Literary Scots and translation

[hdw]

Re Scots and German, in Mondnacht von Eichendorff uses "Himmel", which doesn't have a cognate form in Scots, but instead of 'sky' or 'heavens' Mackie uses the Germanic 'lift', which is related to "Luft".

Les Murray is very interested in his Scottish Borders ancestry, but of course he wasn't brought up with the Scots language. He claims to be related to Sir James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary, another master of language, of course. I once recorded a radio programme he (Les) made.

Harry

 

[DWM]

Re Scots and German, in Mondnacht von Eichendorff uses "Himmel", which doesn't have a cognate form in Scots, but instead of 'sky' or 'heavens' Mackie uses the Germanic 'lift', which is related to "Luft".

Yes. Though there's more immediately identifiable German-Scots parallelism in:

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis die Wälder
So sternklar war die Nacht.

The sough gaed thro' the corn rigs
the ickers waggit licht
the wuids were reeshlin' saftly
sae starny-clear the nicht.

which really does suggest a close affinity between the two languages.

 

[hdw]

Yes. Though there's more immediately identifiable German-Scots parallelism in:

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis die Wälder
So sternklar war die Nacht.

The sough gaed thro' the corn rigs
the ickers waggit licht
the wuids were reeshlin' saftly
sae starny-clear the nicht.

which really does suggest a close affinity between the two languages.

There may be a close affinity, but Mackie, like other synthetic Scots poets, takes some liberties too. I'm sure he made up "starny-clear" to match Ger. sternklar.

Harry

 

[DWM]

I'm sure he made up "starny-clear" to match Ger. sternklar.

Perhaps, but according to Small's 1893 edition of the poems of William Dunbar, the words "starn" and "starny" (for "star", and "starry" respectively) were still in use in Banffshire and Aberdeenshire in the late 19th century.

 

[hdw]

Perhaps, but according to Small's 1893 edition of the poems of William Dunbar, the words "starn" and "starny" (for "star", and "starry" respectively) were still in use in Banffshire and Aberdeenshire in the late 19th century.

In that case, as Mackie was an Aberdeen man, I'll forgive him.

Your Dunbar edition is a rather out-of-date one. There have been many editions since then, the most recent and best probably being Priscilla Bawcutt's of 1999, for the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS).

Harry

 

[DWM]

Your Dunbar edition is a rather out-of-date one.

However, since the 1893 edition is now in the public domain, it's worth linking to, in my opinion. The Internet Archive's copy is not too bad, though some of the OCR is a bit inaccurate.

 

[DWM]

Here's a link to the poems themselves.

 

[Cleanthess]

Man, reading through this thread I can see that there were giants roaming the WLF in the auld days.

In any case I've fallen in love with Hugh McDiarmid's poems. From his The Revolutionary Art of the Future:


Ah, this is my ambition indeed:
To rise up among all the insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly jumpy people
And sing a song of our Alba bheadarrach
-An exuberant, frustrating, truculent, polysyllabic,
Generous, eccentric and incomprehensibly erudite song

And so bring fresh laurels to deck the brows
Of Alba bheadarrach is Alba-nuadhaichte, ath-leasaichte, is ath-bheothaichte.

 

[Hamlet]

Sounds like an average day over here.