The Benefits of Being French for Learning Scots: Paul Malgrati on Poetry, Translation, and Research

Interview with French-born poet, translator, and Burns scholar Paul Malgrati. His debut collection, shortlisted for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, is believed to be the first book of poetry written in Scots by a non-native Anglophone. His monograph Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics: The Bard of Contention (1914-2014), published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023, was reviewed for the GRB by Neil Young.

Interview by Petra Johana Poncarová

Glasgow Review of Books: You are an academic, a translator, and a poet. How do the other two strands of your work influence your own writing?

Paul Malgrati: I would be lying if I pretended these activities were not intimately linked. My debut poetry collection in the Scots language, Poèmes Ecossais (2022), was conceived alongside my PhD research on Robert Burns, which I completed at St Andrews in the late 2010s. As part of my research, I needed to learn Scots, and creative translation to and from the language became integral to this process. Before beginning my PhD, I translated French poets – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others – into Scots, which helped me familiarise myself with Scots dictionaries and connect with an online community of speakers and learners whose feedback was invaluable at the time. While I wouldn’t rate these early translations highly now, they were essential steps in my learning process, enabling me to access the Scots language and tradition from both critical and creative angles.

GRB: And how do you see all of them at the current moment?

PM: Today, almost a decade from that initial stage, poetry, translation, and academic research remain tightly intertwined. I view translation as the core task of any poet: rendering difficult thoughts or unspeakable feelings into human words. Indeed, communication across languages is only one aspect of translation. I am increasingly interested in the various domains of life, art, and science where translation theory might apply. The wisdom of the translator lies in the hackneyed Italian adage traduttore, traditore—’translator, traitor’—which acknowledges both what is preserved and what is inevitably lost in the act of communication, and more broadly, I would argue, in any process of depiction or denotation. Our limited syntax, grammar, and dictionaries can capture only so much. This is why translation is essential: it enriches the ‘words of the tribe’ (to quote Mallarmé) with imported resources. This is also why we need poets: to labour on the arduous rift between human and non-human languages and return home with a mixed bag of raw materials and unexpected news.

GRB: When your debut collection appeared, it was announced as the first volume of poems in Scots written by a poet who is not a native speaker of either Scots or English. When it comes to Gaelic literature, the tradition of new users who became acclaimed writers is much more prominent and established. How would you describe your position in that sense?

PM: This is an excellent point, which goes right to the heart of the difference between Scots and Gaelic. Both of these languages share a history of oppression and a legacy of conflicts with Standard English (and with each other, too). Yet, linguistically, for the most part, this is where their similarity ends. While Gaelic belongs to the Celtic family of languages, distinct from the Anglophone world, Scots is part of the broader Anglo-Saxon family. In other words, unlike Gaelic, the difference between Scots and English is more social and cultural than strictly linguistic. This results in a significant difference for potential learners.

Historically, most Gaelic or Scots learners have come from either the Anglosphere or the Celtic sphere, owing to obvious geographical and cultural links. For Anglophones, Gaelic is primarily a linguistic challenge, which only assiduous work and immersion might overcome. This is arduous work, but the reward is important, as it provides access to a language which, in the contemporary Scottish context, is seen as increasingly prestigious, despite centuries of vilification.

GRB: What would be the greatest challenges in learning Scots?

PM: By contrast, Scots-speaking is primarily a social challenge for potential Anglophone learners. Of course, learners must acquire vocabulary and grammar, as well as navigate Scots’ many dialectal subtleties. But the greatest challenge for non-Scots Anglophone learners (never mind learner-writers) is to use a language that has been primarily codified as a working-class or agricultural sociolect and whose status remains heavily contested in Scotland today. The risk of faux pas is high, from inadvertent middle-class patronisation to outright cultural appropriation. This is why, I think, most Scotophiles from abroad have steered clear of Scots. The New Zealander Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–1975), who moved to Edinburgh aged fifteen, was a rarely convincing exception to this. More recently, the Yorkshire-born Sara Clark and the England-raised David Bleiman are amongst the few Anglophones who have managed rather adroitly to tiptoe into Scots.

GRB: And for a native speaker of French?

PM: As for me, my situation as a non-native Anglophone, though challenging linguistically, proved a blessing socially and culturally. The broader folklore of the ‘Auld Alliance’ encouraged kind responses to my attempts at speaking and writing in Scots. I rarely met with the kinds of barriers that most native Anglophones face when journeying into Scots. Of course, I also worked at it. I spent years reading about and observing the various uses of the language, developing an understanding of what seemed appropriate depending on literary or social situations. My background also helped me, as someone who grew up in Paris’s suburbs and was accustomed to navigating various strands of French from a young age, ranging from academic writing to the rich Parisian argot. But overall, I believe that my experience in Scots paradoxically benefitted from my French origins. This is in contrast to the many Anglophone authors whose commitment to Scotland might find a safer conduit through Gaelic than via Scots.

GRB: Did you learn Scots primarily through poetry?

PM: Not only, no. Poetry and bookish translation exercises were essential in this process, of course. But so was the social wealth of my Scottish life: my longstanding Dundonian partner and her family, in particular. They introduced me not only to various words and idioms but also to situations, themes, and aspects of popular culture that later fuelled my Scots works.

GRB: You wrote a monograph on Robert Burns – does he influence your writing in Scots?

PM: Although I learnt Scots in tandem with my research on Burns, I rarely reference or quote him directly in my writing. His influence is perhaps more apparent in my choice of working-class topics and themes, my interest, sometimes, in depicting Scottish local life, and my nods to radical aspects of Scottish history. My occasional use of Scottish stanzas (Habbie or Christ’s Kirk) also reflects Burns’s broader influence in promoting these forms within the Scots tradition.

GRB: Who are the other poets who have been especially important to you?

PM: Beyond Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid is the Scottish poet whom I have read and studied most extensively. His protean verse, combined with his absolutist dream of a poetic Scotland, continues to inspire me, even though I disagree with some of his political and aesthetic views. In contemporary Scots writing, Kathleen Jamie, W.N. Herbert, Roseanne Watt, Harry Josephine Giles, and Colin Bramwell have all impacted me, prompting me to deploy Scots boldly while preserving a demanding approach to poetic craft. During my PhD years, my co-supervisor, Robert Crawford, was also an early mentor. He encouraged me to blend French and Scots in my poems, a combination that became the core theme of my debut collection.

Beyond Scotland, my inspiration remains very French. The symbolists Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry remain a constant source of both poetic and philosophical delight, and their work is where I turn whenever doubting the possibility of artistic perfection.

GRB: Apart from Scots and English, you also use your native French – and as the two poems featured here show – other languages too. What does this multilingual practice mean to you – and what do you want to bring into Scottish writing through it?

PM: Yes, multilingual, ‘macaronic’ poetry is a genre that I care particularly about. Of course, this stems from my personal situation between France and Scotland. But as you suggest, there is a deeper purpose at work.

Multilingualism has played varying roles in modern poetry. For example, the sprawling interwar works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Hugh MacDiarmid include many rogue translations alongside quotes in myriad tongues. However, their hybrid styles seem less focused on foregrounding foreign texts and more intent on absorbing them—integrating these elements into a sweeping, universal worldview where English (for Pound) or Scots (for MacDiarmid) ultimately dominates. While exciting and groundbreaking at the time, these works’ imperialist overtones are problematic—especially when Scots is made to replicate the kind of linguistic domination which historically undermined it.

By contrast, I aspire to a more egalitarian multilingual purpose. Instead of computing languages to fuel the power of an overarching tongue, I prefer a more neutral, respectful juxtaposition. This aims to reflect the limited power of each language, capable of rendering a portion of reality but never encompassing it entirely. In my multilingual poems, each language contributes to understanding the full meaning—though that ‘full’ meaning often gestures toward interpretations beyond my intentions as an author and, further, beyond our current human grasp of the reality at hand.

GRB: And which project keeps you most busy at present?

PM: I am increasingly convinced of the ecological potential of multilingual poetry. Its juxtapositions reflect the scope and limits of each human tongue. But more constructively, it can also encourage a connection with both formal and non-human kinds of languages. Spores, scents, DNA, mycorrhizal networks, alongside musical notation, mathematics, and binary coding all interest me as various forms of languages. However, my aim is not to synthesise them. Unlike MacDiarmid, my goal is not to craft a ‘total’ form of poetry.”. My ambition is to be precise rather than all-encompassing, using as many languages as necessary to render a particular situation, feeling, or reality. In a Scottish context, this means drawing on all available resources to depict the nation’s form(s)—to help define its scope, regions, relations, and beginnings and borders as a unique yet changeable reality. This is an ongoing project, of course, and a direction which I’ve only begun to follow recently. So I’ll away now, and keep on working.

This is part of a collaborative project between Glasgow Review of Books and Bella Caledonia. The Glasgow Review of Books is an online journal which publishes critical reviews, essays and interviews as well as writing on translation. They accept work in any of the languages of Scotland – English, Gàidhlig and Scots.