#hugh macdiarmid
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
"But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream Fitful and dark, Unseizable in Leith And wildered by the Forth, But irresistibly at last Cleaving to sombre heights Of passionate imagining Till stonily, From soaring battlements, Earth eyes Eternity"
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
A poem by Hugh MacDiarmid
The Watergaw
Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding; An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose That nicht—an’ nane i’ mine; But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht Ever sin’ syne; An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)
Hugh MacDiarmid introduces, translates and reads his poem
2 notes
·
View notes
Photo
1 note
·
View note
Text
Also, it'd make the time limit (1925), but "not written in English" means that things written in Scots qualify, so have some Hugh MacDiarmid:
Mars is braw in crammasy, Venus in a green silk goun, The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers, Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers, Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’ Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn! – But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll drown The haill clanjamfrie!
like tell me the name of one poem you like that WASNT originally written in english by an american or british poet in a time btw 1960 and now. and to make it extra hard the anne carson translations of sappho dont count. Quickly.
634 notes
·
View notes
Text
Poets Pub - Alexander Moffat , 1980,
Scottish , b. 1980 -
Oil on canvas , 183 x 244 cm.
#Alexander Moffat#scottish artist#pub interior#Edinburgh#drinking haunts#scottish poets#scottish writers#Hugh MacDiarmid.
62 notes
·
View notes
Text
On October 26th 1911 the Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean, was born on the island of Raasay.
Sorley (Somhairle MacGill-Eain)was brought up within a family and community immersed in Gaelic language and culture, particularly song. Sorley studied English at Edinburgh University from 1929, taking a first class honours degree and there encountering and finding an affinity with the work of Hugh MacDiarmid, Ezra Pound, and other Modernist poets. Despite this influence, he eventually adopted Gaelic as the medium most appropriate for his poetry. However, it should be noted that MacLean translated much of his own work into English, opening it up to a wider public than the speakers of the Gaelic language.
During the Spanish Civil War, MacLean was torn between family commitments and his desire to fight on behalf of the International Brigades, illustrating his left-wing - even Marxist - political stance. He eventually resigned himself to remaining on Skye. He fought in North Africa during World War Two, before taking up a career in teaching, holding posts on Mull, in Edinburgh and finally as Head Teacher at Plockton High School.
It is often said that what Hugh MacDiarmid did for the Scots language, Sorley MacLean did for Gaelic, sparking a Gaelic renaissance in Scottish literature in line with the earlier ‘Scottish Renaissance’, as evinced in the work of George Campbell Hay, Derick Thomson and Iain Crichton Smith. He was instrumental in preserving and promoting the teaching of Gaelic in Scottish schools. Through the diverse subject matter of his poetry, he demonstrates the capacity of the Gaelic language to express themes from the personal to the political and philosophical.
MacLean’s work was virtually unknown outside Gaelic-speaking circles until the 1970s, when Gordon Wright published Four Points of a Saltire - poems from George Campbell Hay, Stuart MacGregor, William Neill and Sorley MacLean. He also then appeared at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, establishing his fame in England, as well as Scotland and Ireland, where he had become something of a cult figure thanks to a fan base including fellow poet Seamus Heaney. A bilingual Selected Poems of 1977 secured a broader readership and a new generation began to appreciate his work.
Latterly, he wrote and published little, showing his concern with quality and authenticity over quantity. Never a full-time writer, he was also a scholar of the Highlands with a vast knowledge of genealogy, and an avid follower of shinty. Amongst other awards and honours, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1990. He passed on in 1996 at the age of 85, and was survived by his wife and two daughters.
I have posted many times about Sorley, and probably overused Martyn Bennet’s Hallaig, but if you haven’t heard it, please go to Youtube and search for it, you won’t regret it.
The Two MacDonalds Sorley MacLean
You big strong warrior, you hero among heroes, you shut the gate of Hougomont. You shut the gate and behind it your brother did the spoiling. He cleared tenants in Glengarry – the few of them left – and he cleared tenants about Kinloch Nevis, and he cleared tenants in Knoydart. He was no better than the laird of Dunvegan. He spoiled Clan Donald.
What did you do then, you big strong hero? I bet you shut no gate in the face of your bitch of a brother.
There was in your time another hero of Clan Donald, the hero of Wagram, Leipsig, Hanau. I have not heard that he cleared one family by the Meuse or by any other river, that he did any spoiling of French or of MacDonalds.
What a pity that he did not come over with Bonaparte! He would not clear tenants for the sake of the gilded sheep, nor would he put a disease in the great valour of Clan Donald. What a pity that he was not Duke of the Land of the Barley And Prince of Caledonia!
What a pity that he did not come over with Bonaparte twenty years before he did, not to listen to flannel from the creeper Walter nor to gather dust from the old ruin but to put the new vigour in the remnant of his kinsmen!
What a pity that he did not come to succour his kinsmen!
Dá Dhómhnallach Somhairle MacGill-Eain
‘Na do ghaisgeach mór láidir; ‘Nad churaidh miosg nan curaidhean, Dhùin thu geata Hougomont. Dhùin thu ‘n geata ‘s air a chùlaibh Rinn do bhráthair an spùilleadh. Thog e tuath an Gleann Garadh – Am beagan a bh’air fhágail dhiubh – Is thog e tuath mu Cheann Loch Nibheis Is thog e tuath an Cnóideart. Cha b’fhearr e na Fear Dhùn-Bheagain: Rinn e milleadh air Cloinn Domhnaill.
De rinn thusa ‘n uair sin, A churaidh mhóir láidir? Fiach na dhùin thu aon gheata An aodann do ghalla bráthair?
Bha ann ri d’linn-sa fear eile, Curaidh eile de Chloinn Dhómhnaill, Curaidh Bhágram, Leipsich, Hanau. Cha chuala mi gun do thog esan Aon teaghlach mun Mheuse No mu abhainn eile. Cha d’rinn esan milleadh Air Frangaich no air Dómhnallaich.
Nach bochd nach táinig esan Le Bonaparte a nall. Cha thogadh esan tuath Air sgáth nan caorach óraidh, ‘S cha mhó chuireadh esan gaiseadh Ann an gaisge mhóir Chloinn Dómhnaill. Nach bochd nach rodh esan ‘Na dhiuc air tir an Eórna Is ‘na phrionns air Albainn.
Nach bochd nach táinig esan Le Bonaparte a nall Fichead bliadhna mun táinig, Cha b’ann a dh’èisteachd sodail O’n t-sliomaire sin Bhátar No a chruinneachadh na h-ùrach As an t-seann láraich, Ach a chur an spionnaidh ùrair Ann am fuidheall a cháirdean.
Nach bochd nach táinig esan Gu cobhair air a cháirdean.
27 notes
·
View notes
Text
"The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid called Edinburgh, draped over the back rocks of an ancient volcano, 'a mad god's dream'."
Footprints - In Search of Future Fossils, David Farrier
16 notes
·
View notes
Text
Poet's Pub
Artist: Alexander Moffat (Scottish, born 1943)
Date: 1980
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburg, Scotland
Description
Moffat's group portrait is an imaginary vision of the major Scottish poets and writers of the second half of the twentieth century gathered around the central figure of Hugh MacDiarmid. From left to right, they are: Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch. In the foreground is Alan Bold and, on the steps behind, the art critic, John Tonge. The setting is an amalgam of the interiors of their favourite drinking haunts in Edinburgh: Milne's Bar, the Abbotsford and the Café Royal.
#oil painting#poet's pub#alexander moffat#scottish artist#genre art#edinburg#mine's bar#cafe royal#men#women#tables#chairs#20th century art
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
So like I mentioned before, here's something I originally wrote way back in 2011 for Deviantart's much smaller and less friendly 40k writing fandom. Current day 40k tumblr really is a chill and welcoming place and it's lovely to share it with you all.
Suffice it to say I would write this very differently now than I did then. And maybe I will sometime. It's alright technically but very stiff, I would say is the right word, and lacking in confidence both in myself as a storyteller and in the story being told. The characters are okay though, I've always enjoyed creating grotesque people in my head and then describing them.
It was hugely influenced by my interests at the time being mercenaries/PMCs and Second Empire France and the French military more generally. It's a lot more French than it needs to be.
Just as one example of how I feel about it now, the beginning is quite flat because I was trying to be like Raymond Chandler without being old enough and/or drunk enough to pull it off. Now I'd lead with the fact that the planet is a dry arid place and keep hammering on that because everyone can relate to being too hot. Things like that.
Oh! Proof that I've always been pretentious about titles, too - this one comes from the first stanza of A.E. Housman's Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries:
These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
But it would be remiss of me not to also give you Hugh MacDiarmid's response from his Another Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries:
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
Aren't mercenaries interesting?
#2011 neves in “starting the first part of a series and never continuing it again” scandal#there's no way that would happen now#wh40k#warhammer 40k#warhammer 40000#writing#fanfic
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
Took a moment to think about the ‘film poem’ in an online meeting with @integratedartists Alastair Cook. Considered with the help of Sarah Neely and Alan Riach ‘Demons in the Machine’ (2009) ; and Margaret Tait’s ‘Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait’ (1964) .
“Attention paid in ‘MacDiarmid’ to the class- and culturally-coded linguistic registers so often associated with traditional documentary modes shows Tait’s alternative approach to documentary in action. In 1964, BBC radio and television was generally sustained by voices whose received-pronunciation English was at the far end of the spectrum from the sounds of vernacular Scots voices. The musical settings of MacDiarmid’s poems by F. G. Scott used by Tait bring the Scots tones and their velar fricatives into a high art medium, a fact which must have affronted certain contemporary arbiters of taste. By quoting such material, Tait’s MacDiarmid evokes large questions about authority, the dissemination of information, how it is sanctioned or disapproved, and therefore how people are empowered or disenfranchised all questions equally central to the poetic work of her film’s human subject.”
0 notes
Text
Alredered Remembers Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, on his birthday.
"It is time we in Scotland put England in its proper place and instead of our leaning on England and taking inspiration from her, we should lean and turn to Europe, for it is there our future prosperity lies."
Hugh MacDiarmid
0 notes
Text
0 notes
Photo
Jesus is laid to rest in a tomb, here beside a rubbish tip in a polluted industrial nation. We come from the clay of Mother Earth’s womb, are nourished from the fields, and in the end return to the soil – ashes to ashes, dust to dust - at one with rock-building geological processes set in time when place began. “I lift a stone; it is the meaning of life I clasp,” said the Scots bard, Hugh MacDiarmid, in On a Raised Beach: “We must reconcile ourselves to the stones…/ Though slow as the stones the powers develop/ To rise from the grave – to get a life worth having.”
~ Alastair McIntosh, The Way of the Cross from Latin America, 1492 - 1992
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Stations of the Cross, 1992, Station Fourteen: Walking in the Shadow of Death
7 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Of Life and Death by HUGH MACDIARMID
43 notes
·
View notes
Text
Poet George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17th October 1921.
Hailed as one of the greatest Scottish writers of the twentieth century. A prolific poet, admired by such fellow poets as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, he was also an accomplished novelist, dramatist and a master of the short story. Bar a brief period in Edinburgh, where he associated with the ‘Rose Street’ crowd including Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and others, Mackay Brown spent most of his life in Orkney, and his work is saturated with references to his native islands. As Seamus Heaney wrote, in Mackay Brown’s work everything was passed ‘through the eye of the needle of Orkney’.
George Mackay Brown was the youngest of six children of John Brown, tailor and postman, and Mhairi Mackay, a Gaelic speaker. He grew up in fairly straitened circumstances as his father was unable to work through illness. Mackay Brown himself suffered from tuberculosis as a young man. In his twenties he worked as a journalist on the Orkney Herald.
During his early years Stromness was a “dry island”, there was no licensed premises, in 1920, the temperance movement voted the town ‘dry’ and it remained that way until 1947. And so it was 1948 aged 27 he first taste alcohol of which he wrote 1948 Mackay Brown first tasted alcohol, which he found to be “a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself ‘If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness’ Subsequently, alcohol played a considerable part in his life, although he says, "I never became an alcoholic, mainly because my guts quickly staled”
Now a lot of posts you here of famous Scots entering University at very young ages, Mackay Brown is the exception, the the age of 30 he left the Orkney Isles for the first time to continue his education.
He a mature student at Newbattle Abbey Collegewhere he met the poet Edwin Muir who encouraged his writing and wrote the introduction to Mackay Brown’s first full collection of poems. He went on to study English at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1960.
Now I touched upon the alcohol thing earlier and where else in Edinburgh at in those days would an aspiring poet go? Of course it was Milnes Bar and into the company of Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and the likes. He met and fell in love with Stella Cartwright described as the bars muse was she was lover to a number of Scottish poets, they were briefly engaged but kept in touch until she passed away in 1985.
After his graduation Mackay Brown, who was prone to sickness,due to having previously suffered from tuberculosis decided to return home, living with his mother until her paassing, Despite almost continual ill-health he continued to write and gained numerous prizes for his work as well as post graduate work. He has been dubbed the Orkney Bard. His weekly column which ran for more than 25 years in The Orcadian from 1971 is in print in book form and gives an insight into his Stromness routines and his observations on a changing Orkney.
Throughout his life he not only had the bronchial problems but also suffered depression, this seems to have been an affliction that beset his family, his Uncle’s body was fished out of Stromness harbour in 1935 and it is thought he committed suicide, he himself spent almost a decade fighting his demons, while also having physical health problems, in 1981 he was given the last rights by his priest.
George Mackay Brown wrote 15 collections of poetry, 9 short story collections, 6 novels, 2 plays, 9 collections of essays,biographies and journals, some published posthumously.
He survived his near death encounter in 1981, his 1994 novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, was shortlisted for Booker Prize and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society.
Mackay Brown passed away on 13 April 1996 aged 73 after a short illness. For a man who spent his life writing about Orkney it was rather fitting that his funeral on April 16th coincided with the Feast of St Magnus, patron saint of Orkney.
I love this quote from the man…….
“In Scotland, when people congregate, they tend to argue and discuss and reason; in Orkney, they tell stories.”
The pics are of the poet, the second is a window on Edinburgh's Rose Street and is representation ofa hi poem Beachcomber. The final "pic" is George Mackay Brown reading "Darkness is a stranger. Moon and stars have lost their winter glory" in 1967, celebrates midsummer on Orkney.
18 notes
·
View notes