Feature by Morag MacInnes
James Robertson
1 Oct 2009 in Writing
Revitalising Scots Language
James Robertson visited Orkney to read from new work recently, and MORAG MACINNES took the chance to catch up with his doings in the 100 Acre Wood and elsewhere.
JAMES Robertson is a well known Scottish author. He is a poet, a childrens’ story writer, he has won the Saltire Award. Much of his work touches on Scottish themes which I find very resonant – Calvinism, and our strife–torn history casts a long shadow. Firstly, though, we talked about his childrens’ stories, written in Scots.
JAMES ROBERTSON: Itchy Coo is an imprint that was set up in 2002. Its aim was to publish “braw books for bairns o aa ages” – an idea fellow writer Matthew Fitt and I had. There’s been a sea change in educational attitudes to Scots. Gone are the days, to a large extent, when you would get beaten up by the teacher for saying ‘dinnae’ or ‘aye’. In its place came recognition that it would be better to encourage children and make them more articulate both in their dialect, and in formal English.
James Robertson and Matthew Fitt
We realised there was a lack of resources, and teachers didn’t know how to bring Scots into the classroom. They themselves had gone through an education system where it was frowned upon, regarded as second rate. So we set about trying to produce a range of books which could be used all the way through school.
We got Arts Council funding and went into partnership with Black and White publishing in Edinburgh. There was a need and a demand – in the last seven years we’ve published 34 titles, I think, from board books to quite a sophisticated anthology, The Smoky Smirr o Rain, which presents all kinds of Scots writing, from 600 years ago to the present day, for senior pupils.
MORAG MACINNES: What’s the reception from teachers been like?
JAMES ROBERTSON: Very enthusiastic, especially at primary school level. No problem at all. There’s still some resistance at secondary level – but that’s to do with the fact they’ve got such a packed curriculum – it’s always sourced through the English department, and we’re appreciative of the difficulties. Fundamentally everyone is pretty sympathetic, though. People are much more aware of Scottish literature and culture than they were half a century ago.
MORAG MACINNES: It’s about ownership, isn’t it? When you hear a story about Katie’s Coo or Katie’s hoose it’s very different from having Winnie the Pooh read to you… of course there’s a complication in that lots of teachers in Scotland are English! They’re approaching this as they would a foreign language, perhaps?
JAMES ROBERTSON: Yeaah… but they are sometimes more enthusiastic than others who have still got a chip on their shoulder about ‘language’ – that dialect, or Scots, is going to hold you back, be detrimental to your future. We find that if you encourage children to value their Scots, they’ll have a better understanding of the relationship between Scots and English. They value their English because they no longer regard Scots as ‘bad English’ or slang. Linguistically it’s got its own value.
MORAG MACINNES: I remember well, and you will too, the two languages we had – one for the playground and one you ‘pit on’ for the classroom. Your work seems to accord playground language with a vitality and value of its own. Can I ask you about translation? Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, for example, becomes Sleekit Mr Tod – which seems to me to have a whole different resonance. Do you find translation is about creating?
JAMES ROBERTSON: You can do a literal translation, but then you get a literal text. If you recreate the text what you get is a different thing aathegither. I was trying to find an alliterative adjective to go with Tod – tremendous, say, or terrific – but it just didnae ring true. Then I thought, if you are going to be a fantastic fox you probably have to be a bit sleekit! It’s not a direct translation but I think it’s in the spirit of the book.
The Smoky Smirr o Rain
The first of those translations, The Twits, which Matthew did, became The Eejits. I was editing him. Sometimes he was moving quite far from the text, being incredibly creative, and I had to pull him back a bittie – but we tried to be flexible. The Roald Dahl estate have been fantastically supportive of this – and I think we’ve captured the spirit of the books. We tried to retain all the qualities and give them a new dimension. The bairns absolutely love them. They don’t always know all the vocabulary but that doesn’t matter… you can sit the English version against the Scots, as a teaching resource, and you can compare, and see why and how the language is going in different directions.
MORAG MACINNES: I find it’s very difficult if you are a poet working in dialect to explain why words which are no longer used are still important. And the world of poetry I was introduced to – Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, the poets I had at school – it was a different language. The feeling of coming home even when I see your titles – The Smoky Smirr of Rain sounds just like what’s outside the window!
JAMES ROBERTSON: All words are imported into us. Until you are taught a new English word you are not using that word either; so it seems to me an artificial argument, the one against using Scots words that are maybe not in common currency. At Itchy Coo, when we use words that are not that well known, inevitably we come across a cluster of folk – including children – who know and use those words. Bairns in West Lothian were still familiar with the word ‘urchin’ for a hedgehog, for example. What I term ‘deep language’ is there – the skeleton. Lots of people have the bones of it though the flesh is gone – but to put that back on is not so hard.
MORAG MACINNES: You’ve translated Winnie the Pooh. Now, it’s written in such a quintessentially southern English culturally dominant dialect, strange to most Scots, and yet – like the Malory Towers boarding school books, and Just William – I loved it, perhaps because the tone and the world was so different. I’ll read the original iconic first lines:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump bump bump on the back of his head.
Now will you read your version?
JAMES ROBERTSON: (reads)
Yon’s Edward Bear cumin doon the sterr, dunch dunch dunch oan the back o his heid.
There’s not a huge difference – but the shift in terms of what it does to the book is massive. My first reaction was no, it’s not going to work in Scots – but I started to play about with it and I realised that it does. The very annoying Christopher Robin becomes a bit more gallus and Scottish. It’s not a national identity thing! He just shifts his character as do the other animals – Piglet becomes Wee Grumphie and I hear him with an annoying voice, a wee feartie who wants to be brave and he cannae… I hear them in a way I never heard the voices in the original. Eeyore (Hee Haw) – he’s like a Reverend I. M Jolly character. For example, when Pooh meets him, he says, ‘guid moarnin. If it IS a guid moarnin … an ah hae ma doots…’
MORAG MACINNES: Isn’t there a shift too in the way that you appreciate class? Rabbit is upwardly mobile lower middleclass. Kanga (the single parent) and Piglet are is low down in the hierarchy, as is Pooh. I kind of appreciated this in English, certainly when I read it to my own kids, but I never gave the characters accents to suit. I think it’s easier in Scots?
JAMES ROBERTSON: One of the most popular stories I tell is the one where Heehaw has a birthday. Pooh goes to Owl – or Howlet as we call him – and asks him to write Happy Birthday on a pot he’s gaun tae gie him. Howlet is a fraud. He cannae spell so he makes it up. As a child you are aware something’s going on. As an adult you see that he’s pullin’ the wool ower folk’s eyes. Pooh swallows it! When I read those sections oot I know who defers to whom. Pooh’s most comfortable in the company of Wee Grumphie. What surprised me was how easily it worked. We’re going to do The House at Pooh Corner next year.
MORAG MACINNES: Ah – Tigger! Have you got his accent? Is he maybe a stroppy Glaswegian?
JAMES ROBERTSON: Maybe he could be a west coaster!
MORAG MACINNES: What about the novels? Readers will know The Fanatic, which was a fantastic investigation of Covenanting and guilt, and put you on the literary map – then there was Joseph Knight, about slavery and guilt and our long experience of Scots exporting themselves elsewhere… and then The Testament of Gideon Mack, about a man meeting the Devil. What’s your motivation?
JAMES ROBERTSON: I am fascinated by the passage of time and what that does to our understanding of who we are, particularly in a country like Scotland that’s in the process of rediscovering itself. We keep revisiting the past to see where we’ve been and perhaps what we’re moving towards. Recently there’s been a strong political dimension to that, too. The past changes every time you look at it. It’s an obvious point that it influences the future – but actually we all find the present influences the past.
The Fanatic explored a dark passage just prior to the Union of Parliaments: religious strife, folk battling out what sort of theocratic system they were gonnae impose on us. There were people imprisoned for their beliefs; women being hauled up for witchcraft – it seems every time there were political or economic upsets a scapegoat was needed….
MORAG MACINNES: And it’s aye a woman!
JAMES ROBERTSON: Yes, and within a short space of time of all that upheaval you move into the Enlightenment…
MORAG ROBERTSON: Rationality and balance…
JAMES ROBERTSON: So it’s never made sense to me to say, thank God that’s Scottish history over, now we can move into the present. A proportion of the elements that made the 18th century what it was come from the 17th century. I wanted to explore that, with a parallel story set just before the 1997 election which finally ushered out the Conservatives and ushered in Labour, who delivered a Scottish Government [Parliament]. So the tales are three hundred years apart but only three miles geographically speaking.
It’s the same in Joseph Knight – if we are moving into a future where we have to take more responsibility for our own affairs, then we also take responsibility for our past – accept and move on. I had never heard Knight’s story when I started the book – someone came to me with it. He was a slave who won his freedom in the law courts and married a Dundee lass.
MORAG MACINNES: I think you are investigating hidden history here – there have always been these people but none of the school books mentioned them, a bit like the multicultural melting pot Orkney has always been.
JAMES ROBERTSON: We are a diverse culture and that’s a good thing nationally and at local level. Orkney is a different place from Glasgow or Edinburgh. You can’t pretend there’s a unity that binds us all together in a simple way. But if you recognise that there’s a prospect we can move into a tolerant multicultural future that echoes the melting pot of nationalities who’ve lived here – that’s what Joseph Knight is addressing in a sense.
Like your example – in the 18th century and 19th century in Orkney everybody visited or settled, but that gets lost in official history. Knight had been obscured because he was not seen to be important. I brought him out of the shadows. We’re what McIlvanney describes as a ‘mongrel nation’, and though I’m in favour of self government for Scotland, (I’ve deliberately avoided the term independence because I’m not sure what it means) I absolutely resist any nationalism about blood and soil and race.
MORAG MACINNES: When a nation becomes more confident it can then become a bit ironic about the wee kiltie plastic dolls?
JAMES ROBERTSON: Maybe the sense that you’ve come through being a second nation informs your literature
MORAG MACINNES: Does The Testament of Gideon Mack draw on your own past? Your experience of a fairly grey Calvinistic life? Would that be true?
JAMES ROBERTSON: Only up to a point – I’m not a son of the manse like him, but I did go to a wee boarding school in Stirling which had a strong religious ethos. I didn’t have a terribly austere upbringing, but it was religious. I ditched it all when I was thirteen or fourteen, as Gideon does in the book, but for very different reasons. Maybe I’m a Presbyterian agnostic – the doubts and the ability to question that stuff, which Presbyterianism does, is still very much inside me. So I experienced the structure of belief but it’s not autobiographical. It is very moral though; that feeling there’s a moral imperative to behave yourself and do the right thing, which Gideon has.
I wanted to explore what happens, if like Gideon, you reject religion and move from being part of a religious society. Do we lose something in the mad rush to secularism, which is quite related to the mad rush to consumerism? Look at the difference in a Scottish Sunday – do we then by ditching a set of values end up with another set which aren’t values at all?
MORAG MACINNES: Not so much research for the next book, since you’ve lived through the time you’re writing about?
JAMES ROBERTSON: Yes and no! It’s set between1950 and 2007, and you forget so much! It’s a big panoramic novel about political and social change, and there are bound to be people saying: aw, but you havenae talked aboot this, or that’s no how I saw it – but it’s an important story.
MORAG MACINNES: You’ve almost got to be hovering above it all, and it’s easier to do that about events 100 years ago?
JAMES ROBERTSON: It is in a sense. There are fewer people around to challenge you! Writing about now – everybody will! It’s risky. I hadn’t a clue whether The Testament of Gideon Mack would be relevant – and people thought it was. That’s the most frightening thing about being a writer. You can put three or four years into something and realise that people aren’t very interested.
The difficulty with this close-to-the-present book is the politics – you have to put in information, so sometimes you risk telling, not showing. But if you remove the info do they understand the story? You’re constantly juggling, providing the context with telling the tale.
MORAG MACINNES: Finally, the way you use Scots intertwined with English in the novels – how do you stand on that?
JAMES ROBERTSON: It’s a constant battle between the sound and what’s reproduced on the page. My publishers have been good, but the more you turn the Scots on the more you may turn the readership off. The Fanatic and Joseph Knight haven’t been published in North America because they say they can’t cope with the language. I think that’s mealymouthed – I can’t believe Americans won’t cope with challenging language if it’s good enough.
Even within Scotland, some readers don’t rise to the challenge. Every writer has to address the issue and they make different decisions. Ian Rankin on the one hand does not use Scots in his books, but you know that’s the sound. James Kelman has a particular way of representing the Glaswegian. Matthew Fitt wrote a sci fi novel in full-on
Scots, no like anything heard on the streets but creative and challenging. As for myself, in every book I come up with a different solution.
MORAG MACINNES: It’s part of a revitalisation of Scots language when writers feel confident to try all sorts of forms and variants… maybe you’re part of a new renaissance!
JAMES ROBERTSON: Perhaps! Me and plenty other folk.
MORAG MACINNES: Many thanks, James.
