Sorley Maclean: "Why Marx and Blake look down with equal admiration..."

SEAMUS HEANEY lauds Gaelic's greatest poet in the inaugural Memorial Lecture

The great Sorley Maclean was accorded something close to the ultimate posthumous tribute last week, when he was placed in the first rank of world poets by the Nobel Prizewinner, Seumas Heaney.

Heaney had been invited to give the inaugural Memorial Lecture for Sorley Maclean, set up by the Sorley Maclean Trust and the Saltire Society. The focal point of the lecture, at the Edinburgh Books Festival, was what Heaney described as Sorley's "signature poem" - Hallaig.

The Irish literary giant said that Sorley Maclean had "stuck to his guns in all sorts of ways". He added: "Not least in his determination to let his poetry stand as the pure thing in Gaelic and not to attempt anything in his translations other than a faithful account of the meaning in an almost word-for-word way..."

In a great description of Sorley's pre-eminent commitment to Gaelic and the Highlands - "politically, linguistically and artistically" - Heaney said: "He was prepared to go a certain distance towards the horizon but not prepared to leave the landscapes and seascapes where the navigation markers of his spirit were located."

Heaney opened with what proved to be a largely unnecessary apology. "I have no inwardness with Sorley Maclean's first language. What I know of it comes through the scrambling device of Irish and my Irish was never any more than schoolboy's.

"But even so, I'm still responsive to the sounds of it and know the cadence of its living speech... Certainly when I heard Sorley Maclean read his work, it was impossible to miss the intensity of the art or the utterance. The aural and emotional force were indistinguishable."

Heaney recalled what he wrote 15 years ago about the first time he heard Sorley Maclean speaking his own poems in Gaelic, in Dublin's Abbey Theatre. "Again, this had the force of revelation: the mesmeric, heightened tone; the weathered voice coming in close from a far place; the surrender to the otherness of the poem; above all a sense of bardic dignity (and calling) that was without self-parade and was instead the effect of a proud self-abnegation, as much a submission to heritage as a laying claim to it."

On that occasion, Heaney recalled, he read Sorley's own translation of Hallaig - "a living masterpiece that comes across richly and strangely in English although it can only breathe its deepest cultural and musical breaths in Gaelic". He was "haunted by it from that moment" and eventually wrote his own translation.

Heaney spoke of Sorley's "highly cultivated genealogical awareness" and its influence on his outlook. It "linked Maclean to a history of loss, so that poetry and politics were grounded in a common need to redress a balance gone wrong in the world. His love of pibroch, his socialism and the high lamenting register of his own voice and stanzas are all the expression of a unified sensibility; they are all marks of a quality of mind called in the Irish language duchas".

He continued: "So a poem like Hallaig arises out of this duchas, out of a sense of place that is also a sense of displacement; out of a double sensation of presence and absence... If he shut his eyes, he immediately entered the glen of his duchas; but the modern world asked him to open his eyes and see his way to individual choice and decision. It put pressure on his intelligence and his moral being, and tuned the lyre to a pitch 'past pitch of stress'."

Heaney said: "Whatever the reasons were that kept Maclean from going to Spain and joining the anti-fascist cause, the intensity of the mental turmoil that ensued and the mixture of guilt and ardour that characterised his love would prove immensely productive for Scots Gaelic poetry."

Of the Poems to Eimhir - from this period and published first in 1943 - Heaney said: "They are at once the poems of a puritan conscience and a passionate nature; they enter the arena of their times bare-handed, and there is something very moving, something akin to naivety in their readiness to face the historical odds head on. Marx and William Blake look down with equal admiration."

Analysing Hallaig and its symbolism, Heaney noted: "Hallaig is an actual place, a set of deserted homesteads, a ghost clachan north of Beinn na Lice on the Island of Raasay where the poet was born and spent his earliest years.

"Maclean's poem begins with an image of screening and blotting out, the familiar sad sight of a boarded-up window, so common in Ireland and Scotland and so suggestive of emigration, eviction, famine, clearance, the injustice not only of the skies but of the system. But miraculously by the third line, the screen is removed and the sorrowful recognitions are transposed into a paradisal key."

Heaney concluded by reading his own translation into English of Hallaig - written quickly a few years ago, he said, in advance of a previous visit to Scotland. "It does not purport to equal, never mind replace the almost scriptural English that Sorley set down in place of his Gaelic poem, but it tries to do what Yeats once said rhythm in poetry was supposed to do: it simply tries to prolong the moment of contemplation."

To say that Seumas Heaney's inaugural Sorley Maclean Memorial Lecture was well-received would be a modest understatement.