56 Degrees North – on Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics
This episode of 56 Degrees North I interview Paul Malgrati, author of a new book on Robert Burns. Paul was born in France and earned his award-winning PhD in Scottish History and English in 2020. He currently lives in Switzerland where he works as a teacher and researches Scottish literature as an independent scholar. His first book, Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics The Bard of Contention (1914-2014) is forthcoming from EUP in March. Alongside academia, Paul also writes poetry. His debut collection, Poèmes Écossais (2022), which was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, is believed to be the first book of Scots poetry by a non-native Anglophone.
Listen here…
You can also listen on Spotify here.
You can pre-order the book from EUP here (until the end January, you can use the code BURNS30 to knock 30% off the price …):
Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics (edinburghuniversitypress.com)
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A very interesting consideration of political aspects of the Cult of the Poet combined with the grave difficulties in establishing a National Bard that represents the general public in a reasonably coherent way. I didn’t know about the Cold War void or the Westminster debates about the nonforthcoming Stamp, or the contested background of those unattributable poems.
Good discussion of the protean nature of poets and poetry, and how a poet may cultivate their own brand in changeable ways for different interest groups and patrons.
I think the questions of whether Burns was a Scottish nationalist, or egalitarian, or republican (even if limited to ‘during a certain period of life’) are essentially unanswerable, not very interesting, and rather misses the point of what poetry is (the nature of poetic truths being falsehoods, not to mention writing personas). It is easy to see how Burns’ poetry and reported life fits with the Patriarchy. Burns should get credit for his archival work in preserving older Scottish songs and poems.
In terms of poetic context and fidelity, I guess that although context is usually stripped from published poetry, it is usually published (if not quoted) in full; unlike, say, the theatrical work of England’s National Bard, Shakespeare, whose plays usually suffer from what Germaine Greer calls ‘judicious barbering’ in production. I watched Orson Welles’ butchered Macbeth on Burns Night. I’m not sure how fidelity is preserved in either case during translation.
There is, of course, a lot of poetry (and poetic truths aka falsehoods) in religion, not just in scripture and hymns. You can have as many poetic truths coexisting on the head of a pin as you like, they are unamenable to logical refutation by any means including comparison and contrast. That’s why it is so easy for Conservative Unionists, Labour, SNP, USAmerican white supremacists and Soviet egalitarianists to claim Burns for themselves. The value of poets like Burns lies elsewhere, and I think this interview highlights some significant points in history, the Revolutions that made their imprint, the battle for universal suffrage, the Great War, Cold War, culture wars and so forth looking for champions to rally and dragons to slay.