Pervigilium Scotiae.

Roy, G. Ross

Tom Scott, Somhairle MacGill-Eain [Sorley MacLean], Hamish Henderson. Buckfastleigh, South Devonshire. Etruscan Books. 1997. 126 pages. [pounds]7.50. ISBN 1-901538-06-0.

Pervigilium Scotiae is one of nine projected Etruscan readers, and the three poets included have appropriately maintained "Scotland's Vigil" as the first post-Hugh MacDiarmid generation. True to his heritage, they made it a priority to keep alive the two lesser languages of Scotland - Gaelic and Scots - and remained active spokesmen for a more just society. While this last concern focused principally on matters Scottish, Tom Scott, Sorley MacLean, and Hamish Henderson recognized that such problems are worldwide - for example, Scott's "Son of Man," about events in post-Tito Sarajevo.

One of the most meaningful forms which internationalism can take is the art of translation, and these three poets were adept at it. Scott's first book was Seeven Poems o Maister Francis Villon made owre intil Scots (1953), which Ezra Pound called the best translation of Villon he had ever read. The present volume contains ten poems by Baudelaire translated into Scots, although in later years Scott despaired of being able to render Baudelaire adequately into that language. The longest poem of his here is "Tam's Temptation: An Unco Dream," in which a very modern Devil tells him to "pimp your Muse for pay."

Sorley MacLean spent his life translating his own Gaelic poetry into English, not Scots. He also translated many traditional Gaelic bards, often for the first time. The selection in this book is bilingual. Running through them is a Celtic mournfulness, without the occasional flabbiness one finds in turn-of-the-century Celtic Twilight writing: see, for instance, the end of "I gave you Immortality": ". . . if I reach my place . . . you made a poet of me through sorrow."

"The Great Famine" makes its appearance again, one of MacLean's major international poems, a marriage of folk memory and the present. Drawing on a poem about World War I by Malcolm MacLean, of the 4th Camerons, Sorley MacLean gives his own version of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in "Festubert 16/17-5-1915." The poem opens with the scene of battle, then abruptly shifts to the Isle of Skye.

big heavy doors shutting on many a brave strong young man. . . . . Doors opening quietly and shut as they were opened: boy or girl, or two or three taken out of schoolrooms . . . . brothers or fathers dead: thirteen on one day in the little town of Portree.

The poem ends with "Clangour of the big guns . . . and doors opening quietly / to dwellings of the broken heart."

There are translations here by Hamish Henderson from Holderlin, Montale, Campana, and Cavafy. Next to his award-winning Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, Henderson is best known for some of the songs he has written, four of which are published (with music) in this volume. "The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily" hauntingly rhymes the word eerie and the refrain "Puir bliddy swaddies are wearie." Henderson and MacLean served in Africa during World War II, and both turned their experiences into poetry.

The most important of Henderson's songs is "Freedom Come-All-Ye." With prospects of an independent Scotland, the song has been widely touted for adoption as the national anthem. The opening lines set a tone which would seem appropriate: "Roch [rough] the wind in the clear day's dawin / Blaws the cloods heelster-gowdie [helter-skelter] ow'r the bay, / But there's mair nor a roch wind blawin / Through the great glen o' the warld the day." Like most national anthems, "Freedom Come-All-Ye" is distinctly a product of its time, but it might also fulfill its promise as well as the vigil of this book's title.

G. Ross Roy University of South Carolina