Showing posts with label Alan Raich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Raich. Show all posts

Tuesday 30 June 2020

The Poems of Ossian



Macpherson’s poems of Ossian translations from the Gaelic traditions – had a profound influence on many painters, poets and writers. And his books were read internationally. The poet MacDiarmid lamented for Scotia’s lost music. 

Professor Alan Raich writes in his National articles - Immense, deep ... and surprisingly rich: The legacy of Ossian
By Alan Riach Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University

“The poems of Ossian had a profound influence but the idea that Macpherson perpetrated a “hoax” persists. This is unjust and inadequate. In Fiona Stafford’s words, Macpherson’s Ossian is “pre-eminently a text of the margins – not in the sense that it is peripheral to serious literary study but because it inhabits the margins of contrasting, oppositional cultures.

For Macpherson’s ‘translations’ involved acts of interpretation not only between Gaelic and English, but also between the oral culture of the depressed rural communities of the Scottish Highlands, and the prosperous urban centres of Lowland Britain, where the printed word was increasingly dominant.”

In this context, they are “less the work of an inexpert linguist, or an unscrupulous ‘Scotsman on the make’ than a sophisticated attempt to mediate between two apparently irreconcilable cultures.”

The legacy of Ossian, beyond Macpherson’s actual works, is immense, deep and surprisingly rich. Images of Ossian have perennially been a subject for the visual arts. 
“To remember the great music and to look
At Scotland and the world today is to hear
An Barr Buadh again where there are none to answer
And to feel like Oisin d’ éis na Féine or like Christ.”

And it is not only paintings and drawings. The literary influence is there, too, and was felt early. Wordsworth (1770-1850), in “Glen-Almain; or, the Narrow Glen” (1803), a result of his tour in Scotland, writes:
“In this still place, remote from men,
Sleeps Ossian, in the NARROW GLEN;
In this still place, where murmurs on
But one meek streamlet, only one:”

Ghosts and graves and windy hills and caves are an essential parts of the story - 
as in the short, haunting poem
 Ossian’s Grave” by the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), here given in my own translation:
“In the Highlands of Scotland I love, 
Storm clouds curve down on the dark fields and strands,
With icy grey mist closing in from above –
Here Ossian’s grave still stands.
In dreams my heart races to be there,
To deeply breathe in its native air –
And from this long-forgotten shrine
Take its second life as mine.



** The Gaelic phrases relate to this. In footnotes, MacDiarmid explains “An Barr Buadh” is “somewhat in a state between existence and non-existence.”
And “d’ éis na Féine” is:  “A withered babbling old man, ‘Oisin after the Fianna’ (ie when his love for Ireland made him return to it from Tir-na-nog) in that immortal phrase which has in it more than Virgilian tears.”

In other words, the evocation of Ossian “after the Fianna” –
after his father and family and companions of high youth, health and vigour, have all gone into the past, leaving him old, blind and alone – delivers a permanent image of tragic and irrecoverable loss, encompassing and predating other ancient religions and civilisations.
And there is no fraud or hoax involved in that. Its permanence is also Ossian’s legacy.



Saturday 25 June 2016

CELTIC Interconnections Against Imperialism

Celtic Arts & Identity
This exhibition explores our interconnectedness throughout Northern Europe. 
In their article historians Alan Raich and Alexander Moffatt, discuss the many Celtic connections in the fight against reactionary imperialism.  And their way of marking beliefs and expressing power and understanding our heritage and place in the world. 

There are many Acts of Renaissance – meaning rebirth – decided acts of cultural rejuvenation, all across northern Europe, in opposition to reactionary ideas of imperial authority. 
The "only way this emphasis can be fully delivered is through the arts.” Celtic art draws inspirations from plants and animal life.

**The EU is not a Super state – neither a state nor an empire but a union of states and peoples whose policies were arrived at through consensus seeking and compromise.

“British nationalism and legacy of imperialism, comes to the 21st century through contemporary mass media every day and evening”
http://www.thenational.scot/comment/there-were-many-celtic-connections-in-the-fight-against-reactionary-imperialism.19148



What are the repercussions of Brexit.

Firstly, many appear to believe the lies in the media – from migrants taking peoples jobs to believing their standard to living will increase with a Brexit. The poor have been hood-winked by a Tory elite and those in London who have been amassing millions on their properties.

Secondly majority of young people voted to stay in the EU. They already feel let down by the older generation – and now they feel old people, who pine for long lost good old days of empire – are dragging them out .

Now England wants its independence there’s a lot for Scotland to consider.

Scotland now has to choose  – do we want to be part of Europe or part of the UK?