Sangs tae Eimhir

by J. Derrick McClure (Translator), Sorley Maclean

This is an unusual book. Derrick McClure, with his usual robust and accomplished style provides Scots versions of Sorley MacLean's Dàin do Eimhir. The book will be a source of delight to readers and speakers of the Scots and Gaelic languages worldwide, wherein they can exclusively view Scots and Gaelic, the two languages of the country, side by side in a single volume. It is a must for all public and private bookshelves.

185 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 14, 2013

About the author

J. Derrick McClure, M.A. (Glasgow), M.Litt. (Edinburgh), is a Senior Lecturer (now part-time) in the Department of English, University of Aberdeen. Publications include Why Scots Matters (1988, revised 1997), Scots and its Literature (1995), Language, Poetry and Nationhood (2000),Doric: the Dialect of North-East Scotland in the Varieties of English Around the World series (2002), the chapter English in Scotland in the Cambridge History of the English Language (Vol. 5), and over eighty articles on Scottish linguistic and literary topics in various journals, festschrifts and conference proceedings volumes.

He is Chairman of the Forum for Research in the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, and member of the Scottish Parliamentary Cross-Party Group on the Scots Language, the Language Committee and the International Committee of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, the Scottish Dictionaries Council and the steering committee of the National Library of Scotland's Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT); he is also Editor of the annual journal Scottish Language.

His recent and current research and publication are principally on Scots as a medium for literary translation and on Middle Scots poetic prosody. Poetic translations include Scotland o Gael an Lawlander (1996), the Scots versions in Meas air Chrannaibh, Fruit on Brainches by Aonghas Pïdraig Caimbeul, Stornoway (2007), and translations from (among others) Cecco Angiolieri, Frïdric Mistral and Alfred Kolleritsch.

Reviews

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sheer delight! I'm enormously impressed with the poetic and translating talent of Mr. McClure -- I picked up this book at the Aros Center at Portree last summer, and am only sad that I didn't tackle it sooner. Translating poetry is challenging at the best of times, but attempting to translate while preserving meaning into a reliable meter with rhyme and internal structure is an extra challenge. I ended up reading portions of the poems in both languages side by side, and I can see why the translator made the choices he did. Having the same text on facing pages really does help, and for English speakers who want to cheat, there's a little Scots-to-English glossary at the end that'll give you common definitions. I had the best time with it when I read the text out loud, though -- even if there was a word I didn't know, context cues gave me most of it, and the uninterrupted rolling meter of the work in Scots was a pure pleasure to roll around in your mind. (You can always go back later and look up the words, and then reread that part.) I hope to be back on Skye next spring, and I'll be looking to see if they have anything similar then!