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SRIOLEEE

THE IMMORTAL MEMORY

Scottish poet links MacDiarmid’s

views, Soviet opinions of Burns

JANUARY 24 is Burns night.
In nearly every country of the
world, and not least in the Soviet
Union, lovers of Scottish poetry
will foregather and the memory
of the Scots poet will be toasted
with all the honors.

Now tet’s court disaster at the
outset by admitting that the old
style Burns supper could be one
of the most ghastly functions
known to man.

However, the more grotesque
of these functions were satirised
out of existence by Hugh Mac-
Diarmid a quarter of a century
ago im a cruel poem which is
the sting in Pennywheep’s tail:

Thought may demit

Its functions fit

While still to thee, O Burns,

The punctual stomach of they

people turns.

Belly will praise

Thee all its days

And spread to all nations

Thy fame in belchings and

regurgitations . . .

This year, I’m glad to say,
there's likely to be a good deal
less nonsense about the Burns
orations.

* * *

LET’S SEE what a Soviet cri-
tic has to say about all this,

In 1949 Samuel Marshak, the
latest in a long line of Russian
translators of Burns, was elect-
ed to honorary. life membership
of the Scottish USSR Society.

The following is an extract
from the letter of thanks which
he sent to the general secretary
of the society: :

“The Scots, like my own peo-
ple, appreciate firm, true and
invariable friendship.. It was
not in vain that your great poet
Robert Burns sang of friendship
and dedicated his best songs to
it:

“Our people respect and esteem

Scotland and the Scottish peo-
ple. Lermontov, that great poet
of my own country, sang of
yours ‘like a Scottish harp’,
“The poems of Robert Burns

were first translated nearly 100

years ago — with love and deep
understanding — by the poet
Mikhail Mikhailov; this writer
was exiled by the Tsar of those
days to Siberia, where he lost
his eyesight.

“But only since the great Oc-
tober Revolution have the ins-
piring works of Robert Burns,
and all world literature for that
matter, become available to hun-
dreds of thousands, indeed mil-
lions, of people in my native
land — ‘in cities ‘as well as in
collective’ farms, and in ‘the

‘smallest ‘workers’ séttlements.”

x x *

SOME MAY find it a trifle
incongruous that Burns, who be-
longs to a small national culture,
should have achieved such a
fabulous popularity in the Soviet
Union. : anes
. They may feel that a writer
who, obstinately continued to use
the vernacular when he was
quite capable of writing English
was ina certain sense “reactio-
nary”.

Now this question of langu-

age: and its relation to culture
is, by no.meang a, new one,
Burns himself was got at by
dozens of well-meaning imbeciles
who entreated him to abandon
Scots and write “elegantly” in
the stilted metropolitan jargon
of his own day.

‘Luckily for Scotland and for
the world, he was ‘far too’ big
a man to ‘fall for this sort of
talk, and he seldom deviated.
from the. natural path of his

own genius.

In a number of amusing ver-
ses he trounced these havering
idiots, and with them every
crusty academic critic who ever
lived:

Whit’s a’ your jargon o’ your

“schools,”

‘Your Latin names for horns

and stools?

If honest nature made ye fools

Whit sairs your grammars?

Ye’d better ta’en up spades

_and sho’els
Or knappin’ hammers!

A set_o’ dull conceited hashes

Confuse their brains in College

classes.

They gang in stirks, an’ come

oot asses,
Plain truth tae speak,

An’ syne — they think tae

climb Parnassus
By dint o’ Greek!
; * * *

IN OUR DAY a great din has
started’ in Scotland on this very
Same issue. Hugh MacDiarmid
author of the Hymns to Lenin,
who is now universally recog-
nised as the greatest Scottish
poet since Burns, has had to
contend with much the same
sort of opposition — partly doc-
trainaire, partly philistine, most-
ly just plain ga-ga. ‘

One of the texts he has most
frequently quoted is the follow-
ing passage from a speech of
Stalin:

“Soviet people hold that each
nation — whether big or small
— has its own qualitative pecu-
liarities, - its specific nature,
which belong only to

peculiar features form the con-
tribution which each nation
makes to the common treasury

‘of world culture, supplementing

and enriching it.” ;
Since he first appeared as, a
major figure on the Scottish
literary scene with the publica-
tion of Sangsehaw in 1925, Mac-
Diarmid has never tired of point-
ing eout, with patience, learning
and logic, that no nation can
make this contribution if it de-
nies its own past, obscures its
own tradition, and lets the green
garden of its heritage become
an overgrown wilderness.
When the controversy flared
up again in 1947 a great deal
of acrimonious nonsense was
said and written (and not only
on the one side), but no one
ever succeeded in  disproving

» MacDiarmid’s two main conten-

tions:

it and
which other nations lack. ‘These

i

ROBERT BURNS
Widely read in the USSR

e@ No Scottish writer can af-
ford to neglect the Gaelic hin-
terland behind his country’s cul-
ture.

@ Scottish writers who have
not got the Gaelic tend to write
better when using Lallans (Scot
Lowland speech) than when us-
ing English,

* * * ‘

ON THE WHOLE, I think we
may truly say of MacDiarmid,
as N. G. Chernyshevsky said of
Pushkin, that’ he has a raised
literature to the dignity of a
national cause in his country. ;

Among the writers who .have
supported. him on this issue is
Sean O’Casey, the great Irish
dramatist. In a letter commend-
ing the work of the Clyde Group
of poets and painters now based
on Glasgow, O’Casey wrote:

“In them, (the poems of the
Clyde Group) I see Alba her-
self, and Glasgow a great city;

and the Clyde a symbol of Mac-

Lean ... Lallans will help (as
well as being lovely) to purify
away the utter insignificance
and respectable indecency of
present-day newspaper English.

Fill up your glasses then, you
lovers of our songs and dances—

‘fill ‘up with the real Mackay,

for even in these hard days it’s
a poor man who cant scrounge
a drop in honor of Rabbie — be
upstanding, and drain your gias-
ses’ with me to the Immortal
Memory!

—HAMISH HEWN: DERSON 5

‘BUT YE ARE THE PEOPLE’.

VANCOUVER

minster 2282].

and North Vancouver.

Peace play at Royal City

THEATRE
three-act production, Hal Griffin’s But Ye Are The
People, will be presented in New Westminster’s Holly-
wood Bowl this coming Sunday, January 21.
under the auspices of New Westminster Peace Council.

Information on advance tickekts at 50 cents may ‘be
obtained by calling Mrs. Nancy Hamilton, New West-

A peace play around the theme of a small town
hewspaper editor forced to choose between his anti-
war sentiments and his business interests, But Ye Are
The People has already been well received in Vancouver

OF ACTION’s first

8 p.m.

GUIDE TO GOOD READING

Montreal writers produce
new literory magazine

THE FIRST ISSUE ofa new
progressive literar y magazine,
Canadian Writing, is now. avail-
able at the People’s Cooperative
Bookstore, 337 West Pender, here.
It is the production of the Mon-
treal ‘Writers’ Workshop. ~The
editors state that the purpose of
the magazine is to help create a
Canadian literature whose “real-
ism is as broad and as deep and
as varied as life itself”? which
“must include within its range
the two central concerns of mod-
ern man, namely peace and a
secure livelihood.”

In general, the writing of the
magazine is marked by sensitivity,
sincerity, and a desire to come to
grips with the problems of Canada

_ and its culture in the modern

world. These enable the contribu-
tors to Canadian Writing to
reveal some of the pain, degrada-
tion, and frustration, produced by
dying capitalism. j

The short stories portray the
brutality of the repression of the
Negro in the United States, the
futility of the life of a Montreal
society woman, and the insulting
insensibility of a doctor to the
birth of a worker’s child:

However, the courage and hu-
mor of the worker and farmer,
the main heroes of the. conflicts
of real life in Canada, are unfor-
tunately largely missing. The re-
sult is too much of a tone of
futility which on at least one occa-
sion results in realism’s opposite
—helpless subjectivity.

Thus one of the poems tells how
the poet in a restaurant opposes
a loud-mouth who wants to drop
the atom bomb on Russia and
kill off all the Russians, women
and children included. The spokes-

‘LIFELONG STAND FOR DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES

ist and fighter for peace is. ex-
pressed in Soviet Art, organ of
the Committee of Arts in the
USSR. "In a series of articles
devoted to the winners of the
International Peace Prizes
awarded at Warsaw in Novem-
ber, a contributor to this period-
ical, N. Gavrilov, commends sev-
cral recent works by Picasso, in-
cluding his portrait of Paul
Langevin, and describes the art-
ist as truly serving the people
With his art.

All his life, Picasso has re-
mained ‘faithful to democratic
principles, he writes, singling
out for favorable comment. the
alburn Dreams and Lies of Gen-
eral Eranco which Picasso pro-

Guced when he served the Span-
ish Republican government as
director of the Prado Museum
in Madrid.

In his Guernica, the artist re-
plied to the inhuman barbarism
of the fascists. During . the
German ‘occupation of France
Picasso- came to recognize how
much the Communist party
could help him to see the truth
and to become an active par-
ticipant in the struggle for peace
and freedom.

“Some people think that the
party is in some way indebted
to them.” he 1s described as
saying in this connection. “That
is not true. We are all indebt-
ed to the party.” — ay

The Soviet critic pays a tri-

_ ‘Soviet Art’ lauds Picasso’s wor

PRAISE FOR Picasso the art-_

bute to Picasso’s sculpture, “The
Shepherd and the Lambkin”
which was erected in the small
Provencal town of Vallory where
the artist now lives and works,
and which has been described

as a symbol of the victory of

the people over the monsters
of war. .

Picasso ‘he writes, is a public-
spirited man who knows that
the link between personal and
social activities is indivisible, as
was shown by his’ refusal to
participate in the officially-spon-
sored exhibition of his work in
London at the, time of Attlee’s
police-measures against the
Sheffield Peace Congress.

It is thus not surprising, the
Soviet. critic writes, that the

/

man for peace is shamed into sil-
ence and flight by the atomaniac
and the hostility of the people
around him,

I saw some faces round about

were shocked,
- At me, not him.

It needs to be said that the
common people of Canada are
shocked by the advocates of atom-
ic war, not by the spokesman for
peace. :

The note which should be more
typical of the magazine is sounded
in a poem by Maurice Whitbread.

‘The city and the bomber

Are the work of man,

And we have lived here in the
city ;

Longer than any bomber’s span.

_And we will emerge

Out of the dust and the pain
And the bomber will pass
And we will move on again.

Besides stories and poems, Can-
adian Writing contains a. survey
of Canadian composers, articles
on American jazz and Rosselini’s
films, and a review of a recent
book on the growth of Montreal.

The publication of Canadian
Writing is in itself an act of faith
and courage. For its virtues, and
in spite of its weaknesses which
it is to be hoped are those of a
first effort, it should be widely
read and supported—including the
contribution of material, and of-
fering of frank and friendly criti-
cism. On its part, the Montreal
group of writers should strive to
come closer to the spirit of the
working class, and reach out to-
wards similar groups of writers
across Canada.— DON FRASER.

-

;

for peace

work of Picasso should arouse
the hatred and anger of reac-
tionaries or that his dove sym-
bol should have gained world-
wide popularity among ordinary.
people.

There are important collections
of Pablo Picasso’s early paint-
ings both in Moscow and Lenin-
grad. The Hermitage Museum,
now extended to include many
rooms of the Winter Palace, has
a room full of Picasso paintings,
most of them executed over 40
years
private Russian collectors. The
Moscow collection of Picasso
originally formed part of the
Shchiukin Collection, -now  in-
corporated into the Gallery of
Modern Western Art.—RALPH
PARKER.

PACIEIO TRIBUNE — JANUARY 19, 1951 — Page 10

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