Ossian Collection > Scottish eccentrics

MACPHERSON 231
there must always be a tremendous gap between the
meaning of a Greek sentence and the meaning of its
however literal rendering. Greek poetry will not bear
translation into our poetry. If the attempt is made the
result may be poetry, but it is English poetry (or would
be Scots or Gaelic poetry were these media used), and
poetry that could be written by no one else than that
particular translator.
Where has he of race divine
Wandered in the winding rocks?
Surely no one imagines he is reading anything but a lyric
by Shelley when he sees this translation of a Euripidean
chorus, or that it is Homer rather than Pope he hears in:
Thus having spoke, th' illustrious chief of Troy
Stretch 'd his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy.
Actually the only excuse for printing these translations is
to cease regarding them as translations, and give them
attention as pieces of imitative verse. Pound is right,
however, when he declares Gavin Douglas's Eneados
better than the original, Douglas "having heard the sea",
but wrong when he speaks of "the starters of crazes, the
Ossianic Macphersons, the Gongoras whose wave of
fashion flows over writing for a few centuries or a few
decades, and then subsides, leaving things as they are".
He is wrong in this alike to the Scottish and to the
Spanish writer; but less to Gongora, because while there
are Gongoras — Euphuists, Marinists, and such like —
who, however, serve a very necessary and valuable pur-
pose, there are no Macphersons — Macpherson's achieve-
ment was absolutely unique.
It is a pity there is not a great deal more thinking and
writing about the problems of language and translation in
Scotland. The "common sense" attitude to language —
the "man in the street" attitude — has meant a complete
and grotesque misprisal of the efforts that have been
made in Scotland to revive the Scots Vernacular as a
literary language; and little study seems to have been