The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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Название: The Canongate Burns

Автор: Robert Burns

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия: Canongate Classics

isbn: 9781847674456

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ world, Arnold’s ethnic prescriptions for literature were not happy ones. Having designated, indeed invented, Celtic literature as fey and ethereal, he saw in Burns’s Scottish writing, the very opposite of this, as often nauseatingly tangible. Thus he wrote in November, 1879:

      This epistolary remark, he fleshed out in The Study of Poetry:

      We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in real poems we have not the real Burns.

      By the latter part of the nineteenth century and with the embryonic stirring of Modernism, the roots of the later self-defined Scottish Renaissance Movement, a crucial problem for Scottish creative writers was whether Burns could be exhumed as a creative force from under the growing mountains of verbiage, false history and commercial artefacts. The initial movement in this direction came from R.L. Stevenson with his acutely attuned antennae both to contemporary world literature and to the Scottish tradition. Along with that went a peculiar, even psychic, identification with Robert Fergusson and associated fellow-feeling with Burns. He also grasped the degree to which Burns was indebted to Fergusson. Hence his haunted, near death retrospective of Edinburgh’s ‘three Robins’:

      Despite the genuine intensity of this feeling, Stevenson felt the task of resurrection of Fergusson and Burns beyond him. The Calvinist and genteel claustrophobia of Edinburgh which he believed had destroyed his namesake was something, with Joycean acumen, from which he fled into ever geographically further exile. Before doing so, however, he diagnosed in his earliest journalistic writings the remarkably over-inflated literary culture that infected Victorian Scotland in general and Burns’s false reputation in particular. Rather than Arnold’s vision of the Scots retreating north of the Tweed, clutching to their bosoms their shibboleth poet, Stevenson, with much more literary sociological realism, saw the Scots as enormously successful commercial exporters and exploiters of a pseudo-national literary tradition. While the more mature Stevenson would not have adhered to these disparaging remarks about Burns’s vernacular poetry, his sense of national literary narcissism did not abate:

      It is somewhat too much the fashion to pat Scotch literature on the back. Inhabitants of South Britain are pleased to commend verses, which, short of a miraculous gift of tongues, it is morally impossible they should comprehend. It may interest these persons to learn that Burns wrote a most difficult and crude patois … there are not so very many people alive in Scotland who could read his works without a furtive reference to the margin … any Englishman need not be ashamed to confess he can make nothing out of the vernacular poems except a raucous gibberish — which is the honest belief of the present reviewer, is about the measure of his achievement. It is partly to this that we must attribute the exaggerated favour of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, by no means one of his best poems, but one of the most easily understood …

      At the end of this assault on the unfortunate James Grant Wilson, we also find this remark on Burns: