10 - ‘What matters is the yeast’: ‘foreignising’ Gaelic poetry

Summary

Writing several years ago about the Scots-language poet Sydney Goodsir Smith, I suggested that the dynamic between what we perceive as foreign and what we perceive as native may be inherently unstable. The elements on either side of the equation – an equation whose equals sign ought, we fondly hope, to have the firmest of strokes through it – tend to replace one another with maddening frequency. Indeed, they may turn into one another unpredictably and without warning.

This instability is related to two fundamental paradoxes underlying the activity of cultural nationalists, so fundamental in Ireland in the years preceding and following the 1916 Rising and, in Scotland, in the wake of the 1978 referendum and still today. If we are to evaluate, or even simply to offer a faithful account of, this activity, then we would do well to keep these paradoxes in mind. With their assistance we may avoid reproducing certain pitfalls, or stumbling into certain dead ends which characterised both enterprises.

On the one hand, cultural nationalism was itself a foreign import. MacDiarmid, for example, contemplating the potential scope and meaning of a Scottish Renaissance movement in the early 1920s, refers again and again to what is taking place abroad, in Belgium or Norway, as well as in Ireland. ‘Look what is happening out there!’ he effectively says. ‘Should not we be doing the same here? Why are no similar changes occurring in Scotland?’