Rebuilding a World That Never Existed
But unlike Ngũgĩ, who wrote in a language spoken by millions, the Scot was trying to build a lexicon that had never really existed.
Key points
- (Although Scots survives as a minority language with many regional variations, none of them closely resemble MacDiarmid’s concoction.) I loved the verse for its woozy lyricism and nerded out on the text’s annotations; I was also fascinated by the author’s grand ambitions.
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- The novel’s narrator is writing a thesis about a widow in Galicia, who resisted the dictator Francisco Franco’s effort to subjugate the area (the government flooded rural villages and banned the Galician language).
MacDiarmid didn’t exactly rebuild Scottish literature, but he made a modernist work of art that I’ll never forget.
A cerebral but darkly funny epic poem whose plot is well summarized by its title, it is written in “synthetic Scots,” a language cobbled together from Scottish dialects by its author, Hugh MacDiarmid.
Additional details
- Feeling rootless and isolated in New York, he hopes, Meyer writes, “to create a home of some sort for the unsettled parts of himself.” Other authors in minority languages have been vocal about their motivations.
- Writers in Greenlandic, Basque, Welsh, and the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino have eschewed dominant languages such as Spanish or English to preserve cultures that have been subsumed by larger nations.
- Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic A Novel About Obsessively Digging Into the Past By Lily Meyer A new book by the Galician writer Brais Lamela chronicles the drive that many have to touch history, no matter how elusive it is.
- What to Read Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald Though his memoir-in-essays is subtitled A Confessional, and though it opens by revising the story he and his family used to tell about his childhood, Fitzgerald doesn’t immediately lay bare the lingering pain of his tumultuous upbringing.
- “Poem for the WaterShed,” a poem by Gretel Ehrlich Meyer calls Lamela’s choice to write in a language primarily spoken in a single region in the northwest of Spain “an artistic expression of commitment to his particular roots,” and it is—but Lamela also understands the futility of trying to re-create the past.
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