"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 05:13:05 +0100 From: Dave Cochran <D.W.H.Cochran@sms.ed.ac.uk> Subject: Frae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translation into Scots
EDITOR: Findlay, Bill TITLE: Frae Ither Tongues SUBTITLE: Essays on Modern Translation into Scots SERIES: Topics in Translation PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters YEAR: 2004
Dave Cochran, Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh
SUMMARY
_Frae Ither Tongues_ comprises twelve essays on Scots translations of prose, verse and especially drama first published or performed in the latter part of the twentieth century, and is intended to be of interest both to specialists in Translation Studies and general readers with an interest Scottish culture, literature and language. Following Findlay's own introduction, comprising an outline sketch of the literary-historical context for the translations and period at hand and a short conspectus of the following contributions, the essays are organised in two parts, the first consisting of commentaries on the act of translation by translators themselves, the second of essays by third party critics.
In Chapter One, Brian Holton offers a personal view of the (still ongoing) task of translating the Mediaeval Chinese novel _Shuihu Zhuan_ [The Water Margin] (Chen, Hou and Lu 1981), into Scots, as _Men o the Mossflow_ (Holton 1981, 1982,1984, 1986, 1987, 1993). Holton describes the personal factors that contributed to his choice of text and target language, not to mention just what _sort_ of Scots he wanted to write. Though celebrated in China, _Shuihu Zhuan_ is obscure to western readers, and so Holton obliges us with a fascinating account of its history as a radical and oft-banned outlaw novel, before going into the nitty-gritty of his drawing upon, reinventing and on occasion, making-up, of the lexical resources of Scots in order to meet those of the original text, including such challenges as legal and theological jargon, puns, titles of ranks and "swearie-words". The chapter concludes with a very helpful section of advice on "How To Do It Yourself" for anyone else wishing to take up the challenge of translating into Scots.
Chapter Two, William Neill's contribution, describes his translation of excerpts from Homer's _Odyssey_ (Neill 1992) as accessing the rich tradition of Scots balladry and folktales as a key to bringing back to life the orality of Homer, and to "nativising" the tales themselves, by drawing on a multitude of narrative themes and structures common to both. Neill addresses the thorny issue of translating metre, where the exemplar is a text in a classical language in which free word order, absent in the Germanic target language, allows for much shuffling around of words in order to fit a highly rigid metre. He also locates his work, and many of his specific lexical choices, in a tradition of Scottish Classicism, referring in particular to John MacLean's Gaelic _Odusseia Homair_ (MacGilleathain 1976) and Robert Garrioch's rendering of a segment of Hesiod (II 503-553, as "Anatomy of Winter" in Garioch 1973, p42-3), and shows that in many cases, the lexical resources of Scots offer a more vivid, immediate, and on occasion more accurate rendering of the Greek than earlier English translations.
Stuart Hood gives an account of his Scots rendering of Dario Fo's _Mistero Buffo_ (Fo 1974, Hood's translation is unpublished except for the short segment in Fo 1988, p. 120-2) in Chapter Three, an interesting text to be translated into Scots, as the original was also written in the tongue of the "fishermen, smugglers and peasants" of the Lago Maggiore area, on the Swiss border, rather than standard Italian. Hood mostly devotes his attention to the factors guiding his choice of dialect, register and orthography in Scots, and how these choices had been to a considerable extent guided by Fo's decisions when faced with the same choices when writing the original.
In the fourth chapter, the last of the "Translators on Translating" contributions, Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay discuss the translation of register in relation to their long collaboration translating several works of the Québécois playwright, Michel Tremblay, focusing on four plays, "Les Belles-Soeurs/The Guid Sisters" (Tremblay 1988, 1993), "Encore une fois, si vous permettez/If only" (Tremblay 1998, unpublished translation) "La Maison Suspendue/The House Among the Stars" (Tremblay 1990, unpublished translation) and "Messe solemnelle pour une pleine lune d'été/Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer" (Tremblay 1996, 2000). Tremblay's plays make extensive use, to varying purpose, of contrasts of register and variety between forms of (Canadian) Standard French and an urban, working class vernacular, "joual" or "montréalais", which, the authors point out, like Scots in Scotland, is treated with scorn by those with a vested interest in the hegemony of the standard language, but to others is iconic of cultural identity and separatist aspirations. Thus, they show that the translator of Tremblay _must_ have access to multiple target varieties that allow the same contrasts and switches of register employed by Tremblay, and that the continuum between Braid [broad] Scots and Scottish Standard English has proven particularly fruitful in that regard.
Chapters Five and Six both discuss translations of Molière, an author who has been translated into Scots so often and with such popularity that Noël Peacock, in the opening to Chapter Five, refers to "the MacMoliere Industry". Peacock discusses two of the earliest such translations, by Robert Kemp, "L'École des Femmes" as "Let Wives Tak Tent" [let wives take heed] in 1948, and "L'Avare" as "The Laird o' Grippy" [Lord Grasping] in 1955 (Kemp 1983, 1987), taking particular care to note the ways in which Kemp's Scotticisation of the texts extends beyond the language, transposing the entire action of the plays to a Scottish setting. For example, "Molière's unidentified outdoor topography in 'L'École des Femmes'('la scène est une place de ville') is changed to a house on the Canongate (a residential district at the foot of the Royal Mile in late seventeenth century Edinburgh)" (p89). Contrary to the practice of English translators of Molière, who typically retain the original French names, Kemp gave the characters all Scottish names, seeking to capture some of the onomastic word-play of the original. Kemp also made alterations to the structure of _ L'École des Femmes_ itself, in order to bring it more in line with Scottish theatrical practice, particularly by enacting on stage physically expressive moments which in the original occur off-stage, narrated by characters watching from on-stage. Peacock also discusses at length Kemp's translation of Molière's verbal humour, which he quotes Kemp as likening to the dry, sometimes somewhat sinister humour of the Scots, focusing on Kemp's efforts to render the French humour relevant and comprehensible to a Scottish audience by cultural transposition. Finally, he gives an account of both productions' critical reception and their ongoing influence on later Scottish playwrights and translators.
This is followed, in Chapter Six, by Randall Stevenson's discussion of Liz Lochhead's translation of _Tartuffe_ (Lochhead 1985). Although Lochhead's rendering is not explicitly relocated to a Scottish setting, she at least follows Kemp's example by placing the play into a Scottish cultural context. Thus Lochhead "quickly establishes a convincingly Scottish accent for Molière's concern with religious and other forms of hypocrisy ... Placing Tartuffe among the figures of monstrous religious self- righteousness who turn up in Robert Burns's 'Holy Willie's Prayer' and at many other points in Scottish literature both before and since" (p.107), and, moreover, uses Scotland's long history of sectarian division as a way of going _beyond_ the meaning of the original. Stevenson shows that in many ways, Lochhead adjusts and expands on Molière's text in order to comment upon, and satirise contemporary Scottish society, and that Lochhead was able to achieve this by appropriating Molière's grounding in the _commedia dell'arte_ and Roman satire to resonate with the Scottish theatre's strong traditions of variety, music hall and pantomime. Much attention is given to the fact that Lochhead, unlike most translators of Molière into English or Scots, chose to write, like Molière, in rhymed verse, and Stevenson argues that Lochhead "often exploits greater phonetic flexibility in a more colloquially based Scots to sustain rhymes unimaginable in standard English" (p.113). He notes, quoting Hampton (1984, A Note on the Translation), that the ingenuity of demanded by a rhyming translation of Molière "cannot avoid drawing attention to itself" (ibid.), but argues that Lochhead makes a "comic virtue" of this conspicuous and sometimes convoluted word-play. In general, in contrast to Holton's practice of using an exotic text to stretch the language, Stephenson shows how Lochhead uses resources of Scots to stretch her text beyond Molière's original, adding comic and rhetorical force absent in the original. Comically charged shifts in register, between the colloquial and the formal or grandiose are made all the more conspicuous by an accompanying change in variety, between Scots and English, inconspicuous lines of the original are changed into typically Scottish laconic wisecracks - "La campagne à present n'est pas beaucoup fleurie" [Not many flowers out in the country, are there?] becomes "How was the country? Green and stuff?" (quoted p.111) and a much broader employment of colloquialisms than is found in the original is used to great rhetorical effect, albeit at the expense of faithfulness.
Chapters Seven and Eight both take up translations by that most prolific of Scottish polyglots, Edwin Morgan. The first of these, discussed by David Kinloch, is his version of Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_, first performed in 1992. Kinloch begins by comparing the heroic energy and eclecticism, the intertwining of humour and pathos of Rostand's play with Morgan's original poetry, with the purpose of showing the naturalness of Morgan's choice of text. Quoting Woollen, in his introduction to his edition of the original play, as defining it as a "_panaché_, i.e. a mixture, of constituent generic features, be they neo-Romantic, neo- Classical, baroque or burlesque" (p.126, Woollen 1994, p. xvii), Kinloch devotes care over much of the rest of the chapter to demonstrating the how Morgan's Scots Cyrano matches and on occasion surpasses the multi-voiced virtuosity of Rostand's French, "where other translators simply give up" (p.127), without descending into virtuosity merely for it's own sake ("Morgan birls [spins] through a kaleidoscope of styles and registers because he understands that, ultimately, this energy ... gives access to the dark and famished soul of a hero who knows and is at once proud and unhappy that he is different." ibid.), and augments this effect by incorporating into a largely faithful translation appropriate but conspicuously contemporary and/or local innovations. Kinloch also examines points at which Morgan opens up an interpretation of the play in the light of the historical Cyrano's homosexuality, quoting Morgan's introduction as claiming it to be "scarcely but perhaps just audible in the play itself" (p.139, quoting Morgan 1992, p. x). Particular attention is paid to to act 2, scene X, in which Cyrano and Christian agree to collaborate in the wooing of Roxane, to be fused together into her composite perfect lover - but Morgan's language of union with Christian is much more physical and more intimate, it is claimed, than Rostand's. Kinloch claims Morgan performs another adjustment of the text's possible interpretation in act 3 scene VII, where Cyrano stands in the shadows wooing Roxane with his own voice but in Christian's name, and hesitates while confessing his love: "In Rostand, one is sure Cyrano's hesitation is that of a poet searching for the _mot juste_ ... The Scots version is ... movingly - less assured ... gobsmacked by a sudden vision of the pitiful, wonderful irony of his situation." (p. 142)
This is followed by Stephen Mulrine's chapter on Morgan's translations of Mayakovsky (Morgan 1972). Mulrine mostly focuses on how Morgan deals with the Russian language's rich inflectional system and extensive use of affixes, which makes any translation longer "in basic word-count terms" (p.148) than its Russian exemplar. Mulrine argues that in most cases, Morgan's expansion on the original constitutes a "tendency to work up Mayakovsky's outline sketch into a full colour portrait," outdoing the word-plays, lexical innovations and rhetorical flourishes present in the original, adding them where absent and refining out Mayakovsky's occasional doggerel rhymes and weak metres. Mulrine further speculates that the more "direct and concrete" imagery of Morgan's translations is a direct consequence of some particular quality of Scots itself, giving Mayakovsky's sometimes hectoring, didactic style the ring of "folk-wisdom, and not ideology" (p. 167).
Chapters Nine and Ten both deal with translations by Robert Garioch. In Chapter Nine Graham Tulloch looks at Garioch's translations of two Latin tragedies by the sixteenth-century Scottish author, George Buchanan, _Iephthes_ and _Baptistes_ (Sutherland 1959). Tulloch examines philological evidence for the sources of Garioch's translation, assessing it's independence from the English translations of Brown (1906) and Mitchell (1903, 1904) and also the sources of Garioch's "Synthetic Scots" [a twentieth-century literary variety of Scots, based around a lowland standard but consciously and conspicuously augmented by items of vocabulary from archaic sources and other dialects - mostly sourced from Jamieson (1879-82), which seem to come in part from Garioch's reading of other poets using Synthetic Scots, in particular Hugh MacDiarmid, but also from working directly from Jamieson, in particular looking for Latinate formal and technical vocabulary from Middle Scots (1450-1700), prior to the loss of the higher registers. Tulloch describes the presence of Middle Scots vocabulary which was in fact also part of the vocabulary of English of the same period, but which has become obsolete in both, as being part of a project of writing in Scots as if its development had never been interrupted. A small number of neologisms are also noted, as is considerable borrowing from English of more recent coinage, which is common practice in spoken Scots, but odd in Synthetic Scots, which is generally adopted precisely in order to avoid such borrowings. Tulloch briefly compares Buchanan's frequent echoes of classical authors with Garioch's allusions to Burns, Shakespeare and the Authorized Version of the Bible, and notes also his use of historical allusions. Finally he praises Garioch for having restored to Scots literature a register which has long been absent; that of formal tragedy.
Chapter Ten, by Christopher Whyte, examines Garioch's translations of 120 sonnets by Giuseppe Belli (Belli1965, 1984, Garioch 1983, p215-80). The first part of the chapter consists of a long series of prefatory remarks, beginning with three and a half pages on the likeness between original poetic composition and translation, in which Valéry, Akhmatova and her disciple Brodsky are discussed, but Garioch is not. This is followed by some historical and biographical background on Belli, particularly focusing on his contradictory attitude towards the low- register "romanesco" dialect of Italian, in which the sonnets in question were written. Whyte argues that Garioch was drawn to translation as a way of escaping some of the preconceptions which readers and critics often take to Scots poetry, in particular the notion that "dialect poetry" must "record" or "transcribe" things of the sort that people would actually say. Both the artificiality of the sonnet form and the act of translation itself offer Garioch a way out of that restriction. He goes on to present a rather tenuous argument to the effect that being "a compilation from pre-existing work, making no pretence to originality", Garioch's translations are "a quintessentially post-modern deconstruction of received ideas about the literary text" (p.193).
This, however, is based on the assumption the collection of translations constitutes a single, whole literary text - an assumption which is in fact undermined by all of Whyte's arguments for its status as a deconstruction of the literary text. The second part of the chapter consists of close readings of several of the translated sonnets themselves, focused on Garioch's technical, and in particular, metrical virtuosity. It is noted, for instance, that in sonnet 1479 "Ritual Questions", which records a conversation in which two men briefly greet one another, mention the weather, enquire as to one another's health and family's health, and part, although Garioch follows the metre and rhyme of the original faithfully, he puts it to slightly different use, since the technical exactness of the poem is masked by numerous enjambments, absent from the original. Whyte describes how Garioch worked with the help of English line-for-line cribs, furnished by three collaborators, but had enough Italian to be able to restore details found in the original and omitted from the cribs, a point illustrated in his analysis of sonnet 360, "Wha Gaes By Nicht, Gaes Til His Daith/Chi va la notte, va a la morte", in which material from the crib, the Italian and original material of Garioch's own are interwoven. One particularly interesting close reading in the chapter is that of sonnet 1677, "The Puir Faimly/La famija poverella", which Whyte considers to be a rare failure on Garioch's part. Whyte demonstrates the translation's relative technical weakness, and associates it with the alienness of the content (the "mixture of tenderness, desperate pity and absolute destitution") to the Scottish poetic tradition, in which "a spoken voice in Scots poetry may still carry echoes of the eighteenth century vernacular revival" (p. 205). Also discussed is Garioch's use of a low-register idiom to effect comic lowering in sonnets on religious topics, illustrated by readings of sonnets 811 "The Relicschaw/La mostra de l'erliquie" and 273 "Judgement Day/Er giorno der giudizzio". Finally, White considers at a distance the relationship between Garioch's invention and his eye for Belli's details, concluding, "They are more than a translation because they are not enjoyed ... primarily as a means of access to Belli's originals, but become something different while yet remaining linked, and, in their way, faithful to those."
In Chapter Eleven J. Derrick McLure looks at two translations of Aristophanes, _The Puddocks_ [frogs] and _The Burdies_, by Douglas Young (Young 1958, 1959). This chapter is frustrating, owing to the author's freely admitted inability to read Greek. He begins by outlining the plays' history of production and notes that some of their critical reception was coloured by the critics' inability to understand the Scots. He then puzzles over Young's choice of such obscure and alien material for translation, concluding that the major deciding factor was the universal appeal of much of the humour - scatological, slapstick and surreal - combined with a documented Scottish taste for satire and the grotesque. McClure devotes much energy to showcasing Young's kaleidoscope of styles, registers and varieties, and notes that Young claimed that this reflected a similar polyphony in Aristophanes, but, in contrast to Findlay and Bowman (Chapter Four), is unable to say whether, how or to what extent Young's polyphony _translates_ that of Aristophanes, since he lacks Greek. Aristophanes relies greatly on puns, scatology and bawdry, and McClure documents Young's approach to each of these, substituting Scots puns (often, but not always, relying on obscure Scots vocabulary that would be lost on most audiences) for Greek ones, leaving the toilet humour largely unaltered but toning down the sexual humour, or excising it altogether where it refers to paedophilia. The most interesting portion of the chapter, being the least impaired by McClure's lack of access to the original text, is that dealing with the transplantation/translation of cultural elements. "By retaining all the Greek allusions unchanged, he would ... have rendered ... the plays unintelligible to his audiences. Conversely, a total Scotticisation would have resulted in a discordant cultural clash." McClure shows that Young mixes together Scotticised and Hellenic elements, creating a setting that is Edinburgh and Athens at the same time - "The denizens of Hades include an Aiakos and a Girzie ... the Loch Ness Monsteress ... joins with the Gorgons (albeit from Crail) in a list of terrors..." - though names of places and historical figures tend to be changed to Scottish ones, for instance changing Theseus to Kenneth MacAlpin (Scotland's legendary founder-king).
Finally, the Twelfth Chapter, by Peter Graves and Bjarne Thorup Thomson, explores two collections of Danish ballads by Sir Alexander Gray (Gray 1954, 1958), focusing exclusively on Gray's introductions to the two books and four of the actual ballads. Their interest in the introductions is as a way of getting a handle on Gray's decision to translate into Scots, on the basis of the phylogenetic closeness of the Scots and Danish languages and the corresponding native traditions of folktale-telling and balladry, combined with "a late but clear reflex of those Victorian beliefs in the 'manly' vigour of the languages of the north." (p. 231) They also question Gray's decision to "transplant" rather than merely translate his ballads, by placing them in a Scottish setting and "[ironing out] cultural and generic differences" (p. 235). The first ballad under discussion is "The Power of the Harp/Harpens Kraft", in which a troll living in a stream captures a young bride on the way to her wedding, as it also captured her sisters before her, and her groom, Villemand, subdues the troll by playing softly to it on a golden harp, rescuing his bride and her sisters too. They are mostly concerned with Gray's departures from fidelity to the original, though, unlike many of the authors of preceding chapters, they do not consider these to improve or enhance the text. They are critical of Gray's renaming the hero "William", which they consider to be a poor "'fit' to replace ... the arresting, ambiguous Villemand" (p. 237), and point out a tendency to tidy up and refine the language of the ballads; "In the main, Gray remains faithful to the artful language of Danish balladry ... But where he deviates from it, his favoured direction is towards elaboration, harmonisation and specification, to some extent moving the target text away from the skeletal and the strange" (p. 239). Next "Agnete og Havmanden/Agnete and the Merman" is discussed. The authors first note the overall accuracy and literary quality of the translation, and that in general, where Gray deviates from his source it is in general for the sake of rhyme or metre, and quite in the spirit of the original, but criticise him for his use of narrative tags ("quo' she", "quo' he", and so forth) in dialogue, as they are whole absent in the Danish, and for the change of tone effected by Gray's regularisation of the rhythm and metre; the original is punctuated with irregularities, giving it a quality that is "much more sedate, harsher in tone, and with a more varied pace" compared to the translation, which moves "at an unvarying trot and, in spite of it's subject matter ... [gives] it a fairly light-hearted tone." (p. 245). The third text is "Sir Walter's Daughter/Torbens Datter og hendes Faderbane", which Graves and Thomsen characterise as a starkly minimal tale, in which no place, nor any character but the eponymous Torben is named, and formulaic phrases predominate in the text. They document the ways in which Gray's translation softens this effect, giving the action a named location and fleshing out the formulaic phrases. Finally comes "The Death of Queen Dagmar/Dronning Dagmars Død", an historical ballad telling of the painful illness and death of Queen Dagmar, and her husbands desperate journey across Jutland to reach her one last time. Gray makes a critical error early in his translation by changing the wise women called upon by Dagmar to ease her pain into "wise men o' lear and skill (st.2)" [learning] (quoted p. 248), thus introducing masculinity at the start of the ballad, which in the original does not occur until much later, when Dagmar's illness is realised to be terminal and the King is summoned back home. Otherwise, the authors note Gray's greater fidelity to the original in this case, perhaps related to the better fit between the more authentic, realistic style of the historical ballad and Gray's own poetic temperament, noting only one further exception, which is that when the Queen communicates three requests to the King from beyond the grave, the threefold repetition of the Danish "Bøn" [boon] over three stanzas is translated variously as "request", "asking" and "boon". Graves and Thomson conclude that Gray succeeds in transplanting his ballads into a native Scottish tradition, but at some expense; "he has personalised the impersonal; he has fleshed out the skeletal; he has naturalised the supernatural; he has regularised the irregular." (p. 250)
EVALUATION
In his introduction, Findlay acknowledges that the present volume, "Although ... conceived independently ... can be seen as complementary to an earlier volume in the 'Topics in Translation' series, John Corbett's _Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots_ (1999)" (p.1), a monograph charting the development of literary translation into Scots over five centuries. For any reader coming to Findlay without first having read Corbett, Findlay's short introduction provides an admirably clear and concise synopsis of the relevant historical context for the following essays, contrasting two notable peaks in the history of translation into Scots; the sixteenth century, a period in which Scots spanned the full range of registers up to and including the literary, scholarly and courtly, and translation was driven by a "Renaissance and Europe-wide mood of translating classics into national vernaculars as both a culturo-patriotic act of linguistic independence and as a means of making available to a wider readership the works of classical antiquity," (p.2) and the twentieth century, in which translation into Scots was shocked back to life by the internationalist, modernist and revolutionary impetus of Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance Movement.
Each contribution to the volume is never less than insightful, and the cumulative effect of reading them from cover to cover is the emergence of certain recurrent theoretical themes, particularly the translation of register, and the response of translators to the challenges presented by working with a target language excluded from many types of discourse and subject to considerable erosion of native vocabulary under the influence of Standard English. In chapter one, Brain Holton writes; "As in any translation, get the register wrong, and in particular, the subtle modulations of register that make so much of poetry work - and the whole piece limps." The role of register is revisited again and again in the essays, which tends to come into sharp focus in Scots translation, due to the attrition of many of its registers (those associated with authority and prestige) since the sixteenth century. Several of the works under discussion have taken advantage of this feature of Scots, by selecting source texts written in non-standard, low-register varieties, as in Fo's Lago Maggiore Italian, Tremblay's "joual" or "montréalais" and Belli's Romanesco; similarly, Gray's Danish ballad translations exploit a pre- existing Scots literary register, that of Ballad Scots. In all these cases, the translators may be argued to have chosen texts that could not be done justice in Standard English. This is most notable in the case of Findlay and Bowman's translations of Michel Tremblay, who makes extensive use not only of low-register speech, but also of contrasts of register. By contrast, other of the authors discussed have faced the task of expanding the language into registers not normally available to it, particularly Brian Holton, in deciding not to revert to Standard English to translate high-register speech and legal and religious language in his original, and Robert Garioch in translating George Buchanan's stately, tragic Latin. Thus these essays are illuminating also for translators and scholars of translation used to working with standard target languages, as they make visible and problematise aspects of the task of translation which are, I believe, always present, but usually invisible, just as original literary composition always requires decisions to be made with regard to register and variety, whether covertly or overtly.
My criticisms of the book are few, and should by no means deter any interested party from its enjoyment. As mentioned above, J. Derrick McLure's consideration of Young's translations of Aristophanes might have been far more enlightening had he been found a Hellenist co-author. A dozen chapters is sufficient for a broadly representative selection of texts for discussion, but not a comprehensive one, and with that in mind, it seems that certain authors have been given disproportionate attention; as a provider of source texts Moliere receives two chapters, and Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch two each as translators. There are of course translations neglected here that I would hope to see in the event of a second edition, particularly William Laughton Lorimer's _New Testament in Scots_ (1983), J.K. Annand's _Songs from the Carmina Burana_ (1978) and John Byrne's version of Gogol's _The Government Inspector_ (Gogol 1998), as well as perhaps an editorial epilogue to draw together the common theoretical strands of the chapters, and an appendical anthology of excerpts.
_Frae Ither Tongues_ stands as a groundbreaking tribute to the ingenuity and creativity of the authors behind the modern resurgence in translation into Scots, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in modern Scottish literature, the theory and practice of literary translation, and especially to anyone interested in the role of register in translation, or literary production more generally.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dave Cochran wes learnt Scots as a wee bairn rinnin clorty-kneed roon his
hame toon ae Dumbarton, but has lingered around the higher education
system for so long he can no longer speak it without sounding a trifle
awkward. His first degree, from the University of St. Andrews in 1999, was
in English, with a considerable emphasis on Scottish literature. After a
hiatus in his studies, he enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study
papers in English Language, in order to prepare him for the transition to
the postgraduate study of Linguistics. He is now studying towards an MSc
in Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and his
principal research interests are Stochastic Tree-Substitution Grammars,
the computational modelling of diachronic syntax and interdisciplinary
approaches to Indo-European studies.
