“s na cnàmhan gu bhith ris | a-nis' [and the bones almost showing through | now]: Reading Contemporary Gaelic Poetry

Abstract

the Scottish Gaelic poet Somhairle MacGill-Eain dismissed a current mainstream of English language poetry: in particular he objected to the 'meagre mosaiced whinings of Eliot and the flat slicknesses of Auden etc etc, all so keen to express their age. All this contemporaneity I think just nonsense'. 1 There are political and national dimensions here (MacGill-Eain was a confirmed socialist and Scottish nationalist), but there is also the possibility that 'contemporaneity' might have different characteristics within Gaelic poetry (less 'whiny', less 'slick'), or indeed that MacGill-Eain had a resistance to the notion of the contemporary as some form either of imposition or fallacy: much depends on the tone one uses to read that 'nonsense'. How one goes about defining contemporaneity or the 'contemporary' will vary across every culture, every language, perhaps indeed every individual. Different communities and cultures will raise historical moments to the status of totemic icons or omphaloi of contemporary identity, of 'nowness'; it appears that for a large part of the British population, say, the present moment began (and perhaps ended) with the Second World War -this wartime or post-war episteme is one we are condemned to live through, or relive repeatedly. Within Gaelic culture, the contemporary moment -the episteme we find ourselves in -might stretch back even further, not to a single point in time, but to a process (often ill-defined but always emotively felt) that lasted for over a century from the 1740s onwards: the process of 'clearance'. Gaelic speakers are (and will be until there is a reliable, definite Renaissance or resurgence) living in a period postclearance, one still coloured by -often externally imposed -Celticist notions of 1 Somhairle MacGill-Eain, 'Letter to Douglas Young', 1941, National Library of Scotland, Acc. 6419 Box 38B. For writers who have published under both English and Gaelic names, I have tended for consistency and clarity in the argument to use only one name (the Gaelic) in my essay -this is the case even when discussing essays published in English, as with Christopher Whyte [Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin].