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January 13th, 2009Back at the tail-end of last year, I was asked to write an article for Scotland In Trust, the magazine of the National Trust for Scotland, which owns the Burns Cottage in Alloway and is in the process of turning it into the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. For various logistical and I guess financial reasons this won’t open till 2010, which is a shame given that this year is the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth. On the other hand, Burns is for life, not just for 2009, so maybe the opening of the Museum should be seen as taking Scotland’s, and the world’s, relationship with the poet into the future, and not just marking a convenient date. Anyway, the magazine asked me to write a short piece on ‘Why Robert Burns Matters’. I came up with six principal reasons – Language, Literature, Song, Tradition, Idealism and Burns Himself – but the one I put at the top of the leet was LANGUAGE. I did this because Burns’s language, Scots, is still too often put to the back of the queue, or sent out of the room altogether, like a badly-behaved wean. It’s too often considered a bit embarrassing, a bit of a joke. A lot of folk just wish it would go away. It’s ‘bad English’, ’slang’, ‘the language of the gutter’, or it’s old-fashioned or childish – and anyway no one speaks it any more (except of course once a year when they’re reciting Burns’s poems and singing his songs at Burns Suppers).
All of the above is, of course, complete haivers. Despite the best efforts of its enemies, Scots is still alive and kicking in the 21st century. It is rich and resourceful and varied – ranging from the crafted genius of poets like Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan to the brilliant comedy of Still Game, from everyday speech to one of the greatest national song heritages of any nation on earth. Here’s what I wrote for the NTS magazine:
‘Burns spoke and wrote in both Scots and English,but it is his work in Scots that stands out. He turned to Scots at a crucial moment in the language’s history, and in doing so he fused oral and written traditions. Both Burns and Scotland would be hugely diminished without the Scots language, and so would the world: ‘Auld Lang Syne’, after all, is written in Scots.’
I also said, under the heading LITERATURE, that ‘too often Burns is seen as Scotland’s only poet. In fact, he should be seen as one of many accomplished practitioners in what is arguably Scotland’s finest field of artistic achievement, literature. Scottish literature, and poetry in particular, has a rich history stretching over many centuries, and to isolate Burns from that tradition, which he himself fully recognised, is to misrepresent both his achievement and the culture from which he emerged.’
The poem I’m writing in response to ‘Address of Beelzebub’ is in Scots. It’s the least I can do to honour the poet, his language and his culture, which are mine also.