Culture is not museums, books and cell service. It is that system of understandings and practices which supplies ordinary people with tools with which to live in an imperfect, often heartbreaking, world that never stops challenging us. In a society whose traditional culture has collapsed, as most have today under the pressure of “nothing matters but profit” economies, each individual must figure out their own individual way of understanding and living in the world, and that is no easy task.
I’m not claiming this because “The
Backward Look” nostaligia or because “Ireland, Boys, Hurrah!” Most impartial observers at the time noted the fact. (Those who were afraid that the dark oppressed masses would rise up to cut their throats or decrease their profits…Not so much. They saw barbarians.)
“I have wandered amongst the peasantry of many countries,” folk-tale
collector J.F. Campbell wrote in 1860, “and…There are few peasants I think so
highly of, none that I like so well. Scotch Highlanders have many faults, but
they have the bearing of Nature’s own gentlemen--the delicate natural tact that
discovers, and the good taste that avoids, all that would hurt or offend a
guest. The poorest is ever the readiest to share the best he has with a
stranger…I have never found a boor or a churl in a Highland bothy.” (I’m
quoting from his introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands.”) The same was true of traditional Ireland.
(Anna Nic a' Luain, Na Cruacha Gorma)
Many of these people were also immensely learned in traditional lore and literature, and took everyday pleasure and delight in language. As poet Maire Mac an tSaoi said; “When a Dingle Peninsula man had time to reflect on what he was about to say, what came out was poetry.” She is not talking about fancy discussions of art and philosophy, but everyday conversation about everyday things. A ceili was originally not manufactured entertainment, but a nightly gathering of neighbors to tell stories, sing songs, discuss history and important current matters.
Mary Macdonald of Garryheillie in South Uist in the Highlands (1897-1977) left school at age fourteen and spent her working life as a maid, then as a crofter’s wife. She knew more than two hundred songs, passed down to her by her mother and other women; many of the songs very old and rare...and great That is not all: “Even if she had never sung a song, Kate MacDonald would have been memorable--for her humanity, her dignity, her sparkle, her ready wit and her infectious sense of fun,” folk-tale collector Donald Archie MacDonald wrote. She was only one of hundreds in the Highlands and still Irish-speaking parts of Ireland in the early twentieth centuries.
George Campbell Hay (1915-1984) was brought up in Tarbert, a small town
in the far southwestern Highlands. His father, a minister, died when he was
four, so his mother returned to her family’s native area, (Tarbert) where
George soon discovered the submerged Gaelic language culture of the community.
He also learned the language from fisherman Calum Johnson: “And in front
of Dougie Leitch’s shed there used to be a log where they sat down and talked,
and I don’t remember when I first met Calum, but he used to go round and sit on
the log and talk, you know, and I was small and I sat down beside him and
talked to him, and I got to know him that way; and his boat was out there, and
I said, “Oh, I’ll go fishing” to him , so I went fishing with Calum.”
In 1881, the census noted about 70% of the population of the town as Gaelic-speaking, but by 1921, it was down to 26%, and was only used by older people in situations like “on the log.” Similarly to Douglas Hyde in late nineteenth-century north Roscommon, George Campbell Hay got to know the last representatives of an old world. He absorbed their implicit cultural teaching, and, adding to it a deep self-taught knowledge of Irish and Scottish Gaelic literatures, he went on to become one of the three great twentieth-century Gaelic poets -- writers of world stature. (I will admit that much of the world, and particularly the U.K., has not caught up with the fact yet.) (The other two are Sorley MacLean and Aonghas MacNeacail, both of Skye.)
I’m hoping, after posting The Civilization of Cats, (incoherent and poorly-argued as it is) that I don’t have to go too far explaining why the following poem is not a sentimental exercise in nostalgia: “To My Gran.” The poem takes its place in a large body of Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh poetry in praise of a person (or people, in this case). These poems don’t exist because the people who made them were simpering flatterers. Traditional Irish/Gaelic/Welsh culture never went in much for abstractions. Values, ideas and life paradigms were always presented as embodied in person, in story. There are no essays on how to rule a kingdom. Instead, there is the Deirdre story, and others. There are no philosophical treatises on how to live; instead, there are poems like the following, where “The Good” is embodied in a specific person’s doings.
Tha dithisd
bhan a dh’altrum mi,
Mnài ‘chuir
maise air a’ bheatha-s!
Ged bu sean
iad, le’n cuid gnìomh;
Ealasaid
maraon as Anna,
Bha iad
farsuing, caomh, neochrìon.
Thug iad
saoghal mòr ri fialachd.
Is thug aon
bhliadhna iad do’n chill.
It is in the
graveyard in Tarbert
that two
women who raised me lie;
two women
who made life beautiful,
with their
deeds, though they were old.
Ealasaid and
Anna together;
they were hospitable,
gentle and gracious.
They lived a
long time giving,
And one year
took them both to the grave.
Uaisle
ghiùlain, cainnt ba chiùne,
Suairceas,
sùnnd is crídhe mor,
Có a
shaoileadh mnathan aosda
A bhith ‘nan
aobhar ionghnaidh leò?
Mar sin bha
Ealasaid is Anna,
Le sgairt a
fhreadradh do’n aois òig:
Bha sean
fharsuingeachd nan Gàidheal
A rìsd ‘nan
gnàths a’ tighinn beò.
Nobility of
bearing, gentle speech,
affable,
cheery and great-hearted;
who would
think that would be a cause
of wonder in
old women?
That is how
Ealasaid and Anna were,
with vigour
as though they were young.
They had the
old Gaelic breadth of spirit,
come alive
again in the here and now.
An sean
saoghal còir bha ‘nochdadh
Riamh
tromhaibh ann gach ceum.
Feumaidh
sinn a’ ràdh, mo thruaighe.
Gu’m
“b’aisling uair éiginn e.”
Is maith a
bhiodh sin dheth, a dithisd,
Na’fàgadh
sibh mar ghibht ‘nur déidh,
S na’m
faigheadh daoine an tsaoghail ghoirt seo
Leth nan
sochair bh’annaibh fhén.
You called
into being the old decent world
In everything
you did,
but I must
admit to my sorrow,
that this
was a thing that was, and now has gone.
We would be
better for it, you two,
if you had
left a gift behind you,
and the
people in this bitter world today
had half the
virtues that you two did,
Ealasaid,
you never bent your head or mind
To any
worthless soulless thing.
Anna, who
was generous and good-natured,
never closed
her hand to others, or her door.
I see you
gently smiling, at the head of the table,
sharing with
everyone.
If you are
still here in the old place,
you are a
kindly and welcoming spirit.
(I translate from O na Ceithir Airdean, 1952, Oliver and Boyd.)
While MacLean was inspired by the incredibly
intense and powerful Gaelic songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries,
and MacNeacail by the contemporary, Hays was inspired by the older bardic
poetry:
“For models of high artistic skill,
one inevitably turns to the work of the bardic schools,” he wrote. “Dan
Direach metres can be adapted by substituting a system of stress for the
syllabic system, and by disregarding the rules about classes of consonants.”
(It is necessary to add that he used caoineadh metre a good bit in his last
poems.)
His work has been collected in The
Collected Poems and Songs of George Campbell Hay, edited by Michael Byrne,
Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Thug mi an oidhche caithriseach (sleepless)
Gu
camhanachd is fàire (dawn:
sun on horizon)
A’ cumadh
air an rannaghail, (keeping:
poetry)
S’ an
aicill teachd ‘sa ga tàthadh (binding
together)
Gun chlos on
Cheolràidh fhiadhaich (respite:
feverish Muses)
‘s an norran
gnàthach cian uam, (sleep)
Mar
chomhachag no iasgair, (owl)
No ialtaig
nan sgàile. (bat:
shadows)
Rathlin was essentially a Scottish Gaelic dialect – in the sixteenth century, everyone there was massacred by the English – but the Glens are a very interesting transitional area, part of a sixteenth century MacDonald lordship that included parts of the Highlands and of Ireland.
The southwest Highlands is a distinctive linguistic area within the Highlands as a whole, and in its vocabulary, it often agrees with (east) Ulster against the rest of the Highlands. For details, Seumas Grannd's The Gaelic of Islay: A Comparative Study, Department of Celtic, Aberdeen, 2000) provides discussion, and almost a hundred maps that show linguistic features and vocabulary for many points in the west Highlands south of Ardnamurchan, also giving comparative information for other areas and Ireland. It is great!
Antrim, Down, and then Derry/Tyrone (more or less), on the one hand, and Kintyre, Arran, and Islay/Jura, on the other, thus form the unit of transition between dialects in Ireland ("Irish"), and the Highlands of Scotland ("Scottish Gaelic"). One language, be it that society and culture have diverged since the 16th century.
Excuse me, I’m going to get a drink. I suspect I’ll be gone a while.
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