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Hugh MacDiarmid

1923 - 2023

A. Riach
Lindsay B
Michael W.
AGillis
Monika S
Patrick C
Petra P
Peter M
Andrew M
James B
Paul R

Abstracts

Alan Riach - University of Glasgow

‘A New Life in Poems and the Ethics of Excess’

When William Blake published The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1793, revolutionary ideals and murderous reaction were fresh in a Europe toxic with bloodshed and repression. When Hugh MacDiarmid started publishing in 1922, in the fallout of war and rebellion, and later in the face of rising fascism and populism, the western world once more faced the prospect of international social reconfiguration. The discomforting truths of such times were MacDiarmid’s subject. This was the air his era breathed. In a new book-length sequence of biographical poems, The MacDiarmid Memorandum, my portraits of the poet, the company he kept and the landscapes and histories he inhabited, explore the knots and redress some of the assumptions in MacDiarmid’s story. This presentation brings together poetry as literary biography and historical analysis, and a reading of how ‘extremes meet’ in a writer uniquely committed to the furthest possibilities one nation could comprehend. Blake wrote: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ Does it? or is it just a cul-de-sac, a path to a dead-end future? In the world beyond MacDiarmid, what’s wisdom for?

Alan Riach is a poet and teacher. Born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 1957, he studied English literature at Cambridge University from 1976 to 1979 and completed his PhD in the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University in 1986. His academic career has included positions as a research fellow, lecturer, Associate Professor and Pro-Dean in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and he has given scholarly lectures, keynote addresses and public talks and poetry readings at universities, festivals and other venues internationally. His 734-page Scottish Literature: An Introduction (described in The Times as ‘magisterial’) was published in the centenary year of the first appearance in print of Hugh MacDiarmid and on the 10th anniversary of the long overdue formal provision of the literature of Scotland into Scottish schools. He is the General Editor of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Collected Works (Carcanet Press) and author of The MacDiarmid Memorandum (2023), a book-length sequence of poems, which has been called ‘a work of epic, category-defying scope, blending biography and national history, poetry and prose; an intimate portrait of an old friend and mentor, and a political manifesto calling for revolution.’

Lindsay Blair - UHI

"Hugh MacDiarmid: Word-Image and Aesthetics"

MacDiarmid’s writings on art are little researched. In his Aesthetics in Scotland (1950, published in 1984) MacDiarmid reveals a determination to find a theoretical grounding for an understanding of Scottish art.

 

MacDiarmid as one of the great Modernist poets believed in the benefits of cross-fertilisation within the arts (and sciences, social sciences, and philosophy) and his collaborations with abstract painters William Johnstone and William McCance and the composer Francis George Scott are ample evidence that this was not just theory. Amongst his notable collaborations were the printed edition of twelve of his own poems with accompanying drawings by Johnstone and, in 1955, the publication of In Memoriam James Joyce with illustrations by J.D.Fergusson. Beyond the practice for MacDiarmid, however, there had to be a ground in theory and that it is why the relationship between the collaborative practice and the aesthetic principles had to be defined. This is the reason that MacDiarmid’s Aesthetics in Scotland is such an important resource.

 

In more recent years, Kenneth White in The Wanderer and his Charts, 2004, has written (from his Deleuzian perspective) on both the centrality of aesthetics and on the influence of MacDiarmid. In the essay ‘Aesthetic Considerations on Calton Hill’, having begun with MacDiarmid’s Aesthetics in Scotland, he reaches towards a conclusion unsurprisingly reminiscent of MacDiarmid in both content and tone:

       We are badly in need of a new discourse, the creation of such a discourse being infinitely more creative than most ‘creative art’. Art needs discourse. I mean a discourse behind art. I don’t mean that semi-intellectual discourse that that has surrounded even the most inept of art objects. I mean a logos.

Like MacDiarmid, White regards the aesthetic as the absolute ground for culture. As indicated above, the relationship of word and image has engaged the interest of contemporary artists, philosophers and thinkers as well as schools of academics as they contest the ways that meaning is generated between the two forms of communication. When combined with the interest in a New Aestheticism within literary studies, it is evident that MacDiarmid’s early Modernist forays in aesthetics and word-image collaborations have much to contribute to academic debate in the twenty-first century.

Michael H. Whitworth - University of Oxford

"Scientific language and Images in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle"

My paper will consider MacDiarmid’s use of scientific language in poems from 1922 to 1934 with the principal focus being on A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Critical accounts of MacDiarmid and science (e.g. Robert Crawford and the present author) have largely concentrated on Stony Limits and “The Kind of Poetry I Want”, but MacDiarmid’s interest was established much earlier in the 1920s. “Language” here is used broadly to include not only words with specific technical meanings at the time – e.g. “composite diagram”, “hormones”, “protoplasm”, “stratosphere” – but also other terms that, in context, have implications for ideas about epistemology – e.g.“filter” – or astronomy, such as the references to “licht”. Moreover, MacDiarmid may also allude to illustrative examples from popular science writing, as in the passage about Bannockburn and Flodden, which can be read as a version of Camille Flammarion’s illustration of the Battle of Waterloo being visible “now” on a distant star.

Michael H. Whitworth is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, anda Fellow of Merton College. He has published widely on literature and science and on aspects of modernism; he has published on MacDiarmid in The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, the Scottish Studies Review, the International Journal of Scottish Literature, and most recently in Poetry and the Dictionary ed. A. Blades and P. Pennington.

Alan Gillis - University of Edinburgh

​“Tam o' the Wilds and the Many-Faced Mystery”

This paper discusses the long poem ‘Tam o’ the Wilds and the Many-Faced Mystery’, published in Scottish Scene in 1934. The poem is dedicated to the poet William Soutar, and is putatively a eulogy for the working-class amateur naturalist from Banffshire, Thomas Edward (1814-1886). The talk will implicitly aim to augment the relative importance and interest of this piece within MacDiarmid’s oeuvre. Specifically, it discusses the poem as a showpiece of MacDiarmid’s growing ecological interest in the 1930s. The focus is on a passage within the poem that is potentially of interest as a form of ecopoetry.

Alan Gillis is Professor of Modern Poetry at The University of Edinburgh. His fifth poetry collection The Readiness was published by Picador in 2020. He has previously been nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and named a ‘Next Generation Poet’. As critic he is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2011), and author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (OUP, 2005). He was editor of Edinburgh Review from 2010 to 2015.

Monika Szuba - University of Gdańsk

"'Nature poetry better than Wordsworth': An Ecocritical Reading of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poems"

In an article titled “One Hundred Years of Hugh MacDiarmid”, published earlier this year in The Bottle Imp, Alan Riach suggests that MacDiarmid’s is “nature poetry better than Wordsworth”. The comparison to the “Poet of Nature” himself — “a Worshipper of Nature” — offers an opportunity to explore MacDiarmid’s poetic work from an ecocritical angle. In this paper, I wish to propose a series of close readings, the focus of which will be MacDiarmid’s distinctive poetics of nature. Following Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theoretical concepts, which he develops in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) and Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (2015), a collection of essays which he co-edited with Lowell Duckert, I aim to examine the evocations of human-lithic entanglements in selected poems by MacDiarmid. The analysis will serve as afoundation into an  enquiry concerning the perspectives on natureculture demonstrated in his work as a possibility of redefining planetary relations. Finally, I propose to investigate the ways in which MacDiarmid’s views on the natural world as presented in the poems might cast light on the challenges which arise from human-environmental interactions.

Monika Szuba is Associate Professor at the University of Gdańsk. She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-editor of Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern (Brill, 2022), The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave, 2019), and editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2015). Her new book Landscape Poetics: Scottish Textual Practice 1928-Present will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

Patrick Crotty - University of Aberdeen

"Highland Hugh in the Empty Glen: MacDiarmid and the Gaelic World"

Petra Poncarová- Charles University

"Ceòl mòr anns a’ Chuimhne" (Big Music in the Memory):

 Derick Thomson’s engagement with Hugh MacDiarmid

In this paper, my aim is to explore the long-term engagement with Hugh MacDiarmid on part of the poet, scholar, journalist, and Gaelic-language champion Derick Thomson / Ruaraidh MacThòmais (1921-2012). Thomson’s sustained interest in MacDiarmid is evidenced by a number of reviews of publications by and about MacDiarmid that appeared in the Gaelic quarterly Gairm, by Thomson’s translations from Scots into Gaelic, and by references in Thomson’s essays and poems, including one written in response to MacDiarmid’s demise and funeral. Arguably, these are not only manifestations of Thomson’s interest in the promotion and development of Scots, which in his view should complement Gaelic revitalisation efforts as part of the drive for Scottish political and cultural independence, but also of deeper personal affinity and regard. Drawing on previously untranslated Gaelic material, the paper thus seeks to bring forward a lesser-known connection between MacDiarmid and the twentieth-century Gaelic world, apart from his well-known earlier association with Sorley MacLean / Somhairle MacGill-Eain.

Petra Johana Poncarová is based at Charles University in Prague, and has been working mostly on modern writing in Scottish Gaelic, especially Derick Thomson, Sorley MacLean, Tormod Caimbeul, and Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar. With the ASLS, she published a Scotnote on Thomson’s Gaelic poetry in 2020, and her monograph on Thomson is currently being prepared by the Edinburgh University Press.

She is secretary of the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures and one of the co-directors of the newly established Ionad Eòghainn MhicLachlain | National Centre for Gaelic Translation.

She translates directly from Gaelic into Czech.

Peter Mackay - University of St Andrews

"'Hurling his poems in the gutter': MacLean, MacDiarmid and Gaelic translation"

The student Sam MacLean first heard Christopher Murray Grieve speak at a rectoral debate at Edinburgh University. Grieve, the Communist, was not popular with the audience, ‘an ungentlemanly rabble of vacant-minded, coarse-grained, vulgar medical students – typical representatives of the Scottish “bourgeoisie”’, who set off squibs and greeted Grieve with a chorus of ‘rasps’. MacLean, though, was smitten by this example of an artist who ‘gains intensity in proportion to his exaltations and humiliations [… who] must experience the gamut of the emotions confronted by an unintelligent, howling mob of people’, who was willing to ‘hurl’ his poems into the gutter rather than appeal to popular taste. This was the spur for a friendship that would persist until Grieve’s death in 1978 – through exaltation and humiliation. Focussing on MacLean’s writing to and about Grieve (published and archival), and especially on their collaboration on the translation of ‘Moladh Beinn Dòrain’ and ‘Birlinn Clann Raghnail’, this paper will cast a new look on their relationship; and that ‘ironical gesture’ of throwing poems in the gutter rather than sacrificing poetic and political conviction.

Andrew Mitchell

"Cognitive dissonance and Creativity: Three Scottish poets and their Creative Development"

Hugh MacDiarmid, Derick Thomson and Iain Crichton Smith were all raised in rural,traditional and  geographically marginal areas of Scotland. Their creative thinking had to develop against staid communities, leading to dissonance, a state of mind where the pressure to reduce mental conflict creates change. Dissonance can be used to fuel creativity, a technique all three poets used. Whether consciously or unconsciously, new cognitive elements emerged for each poet reducing psychic conflict and changes of environment assisted their development.

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MacDiarmid emerged from conventional Georgian English poet as the progenitor to a Scottish literary renaissance. The dissonance between English language and culture and MacDiarmid’s Scots vision drove forward a national cultural flowering at great personal cost. He added nationalism and communism to his creed.

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Derick Thomson reached back to admire 18th Century Gaelic poetry but felt the hold of Presbyterian religious thinking created a literary ‘dissonance’. He left Lewis and developed his Gaelic dictionary, espoused nationalism, and used the ‘dissonance’ from his origins to fire his poetry.

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Iain Crichton Smith moved beyond writing solely in Gaelic to also write in English. The ‘dissonance’ of Presbyterian religious thinking was countered by not adhering to any specific religious creed. Dividing time between both languages, knowing his native Gaelic was a dying, caused additional dissonance. Despite leaving Lewis, the psychic toll of this balancing act was at times too great.

Andrew Mitchell, a poet and independent scholar, was Honorary Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing 2017-19. He has opened international conferences, marked important literary centenaries and bicentenaries. Performance venues have included: The British Library, London; Keats House, London; Keats-Shelley House, Rome; The Shakespeare Theatre, Gdansk. Publication and archives include poetry presses, academic journals and the V&A International Archive, Text and Illustration (with Mary Kuper). Other credits include: BBC Radio 3, Pick of the Week; BBC Television, The One Show. 

James Barrowman - University of Dundee

"Every Force Evolves a Form: Hugh MacDiarmid, Guy Davenport and the Shakers"

The phrase “every force evolves a form” was quoted by both Hugh MacDiarmid and Guy Davenport.

For MacDiarmid, in “Island Funeral” (1939), the words are claimed as a translation of a Gaelic proverb. On closer inspection, the poem is a setting into verse of a review by Mark Van Doren of a book on Shaker furniture. In Davenport's case, the maxim is quoted directly from Shaker missionary Mother Ann Lee and used as the name of the title essay in his second collection of criticism (1987).

 

Aspects of Davenport's essay can be applied to MacDiarmid: on birds in poetry, assigned names, and Calvinism. Davenport's use of the term “assemblage” to describe his approach resonates with MacDiarmid's methods in the later poems.

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My talk will follow the structure of Davenport's essay to draw a comparison between the two writers and their treatments of the Shaker motto. While the original uses the bird metaphor to trace the passage of ideas in Wordsworth, Poe, Whitman and Hopkins, I will use it to explore relations between MacDiarmid and some of his contemporaries: including Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Ugly Bird Without Wings, who Davenport admired, and Edwin Morgan, who was influenced by Mark Van Doren.

James Barrowman is a PhD student at the University of Dundee. His project, Counterfooting the Conjuring of a Ghaist', attempts to reimagine the lost plays of James Wedderburn through an assemblage of fragments and anecdotes from Dundonian literary history. His thesis includes some reflection on MacDiarmid's depictions of Dundee and use of The Gude and Godlie Ballatis in early lyrics.

Paul Robichaud - Albertus Magnus College

"'Apprentice Me to Scotland': W.S. Graham and Hugh MacDiarmid"

W.S.Graham’s relationship to Scottish modernism was deeply ambivalent. He considered the Scottish Renaissance spearheaded by Hugh MacDiarmid too overtly nationalistic, admiring MacDiarmid the man, but disliking the artificiality of ‘synthetic Scots.’ Nonetheless, as John Corbett recently argues, Graham like MacDiarmid struggled with the opacity of language, a conflict informed by the gap between spoken Scottish vernacular and ‘standard English.’ This paper will explore the ambivalent relationship between Graham’s poetics and MacDiarmid’s version of Scottish modernism, focusing in particular on his reception of the older poet. A fresh perspective is offered by a hitherto neglected review Graham wrote for The New York Times in 1948.

 

In it, he offers a surprisingly laudatory assessment of MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance, praising the movement for bringing ‘a passionate energy to bear upon the problems of writing in Scotland.’ Graham’s actual poetic practice, however, aligns his work with other Scottish poets associated with the Apocalypse who rejected the overt nationalism of the Scottish Renaissance in favour of an individualistic, visionary subjectivity. Nonetheless, Graham’s elegy for MacDiarmid, ‘A Page for My Country’ (1979) is a moving tribute to the elder poet, whose death provides the focus for Graham’s deepest poetic engagement with Scottish tradition.

Paul Robichaud is Professor and Chair of English at Albertus Magnus College, where he has taught since 2003.

He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. His chapter on W.S.Graham and Scottish modernism is forthcoming in The Edinburgh Companion to W.S. Graham. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the MLA Scottish Literature Forum, and has previously published on the Scottish poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, and William Dunbar. He has published most extensively on the poet David Jones, including the monograph, Making the Past Present: David Jones, the Middle Ages, and Modernism (CUA Press, 2007). His most recent publication is Pan: the Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion, 2021), exploring representations of the god in a variety of cultural forms through the centuries.

Alexander Linklater

"Antagonist: the life behind Hugh MacDiarmid"

In 1968, with his reputation in Scotland bordering on the mythological, Hugh MacDiarmid was asked whether knowledge of his life might help critics to explain his work. In characteristically lofty style, he dismissed the “biographical approach” as a distraction. After all, he asked, “Where are they going to get the biographical facts from?” Where indeed? Were his own accounts of himself not reliable sources? There would need to be, he continued, an “enormous process of correction” to distinguish “sham facts” from real ones. It was in 1922, the inaugural modernist year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, that he first came to write under the name “MacDiarmid”. Thereafter, the relationship between pseudonym and biographical author would become one of the strangest in modern literature, rivalled for peculiarity only by the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa. When MacDiarmid writes about himself as “I” or “me”, to whom is he referring? And what does the actual life of Christopher Murray Grieve reveal about the persona he created, the poetry he wrote, and the Scottish idea he revolutionised?

Alexander Linklater is a journalist and editor: formerly literary editor of the Glasgow Herald, arts editor at the London Evening Standard, deputy editor of Prospect magazine, Guardian columnist and books editor at the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, Stockholm. He has made literary programmes for BBC4, presented the Scottish Book of the Year awards for STV and founded the BBC National Short Story Award.

His work on MacDiarmid began in the early 1990s as a graduate student at the Department of Scottish Literature in Glasgow and his biography of Christopher Murray Grieve is forthcoming from HaperCollins in 2026.

Callum Irvine - University of St Andrews

"Kenning what he meant: MacDiarmid afore he deed"

In this centenary year of Grieve’s Annals of the Five Senses, and the forthcoming MacDiarmidian centenaries, there will be a flurry of reflections on the career and double lives of Grieve/MacDiarmid: the exemplary anti-syzygyian man. As controversial as he is central to the enterprise of Scottish literature, studies of MacDiarmid are persistent and show no signs of slowing down, with forthcoming scholarly volumes and celebrations like this conference. Perhaps it’s antithetical to MacDiarmid’s project to suggest that there was method in his madness or at least some sense of well-wrought symmetry, and yet that’s what this paper will examine. Putting ourselves in the speaker’s position in one of MacDiarmid’s first Scots lyric experiments, ‘The Watergaw’, ‘mebbe at last [we can] ken’ the meaning behind MacDiarmid’s ‘last wild look [he] gied / Afore [he] deed’. Applying some facets of my research in Late Style to MacDiarmid, I would like to examine the connections between Grieve/MacDiarmid’s beginnings and endings, particularly the moments where a late MacDiarmid’s visions and revisions cast a wild look back over his own life and career, adding the capturing of both life and death in a single gaze to his many dualities.

Callum Robert Forbes Irvine is a poet and academic, currently undertaking research on Late Style in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Twitter: @CRFIrvine.

Giacomo Bianchino - City University of New York

"Hugh MacDiarmid and the Realism Beneath the Modernist Long Poem"

MacDiarmid’s suggestion that modernist “epic” was responding to the incapacity of lyric to achieve a “robustness of thought” and trying to accommodate “the modern world in all its possibilities” recalls Lukacs’ theory of literature developing to contain new “contents” in social life.  We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find MacDiarmid elsewhere defining his work as “socialist realist.”    What might confuse a contemporary critic is how the modernist long poem could be considered realist, and how MacDiarmid could treat an Ezra Pound as a proponent of this poetics.

This paper draws on Riach’s theory of the long poem’s historical ontology and Cairns Craig’s Humean, associationist conception of the “lyrical epic” to determine the “realism” of MacDiarmid’s own epic verse. 

 It takes up, specifically, the singular approach of the unfinished project “Mature Art” to the extension of the poem beyond the lyric. By making the realism of this form explicit, the paper argues, “Mature Art” forces a re-reading of the modernist long poem’s political stakes against the avowed positions of its practitioners. This also allows a reevaluation of the “failures” of long poems in terms of their rejection of a realist ontology.

 

1 Hugh MacDiarmid. “The Return of the Long Poem” in Ezra Pound: Perspectives. Ed. N Stock. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965, pp. 91-93; Gyorgy Lukacs.

The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Trans. J. Mander and N. Mander, London: Merlin Press, 1963, p. 98

2 Alan Riach. Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991, PhD Thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh, 2019, pp.12-13

3 Alan Riach, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry, pp. 14-23; Cairns Craig. From the Phantasmal Chaos. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp 293-298

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Giacomo Bianchino is a Ph.D Candidate in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He teaches English at Hunter College and Philosophy at New York University. He has published in a number of academic journals and edited volumes, and has written journalistic work for Jacobin, The Conversation and others.

He is also a labour organizer for the Professional Staff Congress.

Arianna Introna - University of Stirling

"Hugh MacDiarmid’s Antisyzygy: Scottish Eccentricity and 'the Norm'"

Scotland’s possibility to survive as a nation and its function in the world are for C. M. Grieve inseparable from the eccentricity that defines the Scottish national spirit and is expressed by the national genius. Commitment to this coming together of ideas entertained experimentally and at absolute variance with each other, which Grieve terms ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ following Gregory Smith, is what animates his critique of ‘the sense of what is ‘“sound and normal”’ (1984, p.47) in Scottish culture. And yet, in seeking to theorise the changing configuration of ‘the general concept of the typical Scot’ (1972, p.284) and how Scotland ‘might save Europe’ as a smaller country within the framework of a Spenglerian evolutionary philosophy (1927, p.46), Grieve re-inscribes normality at the core of his theories of Scottish eccentricity. Drawing on Trigant Burrow’s thinking around the establishment and function of ‘the norm’, which MacDiarmid quotes at length in Aesthetics in Scotland, my paper will trace MacDiarmid’s own antisyzygy as the zig zag movement that connects his endorsement of eccentricity against ‘the norm’ of cultural, political and national development, and the crafting of a ‘nationed’ norm that can (re-)orient the Scottish national spirit in the service of a Scottish Renaissance.

Arianna Introna received her MLitt and PhD in Scottish Literature from the University of Stirling and is now Associate Lecturer with the Open University. Their research interests span Scottish literature, disability studies, Marxist autonomist theory and critical theory. Her first monograph is Autonomist Narratives of Disability in Modern Scottish Writing: Crip Enchantments (2022).

Antoine Rumelhart - Université Lumière Lyon 2

"'A tiny screw loose in the Clever Clock': Hugh MacDiarmid through the pen of Willa Muir"

When Edwin Muir published Scott and Scotland in 1936, MacDiarmid’s reaction was a violent one. Branding Muir a traitor to the Scottish Renaissance for questioning the validity of writing poetry in the Scots language, he started a brutal feud that went on for years and sometimes resorted to base personal attacks that affected not only Edwin, but also his wife Willa, such as publishing a hurtful caricature of the couple in his magazine The Voice of Scotland in 1938. This was the end of a decade’s friendship, born in Montrose in 1924, and built not only on the exchange of literary opinions, which were already divergent at the time, but also on the exchange of favours, with Edwin and Willa proving particularly helpful to MacDiarmid in the aftermath of his regular drunken antics, whether in Montrose or later at the Muir’s London home. A consistent self-writer, Willa kept many traces of her and her husband’s relationship with the man they called Christopher Grieve, and this reading of Willa Muir’s mostly unpublished material, letters, and journals – especially the short story Clock-a-doodle-doo (1934) – establishes an assessment of Grieve/MacDiarmid’s personality through the eyes of “one of the best Scots novelists of her time”.

Antoine Rumelhart is a PhD student in English studies at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, and a member of the Triangle laboratory. The working title of his thesis is “And yet, and yet, I want to be acknowledged”: création et engagement chez Willa Muir (1890-1970), écrivaine et traductrice moderniste. His work engages with questions of authorship, translation, politics, and gender.

He can be contacted at antoine.rumelhart1@univ-lyon2.fr.

Fiona Paterson- University of Glasgow

"The Never-Yet-Explored: Early Enquiries into Gendered Language in MacDiarmid’s Prose"

Paul Malgrati - University of Glasgow

"'Antisyzygy': Escaping MacDiarmid’s Impasse"

This paper provides a new critique of the concept of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ developed by Gregory Smith in 1919 and deployed poetically by Hugh MacDiarmid in both A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) and To Cirumjack Cencrastus (1930). I begin by sketching the genealogy of Smith’s concept, harking back to Matthew Arnold’s approach to the ‘Celtic/Saxon’ dichotomy in English literature and, further still, to the Hegelian dialectic and its rehabilitation of conflictual essences. I argue that this Hegelian root is the reason for the impasse of ‘Antisyzygy’ whose dual vision of Scottish identity, encompassing both Celtic independence and Saxon subservience, prevents Scotland from ever becoming something else than it already is. In other words, Smith’s Caledonia is irremediably British (Saxon and Celtic) and its essentialist narrative is a vehicle for British unity. Certainly, this was the problem faced by MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man who, by using the ‘Antisyzygy’ to justify Scotland’s eternity, ended up ‘impaled’ on its own thistle, incapable of breaking free from its all-powerful binary. In the last part of the presentation, I attempt to chart an escape route from MacDiarmid’s impasse. This is achieved with reference to the contemporary French philosopher, Quentin Meillassoux, and his critique of Hegel’s dialectic. Indeed, against Hegel, and away from eternalist fantasies, it is by rehabilitating the principle of non-contradiction (ie the possibility for an entity to become something else) that a radically different path might be cleared for Scottish literary politics.

Paul Malgrati is an award-winning Franco-Scottish poet and scholar, currently based in Switzerland, and affiliated to the University of Glasgow. His monograph, Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics (1914-2014) is forthcoming with EUP in March 2023.

Scott Lyall - Edinburgh Napier University

"'The Omnific Word': Hugh MacDiarmid’s Religious Poetry"

Scott Lyall is Associate Professor of Modern and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. His main research interests are in the areas of twentieth-century literature and Modernism, especially in Scotland, and much of his work concerns the interwar revival in Scottish literature known as the Scottish literary renaissance, on which he has published widely and been interviewed on TV and radio. He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place (published by Edinburgh University Press), co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, and editor of The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Community in Modern Scottish Literature.

Dr Lyall was project leader of the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded The Scottish Revival Network (2021-23) and is currently co-editor of Scottish Literary Review. 

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Filmpoem

Filmpoem is an artists’ moving image project founded by Alastair Cook. We deliver cultural projects and promote the work of poets, filmmakers and composers. Filmpoem has been commissioned by cultural organisations such as Southbank, Poetry International, Poetry Society, Scottish Poetry Library, Alchemy, Antwerpen Boekenstad, Poëziecentrum and Haus für Poesie.

 

“The combination of film and poetry is an attractive one. For the poet, perhaps a hope that the filmmaker will bring something to the poem: a new audience, a visual attraction, the laying of way markers; for the filmmaker a fixed parameter to respond to, the power of text sparking the imagination with visual connections and metaphor.” – Alastair Cook, Anon 7

 

Filmpoem’s current core team comprises editor and director Alastair Cook, electro-acoustic composer Luca Nasciuti and cinematographer James William Norton. We are based in the United Kingdom of Words, travel well and are open to commission. The full archive of Alastair's poetry-film is held by the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Paul Barnaby - University of Edinburgh

"From Brownsbank to the West End: MacDiarmid’s Translation of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera"

In 1963, West End producer Oscar Lewenstein commissioned Hugh MacDiarmid to prepare a new translation of the Brecht/Weil Threepenny Opera. Neither the Brecht Estate nor Kurt Weil’s widow Lotte Lenya were satisfied with existing English versions. Lewenstein, who had met MacDiarmid while managing Glasgow Unity Theatre (1946-50), successfully proposed MacDiarmid as the ideal translator. This paper will draw on correspondence in Edinburgh University Library’s C. M. Grieve Archive to track the chequered history of the translation which was finally staged by Tony Richardson in 1972. MacDiarmid submitted a complete translation of the dialogue as early as 1964 but struggled to produce versions of Brecht’s songs that fitted Weil’s music. He enlisted the aid of composer Ronald Stevenson, daughter-in-law Deirdre Grieve, and fellow poet Norman MacCaig (whose own unpublished translation of The Threepenny Opera is held by Edinburgh University Library). In the end, however, MacDiarmid’s lyrics were substantially rewritten by songwriter Keith Hack. The paper will also examine MacDiarmid’s frustration at being required to work in English rather than Scots, which he felt was better suited to expressing ‘ridicule, satire, rancour, and other Brechtian qualities’. Finally, it will chart further unrealized ambitions for his Brecht translation, including a collaboration with Alexander Scott on The Bawbee Beggars, a projected conflation of Brecht’s libretto and Burns’s The Jolly Beggars.

Paul Barnaby is Modern Literary Collections Curator at Edinburgh University Library. He previously worked as Editor of the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT) at the National Library of Scotland and as Research Fellow for the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe project at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. He has published essays and given conference papers on French translations of Sir Walter Scott, on the international reception and translation of Scottish literature, on theatrical and juvenile adaptations of Scottish writing, and (drawing on his doctoral research) on the Italian reception of French Naturalism.

Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir - University of Iceland

"Hugh MacDiarmid in Iceland: Media Coverage and Translation"

The Scottish Literary Renaissance and the writer at its forefront drew some attention in the Icelandic media, and several articles can be found in the Icelandic newspaper database that discuss Hugh MacDiarmid / Christopher Murray Grieve, from the 1920s and into the 1990s. This paper discusses how MacDiarmid and his literary (as well as political) work was presented and discussed in the Icelandic media during this period. In addition, a couple of short Icelandic translations of MacDiarmid’s poetry are scrutinised, alongside a brief discussion of the presenter’s attempts at translating MacDiarmid’s lyric poetry from Scots into Icelandic.

Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Iceland and holds a Ph.D. in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow. Her main research interests are in historical fiction and contemporary Scottish literature and she has published on Scottish writing, historical novels and fictional representations of the Tudors and Stuarts in literature and film. Her current research is focused on women’s historical fiction alongside a funded research project on the Arctic in Scottish literature.

John Corbett - BNU-HKBU United International College

In his later poetry, Hugh MacDiarmid characterised himself as a Gael who was 'as much at home/in Chinese or Indian thought/As in Greek.' Despite numerous references to China and Chinese thought, the impact of China on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid has attracted comparatively little scholarly attention. This paper reviews MacDiarmid's engagements with China, from the overt racism in passages of his earlier work, to his later, sympathetic engagement with classical and modern Chinese philosophy, culture and politics. MacDiarmid’s later representations of China are informed largely by his reading, some of which is recycled practically verbatim in the poems: he draws indirectly on Chinese philosophers via fragmented references in Western writing, and through the translated work of French sinologues. He engages more directly with the English language writing of several Chinese authors, including a treatise on calligraphy, which affords MacDiarmid with one of his most powerful metaphors in justification of what has been called his 'citational poetics.'

John Corbett is Professor of English and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at BNU-HKBU United International College, in China. He is the author and co-editor of numerous books, chapters and articles on the Scots language, on Scottish literature, and Translation Studies, including Language and Scottish Literature, Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation, The Edinburgh Companion to Scots (with Jane Stuart-Smith and Derrick McClure), and The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry (with Ting Huang). He is one of the General Editors of Brill's SCROLL series on the languages, literatures and cultures of Scotland.

Mail: johnbcorbett2@gmail.com

Daisy Li - Macao Polytechnic University

"From Scots to Mandarin: The Translation and Reception of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry in China"

Drawing partly on paratexts and an interview, this article discusses the translation into Chinese of one of Scotland’s most prominent cultural figures of the past century, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978). The article assesses the translation of a selection of his poems by three Chinese scholars, Wang Zuoliang, Zhang Jian, and Huang Canran. The article highlights the linguistic challenges that MacDiarmid’s poetry in dense literary Scots poses for translators in general, and Chinese translators in particular. Translators also need to address the many specific allusions to Scottish material culture and the poet’s occasional resort to racist caricature. The translation of MacDiarmid’s poetry is inseparable from a growing scholarly recognition in China that the ‘Scottish’ literary tradition is distinct from the ‘British’ one that still dominates Chinese university curricula. The article, therefore, also surveys the reception of MacDiarmid’s poetry in China.

 

 

Keywords: Hugh MacDiarmid; Chinese translation; synthetic Scots; Scottish Literature; reception studies.

Daisy Li Li, PhD in Translation Studies, is currently a professor at Macao Polytechnic University. She has published widely in children’s literature, Translation studies and corpus linguistics. She is also a translator of many books such as Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Practice and The Last Battle. She is now the Principle Investigator of a research project entitled Translation and Scottish Literary Modernism funded by Macao Polytechnic University. Email: hklili333@163.com

Alex L
Callum I
Giacomo B
Arianna I
Antoine R
FPaterson
Paul M
Scott L
Alastair C & James N
Paul B.
Ingibjörb A.
John C.
Li L.
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