulis Press, published its first catalog in 1740, containing “the scarcest Editions of almost all the Greek and Roman authors.” Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) recast a variety of classical genres (elegy, lyric ode, and pastoral) in Scots, seeking to combine learned and popular culture, and the Preface to his Poems (1721) embraces both Anacreon and Horace as role-models.38 The blind poet Thomas Blacklock (1721–1791) studied Greek and Latin at the University of Edinburgh and his Poems on Several Occasions (1746) won him the title “the Scottish Pindar.”39 By contrast, Robert Burns (1759–1796), the greatest of all poets to write in Scots, downplayed his classical education, bolstering a persona of unlettered, natural genius, as when he says of his earliest poems, “I was not so presumtive [sic] as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin.”40 The turn to Greece by poets of the Romantic period is well known.41 Lord Byron (1788–1824), the foremost Philhellene, famously recanted his youthful dismissal of Scottish literary culture, though his translations of Anacreon are (like all his other works) in standard poetic English.42

The Modern Scots Renaissance

As in Gaelic, the twentieth century has seen a Renaissance of Scots-language poetry, spearheaded initially by Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892–1978), whose seminal poem (of 2685 lines) “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” was published in 1926.43 As Ian Crichton Smith observed in an essay on his fellow poet, “it is interesting that MacDiarmid very seldom refers to the Greeks and Trojans from whom so many poems have been quarried but rather goes back to Celtic sources.”44 Though he was certainly an intellectual writer, calling in his poem “The Kind of Poetry I Want” for “A learned poetry wholly free | From the brutal love of ignorance,” allusions to classical material perhaps risked the charge of Anglophone elitism, whereas Celtic myth supported MacDiarmid’s nationalist agenda: as an anonymous voice tells the drunk man near the end of the poem, “A Scottish poet maun assume | The burden o’ his people’s doom, | And dee to brak’ their livin’ tomb.”45 Nonetheless, he made versions of Greek and Latin poets,46 and uses classical references from time to time.47

MacDiarmid inspired many subsequent poets to write in Scots, including Robert Garioch (1909–1981) and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–1975). In “The Hierodules” Garioch freely translates Pindar’s skolion (or party song) celebrating the hundred women dedicated as prostitutes to Aphrodite by the Olympic victor Xenophon of Corinth (fr. 122, trans. Race; cf. Ol. 13):

Young women who welcome many guests, attendants

of Persuasion in rich Corinth,

you who burn the yellow tears of fresh

incense, often soaring in your thoughts

to the heavenly

mother of loves, Aphrodite,

you, O children, she has permitted to cull

without blame in delightful acts of love

the fruit of soft youth.

Under compulsion all is fair …

[lacuna of 10–12 lines]

But I wonder what the lords of the Isthmos

will say of my devising such a beginning as this

for a honey-minded skolion

to accompany women shared in common.

We test gold on a pure touchstone …

[lacuna]

O mistress of Cyprus, here into your precinct

Xenophon has brought a hundred-bodied

herd of girls to graze,

in gladness at the fulfillment of his prayers.

In Garioch’s version:48

In Corinth glittering wi gowd and gules,

ye hartsome servants of Persuasioun,

guid-willie lasses, liefsome hierodules,

are nou arrayit as oblatioun

til Aphrodit’ in dedicatioun;

ane hunder vicars al of that Godess

lykerus her to sair in lustiness.

Your daywerk is the amber tears to brenn

of frankincense in reikie sacrifie

and aftentimes ye ettle, fidgan-fain

to birl in tourbillions of ecstasie

abuin the beryall firmament on hie

whaur luve consecrat bleizes til a sterne

and preclair Aphrodite reigns superne.

Thirlit thus-gait by favour of your Queen

in thralldom’s obeisance til her pouers,

supine in homage, gentill and amene,

maist leman-like ye preive luve’s saftest hours,

Corinthian Aphrodite’s sacrate hures;

whan luve’s consecrat serf dois her devoir

nane sall find faut wi her, nor think the waur.49

Garioch’s use of ornate diction (marked by rhyme: Persuasioun~oblatioun~dedicatioun, etc.), Middle Scots spelling and vocabulary (e.g., gentill and amene, sterne~superne), and the seven-line royal stanza of medieval courtly love poetry all stand in darkly ironic contrast to the miserable constraint of the sex-slaves (“sacrate hures”) whose lives have been destroyed. The lighthearted ancient Greek song becomes a critique of male lust and cruelty.50 Sydney Goodsir Smith often deploys classical allusions.51 Two versions of Sappho fr. 168b52 are juxtaposed to comic effect:

Sappho

For Edith Sitwell

δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα

Dwynit is the mune awa declining

And the Pleiades, the nicht

Is at her mid, the hours flee, and I

- My lane I ligg. alone/lonely, lie

Another Version

For Hector MacIver

The howffs are shut langsyne, pubs

The late snugs tae;

The whures are all abed

- And the Auk his lane … i.e. the poet (born near Auckland), alone

Pissed, of course!53

Smith exploits the persona of the lovelorn poet, with the high literary associations of Sappho preserved in the first version (significantly dedicated to an esteemed female poet, Dame Edith Sitwell), but undone in the second (dedicated to a male friend and drinking buddy), where the poet becomes a lonely drunk shut out of the pubs without any prostitutes around. The same Sappho fragment was also translated by Tom Scott (1918–1995):

From the Greek of Sappho

Doun gaes the muin hersel, an aa

The Pleiades forbye.

Nicht is nearin her mirkest hoor

And yet mylane I lie.54

Similarly, the classical scholar, translator, and Scottish nationalist Douglas Young (1913–1973) published Scots versions of Sappho fr. 31 (“Maik o the gods he seems to me …”) and fr. 96 (“Thon time we aa wonned thegither”) and “Fowr epigrams frae Theognis o Megara.”55

Inspiration and Translation: Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan

Norman MacCaig (1910–1996), who studied Greek and Latin at Edinburgh University, wrote a number of poems inspired by Greek poetry and myth, often wittily reimagining his sources, as in:

The dolphin to Arion

I’m always happy to give a lift

to hitchhikers, Arion,

and I’m perfectly willing

to take you where you’re going

if only, for God’s sake, you stop

playing that damn lyre.56

And poet and translator Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) translated twenty-six poems from the Greek anthology, including one on the savagery of Hipponax’s iambics, even from beyond the grave (7.405):

Stranger, beware! This terrible tomb

rains verses! The very ashes of Hipponax

have screaming iambics to hurl at Eupalus.

Let sleeping wasps lie. Even in Hades

nothing has soothed his spite. From there

he shoots straight metres in lame bursts for ever.57

Greek Lyric Reimagined: Robert Crawford

However, the most sustained engagement with classical culture, and certainly the most creative transformation of Greek lyric poetry, in recent Scottish literature is to be found in the work of the scholar and poet Robert Crawford (born 1959). Beginning in his sixth collection of poems, The Tip of My Tongue (2003), Crawford has published several versions of Greek lyric poetry in Scots and English, including Alcman, Sappho, Archilochus, Alcaeus, and Simonides. Under the title “Cicadas,” for example, he has combined English versions of three poems (Alcman fr. 89 PMG, Sappho fr. 105a, Greek Anthology 5.143):

Cicadas

from the Greek

Alcman

The tops of the bens and the benside burns are asleep

With nesses and steep-sided glens –

All the dark, Gaian larder,

Wildcats and heather-honey bees,

Fins and tails deep in porphyry sealochs –

And the songbirds are flying in their sleep.

Sappho

That cloud-juiced apple at a high-twig’s tip,

Reddening on the utmost branch.

The one the apple-pickers missed.

Not missed. They could never reach it.

Meleager

Though the garland round Heliodora’s head

Fades now, she sparkles, she is herself

A garland to garland the garland.58

Alcman’s rugged mountain landscape is given a Scottish tinge (“bens and benside burns,” etc.), while the use of “garland” as verb as well as noun captures the threefold repetition of στέφανος in Meleager’s short poem:

Ὁ στέφανος περὶ κρατὶ μαραίνεται Ἡλιοδώρας

αὐτὴ δ’ ἐκλάμπει τοῦ στεφάνου στέφανος

In his collection Full Volume (2008) Crawford renders Sappho fr. 104a as:

The Evening Star

from the Greek of Sappho

Hesperus, ferrying home all bright dawn scattered,

You ferry home the sheep, you ferry home the goat, you

ferry the child home to mother.59

Here the use of “ferry” for Sappho’s φέρων/φέρεις mirrors the repeated sound-patterns of the original:

Ἔσπερε πάντα φέρων ὄσα φαίνολις ἐσκέδασ’ αὔως,

φέρεις ὄιν, φέρεις αἶγα, φέρεις μάτερι παῖδα.

And his most recent collection, The Scottish Ambassador (2018), contains English versions of Archilochus and Alcaeus as well as Scots versions of Sappho and Simonides.60

Yet Crawford’s most ambitious use of Greek lyric so far has been his collection Simonides (2011), where Crawford’s Scots translations are placed beside black-and-white photographs by Norman McBeath.61 Crawford’s introductory essay (pp. 5–17) is entitled “Simonides and the War on Terror,” and it eloquently expresses the contemporary resonance of Simonides’ fragments, especially his epitaphs for the Greek war dead. It begins: “The greatest poems of the ancient Greek poet Simonides are body bags. Zipped inside are the remains of human lives. Often no longer than captions, these fragments’ very brevity gives them an eerie contemporaneity in our era saturated with its own shortened text messages. Here are tiny “texts” that are eroded yet seem set to last forever. Remembering those lost in combat zones, the epitaphs of Simonides go with the apparent timelessness of black-and-white photography; yet, like photographs, they are occasioned by particular instants. Photographs, body bags, curt memorials, they are tagged with the names of the dead.”

Thus, for example, Simonides’ poem in honor of the Spartan seer Megistias, his own guest-friend who was killed at Thermopylae, is translated in a way that brings out the simplicity and restraint of the original (recorded by Herodotus: 7.228):

XIX Spaeman

This grun hauds gret Megistias. The Medes

Kilt him whan they spanged the Wattir o Sperchius.

He wis a spaeman, kent his daith wis tied,

But kent he’d no gie owre his Spartan lairds.

This ground holds great Megistias. The Persians

killed him when they crossed the River Sperchius.

He was a soothsayer, and knew that his death was

inevitable, but knew that he would not betray his

Spartan masters.

As Crawford observes, “This poem celebrates Megistias’s facing up to terror. Its measured quality is at one with the measured resolution it memorializes. It does not gush or emote, but gives to a friend as much immortality as poetry can confer. It is perhaps poetry’s greatest ever measured response. It may be an immediate reaction to defeat; or, if inscribed some considerable time after the battle, it may allude to victory, since its original readers would have known that the Medes—the Persians—were eventually defeated. Yet in either event it is a poem of heroic loss, and a poet’s salute to a priest.”62 The same battle produced what is perhaps the most famous epitaph of all:

XIV Spartan war dead, Thermopylae

Ootlin, tell oor maisters this:

We lig here deid. We did as we were telt.

Stranger, take this message to our masters:

we lie here dead. We did as we were told.

Here Crawford incorporates a note of defiance that is appropriate to our modern context. Whereas Simonides stresses the Spartans’ militaristic mindset and unquestioning obedience, Crawford presents them as both faithful and speaking back to their superiors: “This is the Simonides of the ‘War on Terror’: without dishonouring their memories, he incites us to question the orders which send fighters to their death … [Here] is a poem which might offer insight into the psychology of the suicide bomber as well as that of the officer or the squaddy.”63 Finally, one can clearly see in Crawford’s work the advantages of Scots as a medium for Greek lyric fragments, for as a vernacular and pithy form of language, it works against the image of Greek as the preserve of a narrow socio-economic class and is well suited to the compressed and laconic style of short poetic forms.64

Conclusion

In conclusion, the use of Greek lyric by Scottish authors shows that a nation’s literature is often at its best when it is outward-looking and international. Though often local, the best Scottish literature is not parochial, and writers in diverse genres, from the novels of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Alasdair Gray to the plays of Liz Lochhead and David Greig, have found inspiration in Greek literature and myth. Greek lyric too, despite its largely fragmentary survival, has sparked an impressive variety of creative responses in Scotland.65

FURTHER READING

On the history of Scottish literature, see Brown, Clancy, Manning, and Pittock 2006, and Crawford 2007; for Gaelic poetry, see Thomson 1989. Kerrigan 1991, Dunn 1992, Clancy 1998, and Crawford and Imlah 2000 present excellent anthologies of Scottish poetry; Black 1999, 2001 and Thomson 1993 do the same for Gaelic. France and Glen 1989 provide a variety of translations of European poetry by Scottish writers.

Notes

1 Kerrigan 1991: 229.

2 I use the broad definition of “lyric” encompassing solo and choral song, elegy, and iambus. This may be a modern idea, but the diversity of “lyric” is itself a feature of the post-classical reception of these genres; cf. Albright 1985: ix “the lyric genre consists of what is left over when all other genres are subtracted from the corpus of literature.”

3 A complete survey would need to include Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Old English, Old French, and Old Norse, but space and my own linguistic competence necessitate a focus on the major languages. For the linguistic diversity of Scottish literature, particularly before the Union of the Crowns (1603), see Crawford 2007: 6–14 and Clancy 2012.

4 See in particular the collections of Clancy 1998, Crawford and Imlah 2000.

5 See Devitt 1989.

6 See, for example, Wilson 2012, Jay and Lewis 1996, Baumann 1974, Revard 1991.

7 See e.g., Crawford 2011, with further bibliography.

8 See Green 2012. Some recent productions of tragedy—e.g., Liz Lochhead’s Medea (2000) and David Greig’s Bacchae (2007)—have won both critical and public acclaim.

9 See Bawcutt 1976.

10 See Goodare 1999: 216, Kidd and Coleman 2012: 64.

11 Clarke 1959: 136.

12 Cant 1992: 60–61. For the teaching of Greek at schools in Elizabethan England, see Attridge 1974: 45–47.

13 On the role of Classics in the early history of the Scottish Universities, see Davie 1961: 203–251.

14 For a catalog of early lyric texts, translations, and commentaries, see Hummel 1997: 237–251.

15 Because Greek was the preserve of a relatively small University-educated elite, poets could be defensive about their knowledge of the classical languages or take pride in writing in the vernacular (Scots or “Lallans”). Thus Allan Ramsay wrote (Poems (Edinburgh, 1721), p. vi) “My cheerful Friends will pardon (a very essential Qualification of a Poet) my Vanity, when in self Defence I inform the Ignorant, that many of the finest Spirits, and of the highest Quality and Distinction, eminent for Literature, and Knowledge of Mankind, from an Affability which ever accompanies great Minds, tell me, ‘They are pleased with what I have done; and add, That any small Knowledge of the dead or foreign Languages is nothing to my Disadvantage. King David, Homer and Virgil, say they, were more ignorant of the Scots and English Tongue, than you are of Hebrew, Greek and Latin: Pursue your own natural Manner, and be an original.’” By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in “The Maker to Posterity,” from Underwoods (1887): “What tongue does your auld bookie speak?” | He’ll spier; an’ I, his mou to steik: | “No bein” fit to write in Greek, | I wrote in Lallan, | Dear to my heart as the peat reek, | Auld as ‘Tantallon’.

16 On the difficulty of gaining access to Greek before the mid-sixteenth century, see Moran 2012: 191 “The main challenge for anyone attempting to acquire a reading knowledge of Greek in this period was the absence of sources for grammatical information.” For a selection of Scotland’s earliest poetry (c. 550–1350), see Clancy 1998, and for a concise history of Gaelic in Scotland, see Thomson 1984.

17 Thomson 1989: 19–56 surveys traditional bardic praise poetry. For access to Greek and Latin among Gaelic-speakers, see Thomson 1991–1992, who notes that (p. 159) “The 1609 Statutes of Iona had encouraged Highland chiefs to send their eldest sons to be educated in the Lowlands, and the process would have begun earlier than that, perhaps especially in the more southerly Gaelic areas of Perthshire and Argyllshire.” Thus as well as private tutors teaching Classics in Gaelic areas, Gaelic chiefs, and other members of the elite were attending Universities where Greek was taught.

18 Coira 2012: 25–52 analyses the conventions of the “panegyric code” in Gaelic poetry to c. 1700.

19 Archibald Campbell (1607–1661), first Marquis of Argyll, who matriculated at St. Andrews University in 1622.

20 Line references are to the edition of Watson 1965.

21 Harris 1986: 114.

22 See Thomson 1989: 156–217, Thomson 1996, Black 2001: 425, Dressler and Stiùbhart 2012. He was the first Gaelic poet to publish his work: Aiseirigh na Seann Chànain Albannaich (The Resurrection of the Old Scottish Language, 1751); cf. Black 1999: xxi.

23 For example, in his “Elegy for a Pet Dove, Killed by a Terrier” (“Marbhrainn a rinneadh do Pheata Coluim, a Mharbhadh le Abhag”) MacDonald echoes Catullus’ lament for his beloved’s pet sparrow (Catull. 3); see Thomson 1993: 15–19.

24 By contrast, James Macpherson (1736–1796) used his knowledge of Greek to create a ruggedly primitive and Romantic image of the Highlands and its culture in his Ossianic poems, supposed translations from the Gaelic; cf. Stafford 1988, 1996, Meek 2004.

25 The translation is from MacDonald and MacDonald 1924: 4.

26 Thomson 1993: 34–39.

27 George Campbell Hay (Deòrsa Caimbeul Hay, 1915–1984), for example, studied Classics at Oxford and translated a number of poems from modern Greek. On his Gaelic poem “The Return of Ulysses,” see Thomson 1989: 288–290.

28 Cf. MacAulay 1976: 48 “They have become bicultural and it is this situation, a notoriously uneasy one, which creates the tension from which a great deal of their poetry derives.” The early poetry collections of the Gaelic poet and scholar Derick Thomson (Ruaraidh Mac Thòmais, 1921–2012), collected in Thomson 1982, often reflect on being “educated out” of his local community.

29 For an excellent introduction to twentieth-century Gaelic poetry, see Black 1999: xxi–lxx; cf. McLeod and Dymock 2011.

30 Gillies 1985: 75.

31 Part VII uses Aeschylus’ Prometheus as a symbol of human pain.

32 MacLean 1990: 78–79 (“The Cuillin”), 178–179 (“The Woods of Raasay”).

33 MacLean 1990: 38–39.

34 MacLean 1990: 164–165.

35 For a history of literary translation into Scots, see Corbett 1999.

36 On Neo-Latin lyric, see Moul 2015; on the Delitiae, see Reid 2013 and Green 2015: 29–30. For a translation of selected Latin poems by George Buchanan (1506–1582) and Arthur Johnston himself (c.1579–1641), see Crawford 2006.

37 E.g., Book 1, poem 5, entitled “Non posse se uno amore teneri” (“He cannot be bound by a single love”). On the popularity of Anacreon since the first modern edition in 1554, see Michelakis 2009: 342–346.

38 On elite and popular culture in Ramsay’s “lyricks,” see Newman 2002. Gillespie 2018: 202 observes that Ramsay’s classical translations “helped to win Scots verse greater respect among the reading public.”

39 David Hume, in a letter (dated 27 February 1754) sent to many friends, including Adam Smith, urges all of them to buy Blacklock’s poems.

40 Letter to Dr John Moore, August 2, 1787. Cf. e.g., his “Epistle to J. L*****k, An Old Scotch Bard,” lines 67–72: “A set o’ dull, conceited Hashes, | Confuse their brains in Colledge-classes! | They gang in Stirks, and come out Asses, | Plain truth to speak; | An’ syne they think to climb Parnassus | By dint o’ Greek!.”

41 See e.g., Buxton 1978.

42 From Don Juan, Canto X (1823): “And though, as you remember, in a fit | Of wrath and rhyme, when juvenile and curly, | I railed at Scots to show my wrath and wit, | Which must be owned was sensitive and surly. | Yet ’tis in vain such sallies to permit; | They cannot quench young feelings fresh and early. | I ‘scotched, not killed’, the Scotchman in my blood | And love the land of ‘mountain and of flood’.”

43 On the use of Scots as a poetic language in the twentieth century, see McClure 2000.

44 Crichton Smith 1972: 131.

45 Grieve and Aitken 1985: i.165.

46 Cf. Crawford 2006: xv. For MacDiarmid’s use of Greek and Latin diction in his English poems, see Haynes 2003: 88–89.

47 See especially “Ulysses’ Bow,” “Prometheus,” “Like Achilles and Priam,” Grieve and Aitken 1985: i.171–172, 173, 551.

49 Garioch 2004: 113, stanzas 1–3 of 5.

50 Garioch’s other Scots versions include “Dithyramb (Frae Pindar),” “Anatomy of Winter (Hesiod),” and two Latin plays by the great humanist George Buchanan, Jephthah and The Baptist. Classically inspired too are “Sisyphus” and “Proem and Inscription for a Hermes.”

51 See, for example, his poems “Orpheus,” “Prometheus,” “Said Heraclitus,” “Philomel,” and “Sub Regno Cynarae.”

52 “The moon has set, | the Pleiades too; it is midnight, | and time goes by, and I lie alone.”

53 Smith 1975: 109.

54 France and Glen 1989: 74.

55 Young 1943: 36–37. He also translated two poems by Robert Burns (“Caa the yowes” and “Ae fond kiss”) into ancient Greek verse: Young 1943: 52.

56 MacCaig 1990: 365. See also “Any Orpheus” (1990: 72), “His son to Laocoön” (285), “Classical translation” (353), “Clio” (374), “Penelope” (376), “Zeno, and his like” (377), “Circe” (378), “Daedalus” (380), “Hermes–Mercury” (383), “In Hades” (398), “Nausicaa” (441), “Reading The Iliad” (445). With even more pointed wit, the poet, artist, and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) called his garden in Lanarkshire Little Sparta, in opposition to metropolitan Edinburgh as the Athens of the North.

57 Morgan 1996: 400.

58 Crawford 2003: 14. As he later observed (Crawford 2009: 74), “I wasn’t aware ‘cicadas’ was a word the Greeks had used of little poems—it just sounded right.”

59 Crawford 2008: 33.

60 Crawford 2018: 45–52, including a Scots version of Sappho fr. 168b, which one might compare with those by Smith and Scott mentioned above: “Midnicht. The mune sets wi the Seiven Sisters. | The oors gang by. I lig awake. Alane.”

61 Crawford and McBeath 2011. The book was published to coincide with an exhibition entitled Body Bags/Simonides held at the Edinburgh College of Art. For an enlightening interview with both poet and photographer dicussing their collaboration, see Hughes 2012.

62 Crawford and McBeath 2011: 15.

63 Crawford and McBeath 2011: 16.

64 As Crawford himself said in his Classical Association Presidential Address (2016: 15), “the poems speak in Scots, seeking to achieve an acoustic that may commune with common humanity rather than with any ‘Classicist’ elite.”

65 I am immensely grateful to Robert Crawford, Nick Halmi, and Laura Swift for their valuable and expert advice.

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