A Scottish Poet Speaks in Rotterdam

In June 1978, a Scottish poet named Sorley MacLean stood in front of people in Rotterdam. He read poems in Scottish Gaelic. The place was a big concert hall. Many poets from many countries were there. They spoke different languages—Catalan, Turkish, Hebrew, Japanese, and more.

A woman named Vera Illès listened to MacLean. She wrote about what she heard. She said his Gaelic sounded old and beautiful. She said it sounded like it came from a long time ago.

Illès wrote that the best part of the evening was hearing so many different languages one after another. Together they made a beautiful sound.

She explained something important. When you hear a poem in a language you do not know, you hear the sound of the language. You do not understand the words. But you hear how beautiful the language is.

Two weeks later, a newspaper talked to MacLean. They asked him why he wrote in Gaelic. He said, "Because it is my first language. The language I learned at home. It is the language of the people I belong to."

MacLean said eighty thousand people spoke Scottish Gaelic. More people were learning it. The language was not dead.

The newspaper asked what was important in his poems. MacLean said he loved poems that were beautiful and emotional. He also loved poems that had ideas in them. He said he cared about people and the world. He did not write only for other poets.

MacLean talked about a famous poet named John Keats. He said Keats had an idea about the best kind of poetry. The best poetry comes from someone who feels sad about the world's pain and cannot stop thinking about it. MacLean believed this was true.

But MacLean had a problem. Most ordinary people did not read poetry. Poets and regular people were far apart. He did not know how to fix this.

He said one old Scottish poet named Robert Burns had reached ordinary people. Burns was very famous. But MacLean did not know anyone else who had done this.

MacLean said the problem came from schools and newspapers. Schools did not teach people to read poetry. Newspapers did not show poetry to people. So people did not read it.

Three months later, another famous Scottish poet died. His name was Hugh MacDiarmid. He was eighty-six years old. Dutch newspapers wrote about him.

MacDiarmid wrote very difficult poems. He used old Gaelic words and new English words and local Scottish words all together. Other poets loved his work. But most Scottish people could not read it.

MacDiarmid loved Scotland very much. He also loved communism. He wrote poems about Lenin. He wanted Scotland to be independent.

MacDiarmid said he did not want to go back to the past. He said Scotland was like a broken clock. He wanted to fix it.

MacDiarmid won many honors. Universities gave him degrees. But his own town did not want to honor him. Still, he wanted to be buried there when he died.

In the summer of 1978, MacLean stood in Rotterdam and spoke in Gaelic. Almost no one there understood the words. But they heard the beautiful sound of the language. That moment was not a fix for the problem. But it showed something real and true—the beauty of a language, even when people could not understand the words.