7 - The Classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry

Summary

Latin is the most ancient literary language of Ireland, Scotland and England, but usually it has been extirpated by general anthologists of Scottish, English or Irish poetry. Exceptionally, Hugh MacDiarmid included a few English prose versions of Scottish Latin poems in his 1940 Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, but almost six decades would pass before Thomas Owen Clancy's more specialised landmark medieval anthology The Triumph Tree (1998) reminded modern Scots through translation that they, too, inherited a multilingual trove of ancient poetry linking them to Europe, not just to ancient Scotland or the British Isles. For all that they printed work only in modern English translation and omitted the original poems, the wish of Clancy to call attention to a fully multilingual past was salutary.

Yet there were also signs among anthologists in Ireland and Scotland of nationalist anxiety about origins. In Ireland the 1991 Field Day anthology may be structured historically, but its first section, entitled ‘Early and Middle Irish Literature’ (c. 600–c. 1600), occupies a chronological space that begins not before but after the period covered by the second section, ‘Latin Writing in Ireland’ (c. 400–c. 1200). The historical course of the anthology seems skewed so as to position native Irish – The Táin – ahead of the more cosmopolitan Latin – the confession of St Patrick – as the foundational language of Irish writing.