Gaelic Treasure

I was involved in organising a centenary celebration, Ainmeil Thar Cheudan, of the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean from the island of Raasay when I was invited to produce a piece of exactly 62 words in Gaelic for the 26Treasures exhibition. At the end of April I had spent a gloriously sunny Sunday, without as much as a midge or a tourist, re-reading his collected poems O Choille gu Bearradh/From Wood to Ridge on a walk near to home on the coast by Ob Snaosaig and Camas Baravaig and Dùn Choinnich down to Knock Bay in Sleat, Skye, which island, of course, features in so much of his work. I had also been invited around that time to produce a c900 word essay on MacLean and the conference and decided I would write it in similar circumstances. It rained for the whole month of May and the first chance I got was about a week before the event was due to be held. I procrastinated again of course and I decided to defer it until his centenary birthday celebrations in October. Instead, I took some notes I’d researched the night before about St. Ninian’s Treasure. I wrote the poem Faodail (a word MacLean uses a lot) in about an hour in the same spot looking out to Knoydart on the mainland from Buaile Mhòr where I’d been reading O Choille gu Bearradh a month or so beforehand.

The English version (also 62 words, if indeed word is the word) is in a form I have recently adopted – I call it intertonguing or subversion or traduction – as I have come to the conclusion that Gaelic poetry, and MacLean’s work is a case in point, is untranslatable. (In spite of regular residencies, most recently at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Gaelic College in Skye, the full-time professional poet is not for me, I’m sorry to say, and I make my living primarily as a translator for, amongst others, the Scottish Parliament, but that’s quite another matter). The English version given here does not indicate, for example, that the original includes homophones for Shetland and Pict and that the Gaelic for excavation and research originally meant to ransack, deriving, like many Gaelic words, from Norse, in this case, from rannsaka, to search a house, according to Alexander MacBain’s delightful Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1896). MacBain’s work, by the way, is not to be confused with Charles Mackay’s ‘fanciful conjectures’ published as The Gaelic Etymology Of The Languages Of Western Europe, And More Especially Of The English And Lowland Scotch And Of Their Slang, Cant and Colloquial Dialects in Copenhagen in 1877. Mackay, who was educated at the Caledonian Asylum in London, also published Songs and Poems (1834) and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). The word in Scottish Gaelic for Ulster also denotes a treasure (and echoes tasgadh which also means burying) and seòid means both jewels and heroes. Lochlannach primarily means a (Norwegian) Scandinavian but also, by extension, a marauder or robber, in Irish Gaelic at least. Dùn nan Gall, of course, denotes Donegal – there are places of the same name on the islands of Islay, Tiree and Mull, all in Earra-Ghàidheal/Argyll – but also refers to the Northern foreigners recorded in the name Innse Gall or Hebrides. The last line, it occurs to me, could refer to both the site of the discovery and the current location of the object described. Ciste – still with me? – means both the treasure found and the kist or receptacle in which it has been deposited or the case in which it’s on display and so on.

I have yet, as I write, to see St. Ninian’s Treasure for myself or, for that matter, to visit Shetland, but I was indeed fortunate that the project object randomly assigned to me related to an island. The animal aspect of the find reminded me of MacLean’s great friend Hugh MacDiarmid - who knew Shetland well - and the poem Perfect (On the Western Seaboard of South Uist) about a pigeon skull on the machair, a found, if not stolen, treasure if ever there was one.

I never did get round to writing that other essay.