Minority languages and their literature (MacDiarmid etc.)
Andrew Clarke
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Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 08:44:34 +1000
From: ajc (Andrew Clarke)
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Subject: sma...@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Alan Smaill) (2768 bytes)
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From: sma...@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Alan Smaill)
Subject: Re: Wilsons, meet the Wilsons, thair a multi-leidit familee ...
In-Reply-To: a...@libserver.canberra.edu.au's message of Mon, 20 Sep 93 00:34:55 GMT
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References: <1993Sep20....@csc.canberra.edu.au>
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 16:52:38 GMT
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In article <1993Sep20....@csc.canberra.edu.au> a...@libserver.canberra.edu.au (Andrew Clarke) writes:
In article <1993Sep14.2...@csc.canberra.edu.au>, a...@libserver.canberra.edu.au (Andrew Clarke) writes:
|> In article <1993Sep13....@gssec.bt.co.uk> cwi...@gssec.bt.co.uk (Colin Wilson) writes:
Andrew had written:
|> I'm also suggesting
|> that the growth in interest in Irish by urban Irish or the revival of
|> Provencal or even Sloane Cymraig is superficially at least a movement away
|> from internationalism and probably a symptom of a need to identify with
|> some restored sense of "our community" at a time of confusion, economic
|> recession and a sense that social cohesion and values are breaking down.
|> Internationalism, in this context, as I thought I'd made clear, means a
|> concern with cultural values which transcends national borders, which is
|> why Ulysses is more than a book about Dublin.
What, then, is your ground for suggesting that this concern cannot
find expression through languages such as Irish, Welsh, Provencal or
Scots?
AJC: Si ces langues sont ouvertes aux idees, themes, symboles et pensees
mondiales, ca va, peut-etre. Si elles ne sont que les langues des fanatistes,
non.
Allan writes: And why should they not be open to the world of today?
You seem to suggest that an interest in Scots/Provencal/(insert your
favourite ethnic toungue here) goes along with a lack of concern with
cultural values which transcend national boundaries.
AC: I'm not making a prescriptive statement here, but a descriptive one --
there is a strong movement towards the revival of minority languages, and
I'm interested in why. I'm also pointing out that such movements are up
against the economics of publishing/broadcasting plus the domination of
the English language mass media (usually US in origin) -- hence my comment
about subtitling The Simpsons in Scottish. Some people obviously see a
hidden agenda in this: that I'm some kind of Standard English Gauleiter
about to send over the Language Police from Oxford University Press ...
Allan, there's no hidden agenda, and my own original dialect is West
Yorkshire in any case.
What I did remark on was Joyce's ability to make
a particular place into a setting for the most celebrated work of literary
modernism -- written, moreover by a man who could never bring himself to
live in Ireland again.
Allan: Have you read "a drunk man looks at the thistle"?
MacDiarmid chose to use Scots to express himself on universal themes,
with translations from several European poets interleaved.
It is hard to imagine someone more open to the world of his time.
AC: No, but I shall. If somebody had made this suggestion in the first
place, it would have done wonders for CW's blood pressure! I've found it in
The Hugh MacDiarmid anthology / edited by Grieve and Scott (in my own library)
so I will have a bash, as the saying goes.
MacDiarmid was of course a Marxist, which has internationalism built in.
BTW, to understand what I mean by modernism and internationalism, read the
critical writings of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. At first sight, "A drunk
Scot" falls into the same tradition.
Allan: So your objection is really to the inward-looking mentality itself,
and not to the use of particular languages. And there is nothing
easier than to be anti-internationalist in standard English,
after all.
AC: Precisely. I agree that your middle-brow English English man/woman of
letters can be pretty impervious to new directions -- on the other hand, new
English voices from Africa, Australia, North America, India & the
Caribbean do tend to break in. After all, only one of the great English
moderns was English (D.H.Lawrence): the rest were either Irish or American.
Alan Smaill JANET: sma...@uk.ac.ed.lfcs
LFCS, Dept. of Computer Science UUCP: ..!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!smaill
University of Edinburgh ARPA: sma...@lfcs.ed.ac.uk
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, UK. Tel: 031-650-2710
Andrew Clarke
The Library,
University of Canberra
Usual disclaimer.
Foreman: So you want a job, eh? Wot's your qualifications?
Kelly: I'm a qualified buider
Foreman: A qualified builder? I bet you don't know the difference between
a girder and a joist.
Kelly: Sure and I do -- the one wrote Faust and the other wrote Ulysses ...