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Sorley MacLean Quotes

Sorley MacLean was a Scottish Gaelic poet, described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics". Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.He was raised in a strict Presbyterian family on the island of Raasay, immersed in Gaelic culture and literature from birth, but abandoned religion for socialism. In the late 1930s, he befriended many Scottish Renaissance figures, such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Douglas Young. He was wounded three times while serving in the Royal Corps of Signals during the North African Campaign. MacLean published little after the war, due to his perfectionism. In 1956, he became head teacher at Plockton High School, where he advocated for the use of the Gaelic language in formal education.

In his poetry, MacLean juxtaposed traditional Gaelic elements with mainstream European elements, frequently comparing the Highland Clearances with contemporary events, especially the Spanish Civil War. His work was a unique fusion of traditional and modern elements that has been credited with restoring Gaelic tradition to its proper place and reinvigorating and modernizing the Gaelic language. Although his most influential works, Dàin do Eimhir and An Cuilthionn, were published in 1943, MacLean did not become well known until the 1970s, when his works were published in English translation. His later poem Hallaig, published 1954, achieved "cult status":134 outside Gaelic-speaking circles for its supernatural representation of a village depopulated in the Highland Clearances and came to represent all Scottish Gaelic poetry in the English-speaking imagination. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. October 1911 – 24. November 1996
Sorley MacLean photo
Sorley MacLean: 6   quotes 0   likes

Famous Sorley MacLean Quotes

“The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A … language with … no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves.”

Sorley MacLean

Sorley MacLean, June 1943, quoted in Krause, Corinna. "Translating Gaelic Scotland" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beae/ab4c968782c1c0eeb7ee0f9459d009fab52d.pdf and "Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site?" https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41178_en.pdf
Letters and interviews

“My obsession was the preservation of the Gaelic language so that there would be people left in the world who could hear its great songs as they really were. No poetry could be translated, still less could song poetry, and the great language of Gaelic song made me fanatical about the beauty of the Gaelic language and its astonishing ability to indicate shades and positions of emphasis with natural inversions and the use of particles.”

Sorley MacLean

Sorley MacLean, 1982, quoted in Krause, Corinna. Eadar Dà Chànan: Self-Translation, the Bilingual Edition and Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/3453/Krause2007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Letters and interviews

“I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael.”

Sorley MacLean

Sorley MacLean, The Sorley MacLean Trust http://www.sorleymaclean.org/english/from_skye.htm
Letters and interviews

“[T]he Celtic Twilightists achieved the remarkable feat of attributing to Gaelic poetry the very opposite of every quality which it actually has.”

Sorley MacLean

Sorley MacLean, 1939, quoted in Cheape, Hugh (2016). "'A mind restless seeking': Sorley MacLean's historical research and the poet as historian" https://pure.uhi.ac.uk/portal/files/2038514/Cheape_Ainmeil_thar_Cheudan_121_134.pdf
Letters and interviews

“Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig ("Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig")”

Sorley MacLean

First line of Hallaig
Poetry

“The best poetry written in our generation in the British Isles has been in Scottish Gaelic, by Sorley MacLean.”

Sorley MacLean

Douglas Young in Van Eerde, John; Williamson, Robert (1978). "Sorley MacLean: A Bard and Scottish Gaelic".
About him

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