The greatest writer in any 20th century Celtic language was undoubtedly Somhairle Mac Gill-Eain (Sorley MacLean) from the island of Ratharsair (Raasay), near Skye.
When Irishman Sean O Riada encountered Irish traditional music, it was despised and dying; something only a few old people in remote areas played; something in the background in a crowded pub. His work was critically important in re-establishing it as a respected music appreciated in its own right.
Somhairle Mac Gill-Eain was a primarilly a poet, though he also published very important articles on Gaelic literature that shifted general critical perspectives, refocusing attention on the incredible songs of the 16th - 18th centuries. As Headmaster at Plockton Secondary School opposite Skye, he spent years working to establish Gaelic as a modern subject at the secondary school level in the Highlands. It had, of course, no place yet as a spoken language, and was generally despised.
Scottish Gaelic poetry had become deeply sentimental and light-weight by 1900, influenced probably by the fact that a large part of the reading and listening public for poetry (songs) were people who'd left the Highlands as young men and women and gone to work in Glasgow and other Lowland cities. They rarely were able to return to the places in which they'd grown up. In place of the clear-eyed passion and intellect of earlier poetry and song, the songs of exile were meant to support a yearning for the past that could not, by definition, be fulfilled. Since the ascendant pervasive British culture which most of these people accepted, saw no value in Gaelic or its culture, this yearning was also, by its nature, a thing not to be taken that seriously by its audience--a matter Saturday nights only.
The book Dain do Eimhear, published in 1943, shattered all this. Theses love poems to an un-named Irish woman, drew both from the older poetry and from international modernist poetry, and Somhairle Mac Gill Eain single-handedly renewed Scottish Gaelic literature. He continued to produce incredible poetry that brought the passion and intellect of the old poetry into connection with the contemporary world. One of the great writers.
Look at the Sorley MacLean Trust site, for more information. It is not a large site, but it is all there is.
The link below will take you eventually to a video in which Mac Gill Eain speaks briefly and movingly about Gaelic song and poetry. What happens on this computer is that an icon and the words "influence_song" appear on the bottom left of the screen. Does not look promising, but let it load, then click on it.
http://www.sorleymaclean.org/video/influence_song.wmv
Abhainn Àrois (ie. Abhainn in Irish)
Cha chuimhne leam do bhriathran, Ni chuimhin liom do bhriathran
eadhon nì a thubhairt thu, fiu amhain ni a duirt tu,
ach Abhainn Àrois an àileadh iadhshlait ach Abhainn Arois agus boladh feithleann
is àileadh roid air Suidhisnis. a's boladh roid ar Suidhisnis
eadhon nì a thubhairt thu, fiu amhain ni a duirt tu,
ach Abhainn Àrois an àileadh iadhshlait ach Abhainn Arois agus boladh feithleann
is àileadh roid air Suidhisnis. a's boladh roid ar Suidhisnis
(I don't remember your words, even any one thing you said; but Aros River and the scent of honeysuckle; Suidhisnis and the scent of bog myrtle.)
(This is his own translation. I include it here because neither I nor any one else could better it. Taken from Reothairt is Contraigh; Taghadh de Dhain 1932-197, Canongate, 1977, with all respect.
I walked with my reason
I followed only a way
that was small, mean, low, dry, lukewarm,
and how then should I meet
the thunderbolt of love?
But if I had the choice again
and stood on that headland,
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart.
Below is a link to a short interview with the greatest living Scottish Gaelic poet, Aonghas MacNeacail, also from Skye.
Below that is a documentary on the other great Scottish Gaelic poet of the 20th century, George Campbell Hay from Kintyre in the far southwest. I haven't watched it, so I don't know if it is good. There is nothing else about him on YouTube.
(I watched some of it. It is a dramatized acted-out version of parts of his life, with some poems recited, including subtitles.)
Great poets arise out of a strong living tradition that grapples with the world of which it is part. The 20th century Irish tradition was very feeble, comparatively-speaking. O Direain and O Riordain beside Mac Gill-Eain and Campbell Hay? It is a sad thing.
Wales also had many great poets in the 20th century too, of whom Waldo Williams was the greatest. The Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish traditions had all, by the 1950s, say, been so deeply influenced by contemporary English poetry, that when the great ones were gone, very little of interest was left.
If you click on the link below, you will be whisked away to You Toob, to the short and very interesting interview with him on the nature of Irish music.
I walked with my reason
out beside the sea.
we were together but it was
keeping a little distance from me.
Then it turned saying:
is it true you heard
that your beautiful white love
is getting married early on Monday?
I checked the heart that was rising
in my torn swift breast
and I said: most likely;
why should I lie about it?
How should I think that I would grab
the radiant golden star,
that I would catch it and put it
prudently in my pocket?
I did not take a cross’s death
in the hard extremity of Spain
and how should I then expect
the one new prize of fate?
we were together but it was
keeping a little distance from me.
Then it turned saying:
is it true you heard
that your beautiful white love
is getting married early on Monday?
I checked the heart that was rising
in my torn swift breast
and I said: most likely;
why should I lie about it?
How should I think that I would grab
the radiant golden star,
that I would catch it and put it
prudently in my pocket?
I did not take a cross’s death
in the hard extremity of Spain
and how should I then expect
the one new prize of fate?
I followed only a way
that was small, mean, low, dry, lukewarm,
and how then should I meet
the thunderbolt of love?
But if I had the choice again
and stood on that headland,
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart.
Below is a link to a short interview with the greatest living Scottish Gaelic poet, Aonghas MacNeacail, also from Skye.
Below that is a documentary on the other great Scottish Gaelic poet of the 20th century, George Campbell Hay from Kintyre in the far southwest. I haven't watched it, so I don't know if it is good. There is nothing else about him on YouTube.
(I watched some of it. It is a dramatized acted-out version of parts of his life, with some poems recited, including subtitles.)
Great poets arise out of a strong living tradition that grapples with the world of which it is part. The 20th century Irish tradition was very feeble, comparatively-speaking. O Direain and O Riordain beside Mac Gill-Eain and Campbell Hay? It is a sad thing.
Wales also had many great poets in the 20th century too, of whom Waldo Williams was the greatest. The Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish traditions had all, by the 1950s, say, been so deeply influenced by contemporary English poetry, that when the great ones were gone, very little of interest was left.
O Riada
If you click on the link below, you will be whisked away to You Toob, to the short and very interesting interview with him on the nature of Irish music.
Sean O Riada (1931 - 1971) started out as a classical musician also interested in traditional music. In 1959, his music for the film Mise Eire (I am Ireland) broke new ground in its use of sean nos and other tunes arranged in a way that brought out their intrinsic nature. Irish song in English had become vapidly schmaltzy and sentimental, and was beginning to influence the performance of sean nos songs in Irish, at least in the cities. The public face of Irish instrumental music was the ceili band, a 1920s creation. As O Riada described it,"One would have thought that, after a certain time, the ceili bands would have managed to work out a kind of compromise between the solo traditional idea and group activity. But instead....the ceili band leaders took the easy and wrong way out, tending more and more to imitate swing or jazz bands....First they added piano and drums, then double-bass, then....saxophones, guitars and banjos. The most important principles of traditional music--the whole idea of variation, the whole idea of the personal utterance--are abandoned. Instead, everyone takes hold of the tune and belts away at it without stopping." (Our Musical Heritage, 1982, pp.73-4.)
O Riada brought together some traditional musicians (including Paddy Maloney) in the group Ceolteoiri Chualann, and looked to develop a form of group playing that respected the nature of the music. That group later developed into the Chieftains, whose first three recordings (pre-schmaltz) moved O Riada's ideas into a popular context in the days of the Folk Revival that spread appreciation for traditional music from the U.S. to England to Ireland. The Bothy Band, and to a lesser extent, Planxty and De Danaan, adopted O Riada's practice in the mid-1970s, and their influence more or less made Irish traditional music what it is today.
Did O Riada save Irish traditional music? Maybe not alone, but if it hadn't been for him, the music would probably be an obscure hobby in Ireland today. If many current traditional players have once more chosen speed and technical prowess over everything else, and lost sight of the nature of the music, it's not his fault.
O Riada did write great orchestral and choral music, as well, the best of it, maybe, the Irish-inspired ones. He spent the last years of his life in what sort of remained of the west Cork Gaeltacht, but died very young.
An RTE program about O Riada. I remember it as condescending, but perhaps it has improved with age.
Okay....Two videos of O Riada's tune composed for Peadar O Doirnin's (18th century poet) song Mna na hEireann (The Women of Ireland). The video to the right includes the original recording, but the images are truly embarrassing. The second video has pretty pictures, but the recording is not as good as the first, at all, and the singer doesn't know Irish very well. My suggestion? Sound from the first video while you watch the second.
Iarla O Lionaird from Cuil Ao, then a member of a local choir begun under O Riada's direction, sings Aislinn Gheal, a traditional song. He sings in a style very influenced by the old Iar-Mhusgrai/Uibh Rathach style that was the subject of a previous post (An Old Style).
Back to Somhairle MacGillEain.
Below is one of the few online recordings of him reading, and the only one of him reading his translation of the poem Hallaig. It concerns what it concerns, but you should know that parts of the island--like so many places in the Highlands--were cleared of people by the landlord in the 19th century. There was also felling of woods. The poem ends at minute 5:04.
The film accompanies music intended to complement the poem. The music is by Martyn Bennet, a great piper (and Gaelic-speaker) who died very very young. (Scotland has one of the highest cancer rates in the world.) Whether this music fits the poem is a question for another time.
