Scottish literature
Scottish literature is the literature of Scottish authors in Scottish English as well as in Scots or (less often) in Scottish Gaelic . This is perhaps still spoken by 60,000 people.
Beginnings
The earliest literary evidence in the Northern English dialect, also known as Scottish or Lowland Scottish, is a fragment of an anonymous poem from the 13th century about conditions in Scotland after the death of King Alexander III. One of the first great Scottish poets was John Barbour , Archbishop of Aberdeen and author of the Scottish national epic "The Bruce" (c. 1375), which glorifies the story of the Scottish King Robert the Bruce . The Renaissance poets Robert Henryson , Blind Harry (a minstrel , i.e. traveling singer) and William Dunbar wrote in an early form of Scots, which they called inglis . The period between the 15th and 17th centuries can be regarded as the heyday of the Scots, when a relatively standardized version of the Scots was the language of prestige of the nobility and bourgeoisie and the language of the official administration of the kingdom.
In the Highlands , however, Scottish Gaelic was widespread until the beginning of the 18th century . The oldest written evidence is the Book of the Dean of Lismore around 1520, which contained ballads, the style of which, however, hardly differs from the Irish bardic poems. With the decline of Gaelic bardism in the 16th century, new, independent verses came to the fore. The best-known Scottish-Gaelic poet and political writer was Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair ("Alexander son of Master Alexander", English: Alexander MacDonald), around 1698-1760. In 1741 he had the first dictionary printed in Scottish Gaelic.
After union with England in 1707
After the introduction of the printing press , but especially after the union with England in 1707 and the Jacobite uprising in 1745/46, standard English also asserted itself in Scottish literature. Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair's collection of poems from 1745 on the resurrection of the Gaelic language is said to have been burned by the executioner in Edinburgh; only twelve copies survived. Later only "cleaned" versions could be printed. Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724-1812), after Alasdair one of the most famous Gaelic-speaking poets of the 18th century, was able to publish his Gaelic poems from 1768 in Edinburgh without any problems.
Tobias Smollett , who initially practiced as a doctor in London and was in close contact with the important English authors of his time, wrote not only travel reports, letters, adventures, horror and picaresque novels , but also a protest poem against the Culloden massacre ( The Tears of Scotland 1746). James Macpherson published a collection of alleged Celtic prose chants in English ("The Chants of Ossian "), which were finally exposed as falsifications only after 150 years. Although the poetry shows more sentimental influences from the southern English poetry circle, it attracted great attention to the Celtic ballads.
Many Scottish authors left their homeland and went to England. This also applies to the romantic poet and playwright Joanna Baillie, who was born in Glasgow . While Gaelic seemed to be threatened with extinction since 1745 - only Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) was able to collect Gaelic folk songs in the Highlands and the Hebrides - the Scots , which lived on in the vernacular of the Lowlands, was often used for poetry for nostalgic reasons . Scots became more popular, however, when the romantic, radical democrat and vicious satirist Robert Burns published folk songs in the peasant vernacular in the late 18th century and combined them with the standard language in his own poems, but imitated the popular tone. In 1788 he wrote the poem Auld Lang Syne , which served as the template for the world-famous hymn, which is sung every year at the turn of the year. The largely Anglicized intellectuals of the Edinburgh Enlightenment (the so-called Scottish Enlightenment ) also celebrated Burns' works, with which he gave Scotland its own identity again, while at the same time many Scottish artists had to migrate to London for economic reasons . James Hogg , whose mother had already collected Scottish ballads, was influenced by Burns . He wrote numerous poems in English and Scots. His dark novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, about an Ulra-Calvinist Presbyterian who eventually becomes a murderer, was to influence Robert Louis Stevenson.
Hogg's friend Walter Scott also had a feeling for the ballads of his homeland, the borderland between England and Scotland; English and Scottish traditions are reflected in his work. Following popular romance, he wrote nearly 30 historical novels that have been translated into most European languages. Waverley (1814) became famous for a fictional "middle hero" of the Jacobin uprising in 1745. Robert Louis Stevenson , who can be addressed as a Scottish writer despite his nomadic existence, lived a life as a bohemian and at the same time remained caught up in his Calvinist origins. His novel The master of Ballantrae is - although written in the USA - set in the landscape of the Scottish southwest, which Stevenson had got to know during stays and hikes. The two main characters recall the fate of the warring sons of John Murray, 1st Duke of Atholl , in the events of 1745/46, and the red thread follows the Aeneid , which the Jacobites appropriated as an analogy to the fate of the House of Stuart has been.
The romantic stories and lyrical mood pictures by William Sharp (pseudonym: Fiona Macleod ), on the other hand, are shaped by the Celtic spirit of the Highlands. Archibald Joseph Cronin treated in his socially critical novels of the 1930s the life of miners and the conflict-ridden coexistence of denominations in Glasgow. Charles Murray (1864–1941) was one of the first poets to use the Scots of the Aberdeen region, the Doric , for his works.
Scottish Renaissance
A literary movement emerged in the 20th century, shaped by the resurrected Scottish nationalism. It found its way into literary history under the name Scottish Renaissance . The term was first used in 1922 by Christopher Murray Grieve, who later became known under the stage name Hugh MacDiarmid . On the one hand, the movement was concerned with coming to terms with national trauma such as the radical "cleansing" of Catholic churches and monasteries by the Scottish Reformation , the expulsion of the Highland Scots from their farmland (the so-called Highland Clearances ) in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jacobite uprising, later also about the general strike of 1926 or the consequences of the great depression of the 1930s. On the other hand, efforts aimed at the rebirth of a language of their own. There was also contact with the national romantic movement of a Celtic rebirth at the end of the 19th century, but the modernist Scottish avant-garde largely avoided their sentimental Celtic nostalgia . With this nostalgic so-called Kailyard fiction ("vegetable garden poetry") George Douglas Brown (1869–1902) first broke in a radical way in his realistic novel The House with the Green Shutters (1901).
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The poet, nationalist, communist and champion of the Celtic renaissance Hugh MacDiarmid attempted in his lyrical masterpiece, the eclectically assembled comic monologue "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" (1926) based on the techniques of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound , various Scots Combine dialects into an artificial language. His work for a literary revival combined with the hope of a political rebirth for Scotland; but at the same time he was an elitist despiser of mass society and only recognized the danger of fascism late.
Some authors from his circle of friends switched between languages and dialects with virtuosity, such as Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), who translated Friedrich Hölderlin and Bertolt Brecht into English and William Shakespeare into Scottish, but used Glasgow slang for his own works . The poet Robert Garioch wrote his poems in the Scots of Edinburgh's Old Town . The poet William Soutar (1898–1943) also used Scots. His Edinburgh friend Norman MacCaig (1910–1996) wrote his popular poems in the purest English . Because of these linguistic ambivalences, Scottish authors are often considered to be sensitive to linguistic subtleties.
Other well-known representatives of the movement were the playwright James Bridie (1888–1951), a doctor who wrote more for an English audience, the playwright Robert McLellan (1907–1985), the mythologist and politician Lewis Spence and the English-born Scottish- nationalist writer Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr (1869-1960), who also supported the Irish Easter Rising . Anglophobia, hatred of Anglicanism and Calvinism and Gaelic chauvinism increased particularly in the narrow work of Fionn Mac Colla (1906–1975).
James Barke (1905-1958) wrote a five-volume work on Robert Burns and describes in Major Operation (1936) the conversion of a bankrupt coal merchant to socialism by an unemployed shipyard worker in a Glasgow hospital. The play was also adapted for the theater. The Scottish socially critical novel of this time still influences English literature today: The English-born Ross Raisin wrote his novel "Unter der Wasserlinie" (German translation 2014) about the social consequences of the Glasgow shipyard crisis. This is also the subject of the English-language novel The Shipbuilders (1935) by George Blake .
From the Orkneys came the Kafka translator Edwin Muir (1887-1959), who could not join MacDiarmid's nationalism, George Mackay Brown (1921-1996), for the abandoned house without a roof and the farmer who had to leave the island in his boat , Archetypes of historical experience, and the humorous novelist and children's book author Eric Linklater (1899–1974).
The son of a Kätner , who came from the radical labor movement , was self-taught, journalist, colonial worker and later freelance author James Leslie Mitchell , who wrote 16 books, saw himself as part of the movement of the Scottish Renaissance, but criticized it for its ignorance of the social conditions in the Glasgow slums. As a left-wing cosmopolitan who lived abroad for a long time, he was skeptical of nationalism and communism. His novel Sunset Song , which appeared in 1932 under the pseudonym Lewis Grassic Gibbon and was filmed in 1971 and edited for the stage several times, made him known beyond the borders of Scotland for a short time. The themes of the novel, written in poetic language but shocking with its realism, are the material and moral misery of the small rural communities in the north-east of Scotland, the role of women torn between the attachment to home and family and the desire for self-fulfillment, the brutalization of the soldiers who have returned from the world war and the consequences of economic modernization for the traditional life of the peasants.
Newer authors
Scottish literature since the 1980s has been gaining a more and more independent profile compared to the literature of English authors: it is more glaring, more realistic and at the same time more fantastic in the description of extreme situations. But it also reflects the economic decline of Scotland. Alasdair Gray describes his homeland Glasgow in surreal, bizarre and comical works. Irvine Welsh received worldwide attention with Trainspotting (1993), which precisely transcribes the Scottish dialects. Sex, drugs and violence also characterize the novels by Iain Banks ("The Wasp Factory" 1984). The plays by John McGrath (1935–2002), influenced by the Epic Theater , deal with historical and current topics from the old Picts to the class struggles of the past to Margaret Thatcher and the problems of the oil industry. Hardly anyone has contributed as much to the spread of popular theater in Scotland as McGrath. Not to be confused with the playwright Tom McGrath (1940-2009), who was anchored in the London and Glasgow counterculture. Jeff Torrington described the downfall of Glasgow in the angry, funny, autobiographical story of the casual worker Thomas Clay - he himself had worked on the assembly line of a car factory for eight years before he retired early because of the plant closure. For this work Swing hammer swing! Which was awarded the most valuable British literary prize, the Whitbread Book Award . (1992) - meaning the demolition hammer with which the Chrysler factory in Linwood was demolished - he needed 30 years to write.
The author of crime novels, Ian Rankin, often set in the darkest parts of Edinburgh, became popular throughout Great Britain .
Metaphysical references characterize the work of the poet John Burnside , born in 1955 , of whom two anthologies have been translated into German. In his autobiographical novel A Lie about My Father (2006, German 2011) he describes an unhappy childhood in Scotland (and England) in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today novelists such as Irvine Welsh , poets such as Robert Crawford (* 1959) and playwrights such as Bill Findlay (1947–2005), who is known throughout the Anglo-Saxon world , but of course also pop groups largely write Scots. James Kelman writes on the popular Glasgow novel of the 1930s in the drastic Glasgow working class slang . The poet Tom Leonard (* 1944) is also at home in Glasgow's Scots . The musicality and vitality of the Scots are bought at the price of greater difficulties for the reader because of its strongly differing regional variants. Some authors like Bill Herbert (W. N Herbert, * 1961) write with a forked tongue from the start - Forked Tongue is also the title of his collection of poems from 1994.
Modern authors who write Gaelic
In the 19th century, Gaelic had completely lost its importance as a poet's language. The Scottish Gaelic novel began in the first decades of the 20th century. In this context, u. a. Ian MacCormaick ( Dùn Aluinn , 1912, a novel about the eviction of small farmers) and Seumas Mac Leòid . The poet Sorley MacLean (1911-1996), who also belonged to the modernist movement around MacDiarmid, grew up on the Hebridean island of Raasay ("I am writing for no audience"). With his poems he proved that Scottish Gaelic was able to strike a new note. The novelist, storyteller and poet Iain Chrichton Smith (1928–1998) also lived in the Hebrides. Like Smith, George Campbell Hay (1915–1984) belonged to the literary movement around MacDiarmid and is considered a great word artist and brilliant translator. He wrote mainly in Gaelic, but also in Scots and English. Aonghas MacNeacail (* 1942) from the Hebridean island of Skye writes his poetry in Gaelic and performs it at festivals together with musicians. However, his work has often been translated into English.
Gaelic prose telling flourished again in the 1970s. Today, children's books are increasingly being published to promote the preservation of Scottish Gaelic as a mother tongue. Even bands like Runrig sometimes write in Gaelic, but struggle with comprehension difficulties with the mass audience.
Festivals and prizes
The Edinburgh International Book Festival , held annually in August in the Scottish capital, is reputedly the world's largest book festival. In Wigtown the Wigtown Book Festival takes place every year, at which poetry is recited , in St Andrews the StAnza Poetry Festival every March . The Borders Book Festival is held annually on the Scottish border in Melrose . The Walter Scott Price is given here as a special award to outstanding authors.
The prestigious Stakis Prize for Scottish Author of the Year has not been awarded since 1999 due to disputes with sponsors.
2004 Edinburgh became the first UNESCO - City of Literature named.
See also
literature
- Bill Findley: A History of the Scottish Theater. Polygon 1998, ISBN 978-0-7486-6220-3 .
- Julius Pokorny: The Celtic literatures. In: Kindler's new literary lexicon. Vol. 20, Munich 1996, pp. 203-230, especially p. 215 ff .: The Scottish-Gaelic literature; Anglo-Scottish literature.
- Peter Sager: Scottish Literature: The Language of the Thistle. In: Scotland: Architecture and Landscape, History and Literature. Cologne 1997, pp. 29-36.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ National Library of Scotland: First Scottish Books
- ↑ SLAINTE: Information and Libraries Scotland: Scottish Authors> Duncan Ban Macintyre Poet 1724-1812 ( Memento of 8 December 2007 at the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Susanne Hagemann: The Scottish Renaissance: Literature and Nation in the 20th Century. Scottish Studies 13. Frankfurt am Main 1992. ISBN 978-3-631-44698-0 .
- ↑ biography on www.bbc.co.uk
- ↑ Excerpts and explanations of the poem ( Memento from February 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ German: "Song of the Sunset". New translation Berlin 2018.
- ^ Obituary in: The Scotsman , May 14, 2008
- ↑ Lies about my father , Munich 2011. Review by Thomas Glavinic, Something New, That Was Always There in: www.faz.net , March 18, 2011
- ^ Festival website
- ^ Festival website