Sorley MacLean's Oracle: How a Scottish Poet Found His Voice in Rotterdam

In June 1978, Sorley MacLean stood before a Rotterdam audience at Poetry International, his Scottish Gaelic words filling De Doelen concert hall alongside the voices of poets from twenty countries. The ninth edition of the festival had drawn leading poets from across Europe and beyond, and on the evening of June 15th, the fourth day of the festival, the multilingual performance reached something like a crescendo. NRC Handelsblad critic Vera Illès sat in the audience and listened as the languages shifted and changed around her—Catalan, Turkish, Flemish, Hebrew, Japanese—each one a different texture of sound. When MacLean spoke, she heard his Gaelic as something oracular, measured and ancient-sounding, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deep in time.

Illès opened her review with the festival's own self-aware humor. The presenter Geertjan Lubberhuizen had greeted the audience by saying, "You have chosen good poetry over bad football and you were right to do so." The other presenter, Remco Campert, was "far from impeccable," she noted, but "caught his slips and somewhat hazy delivery with his usual charm." What made the evening work, though, was something larger than any individual performance. The festival itself, Illès wrote, was "a particularly successful poetry evening," enhanced by the Turkish singer Ruhi Su performing during intermission. But more than that, it was the sheer variety of languages that created the real magic. "One of the attractions of this annually recurring and increasingly convivial festival is the whirling alternation of different languages, which together form a feast of sound."

This was not mere exoticism. Illès offered a meditation on what happens when poetry arrives in a language the listener cannot follow word by word. "If poetry is concentrated language, then poetry in a language we cannot follow word by word is concentrated sound, in which a language presents itself at its most beautiful." She then catalogued the evening's linguistic palette with the precision of someone who had listened carefully: "The singing Catalan of Augusti Bartra, the measured, oracle-like sounding Gaelic of the Scot Sorley Maclean, the babbling Turkish of Aras Oren, the familiar yet strange Flemish of Hugo Claus, the staccato American of Anne Waldman, the rhythmic and surprisingly soft Japanese of Taro Yamamoto and the stiff Hebrew of David Rokeah." MacLean's Gaelic occupied a particular place in this constellation—not exotic, but ancient, not foreign but oracular, as if the language itself carried the weight of centuries.

Two weeks after the festival ended, on July 29th, De waarheid published an extended interview with MacLean. The headline announced his own words: "I am the only poet in a family of singers, says Scottish poet Sorley MacLean." The interviewer began not with questions but with admiration for the language itself. "I have never heard a poem in such a beautiful language as the poems of Sorley Maclean in Gaelic. One of the most beautiful and sonorous languages spoken by humans." The interview had taken place during his time in Rotterdam, and now the Dutch public would hear directly from the man whose voice Illès had described as oracular.

MacLean explained his choice to write in Gaelic with a simplicity that carried its own weight. "Because it is my first language," he said. "The language I learned at home. It is the language of the people I belong to." He was not writing in an abstract commitment to linguistic preservation. He was writing in the language of his own community, the language that had shaped him. At present, he noted, eighty thousand people spoke Scottish Gaelic, and more were learning it. The language was not dead, though it was certainly endangered.

When asked what he considered important to discuss in his work, MacLean turned to the nature of poetry itself. "That poetry is lyrical," he said. "I love poetry that is lyrical; I love poetry that is a medley—perhaps a philosophical medley—bursting into lyricism. And that goes back in time." This was not a call for escape into the past. Rather, it was a vision of poetry as something that could hold multiple registers at once—philosophy and emotion, thought and song, the present moment and historical depth. He described himself as socially engaged, someone who had always been "strongly socially engaged." He stood against the ivory tower, though he acknowledged being a philosophical poet himself. "But I admit that it may be good for some," he said, with a generosity that suggested he was not condemning those who chose differently. "I do not say that you must be socially engaged. But for me it is very important to be."

To illustrate what he meant by poetry's highest calling, MacLean quoted John Keats. "For me the ideal is what Keats, a Romantic poet from the previous century, said about the highest kind of poetry: 'None approach here but those to whom the miseries of the world are miseries and will not let them rest.'" This was the standard by which he measured his own work and that of others. Poetry was not decoration or entertainment. It was a response to suffering, a refusal to look away from the world's pain.

The interviewer noted that this engagement appeared throughout MacLean's own poems—in his work about the Second World War, when he had fought in the English army in Africa against the Germans, in his treatment of fascism, in his attention to the lives of ordinary Scots. His poetry was rooted in specific historical moments and specific communities. Yet this very rootedness created a problem that MacLean saw as fundamental. "Many poets everywhere in the world face a gap that separates them from people. This is clearly a problem for MacLean," the interviewer observed.

When asked directly about this gap, MacLean acknowledged its reality without pretending to have solved it. "That problem exists in every country. I am aware of it," he said. "I have no answer for it. I cannot see a reason why we could not bridge that gap. But I know no one who has overcome it in Scotland, or England or Ireland—except perhaps Burns in the past. But then again he is also the most famous poet in the world." Robert Burns stood alone as the exception, the poet who had somehow managed to reach beyond literary circles to become part of his nation's common culture. Everyone else, MacLean seemed to be saying, remained trapped on one side of the divide.

He attributed the problem to forces larger than individual poets. "It should be that the poet would be for everyone," MacLean said. "According to him it has a lot to do with education and control of the media." The gap between poets and ordinary people was not natural or inevitable. It was constructed, maintained by systems of education that did not teach people to read poetry, by media that did not make space for it. Yet knowing this did not solve the problem. MacLean continued to write in Gaelic, the language of the people he belonged to, even as he acknowledged that most of those people could not read what he wrote.

Three months after MacLean's interview appeared in print, Hugh MacDiarmid died in Edinburgh at the age of eighty-six. The death of Scotland's most celebrated modern poet prompted substantial obituaries in Dutch newspapers, bringing another Scottish literary figure into focus. The Algemeen Dagblad reported that MacDiarmid, born Christopher Murray Grieve, had debuted in 1926 with "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" and had founded the Scottish National Party. He was, the paper noted, a convinced communist who had written an autobiography titled "Lucky Poet."

The NRC Handelsblad's arts section provided more extensive coverage, filing from Edinburgh to describe MacDiarmid as "one of Scotland's great poets." The obituary traced his major works: "In 1926 he published 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle'; in 1930 'To Circumjack Cenrastus' and the 'First Hymn to Lenin', of whom McDiarmid was an enthusiastic admirer." MacDiarmid's poetry was linguistically innovative and difficult. "His poetry, although greatly admired in literary circles, has remained a closed book for the majority of Scots, because he used old Gaelic, modern English and the contemporary dialect of the Lowlands as suppliers for his idiom." The very linguistic richness that made his work admirable to critics made it inaccessible to ordinary readers.

MacDiarmid's dual passions—Scottish nationalism and communism—had shaped his entire career. "Scottish nationalism in MacDiarmid was accompanied by a deep belief in the achievements of the Russian revolution. He immortalized Lenin not only in hymns, but also in prose: think of his essay collection 'What Lenin has meant to Scotland.'" When asked about his nationalist work, MacDiarmid had offered a defense that suggested he understood the accusation of looking backward. "When I began with these things, Scottish nationalism and Scottish language use in the twenties, the usual objection was made that I wanted to turn back the clock. But that is precisely what must happen when a clock is running wrong." He was not nostalgic. He was correcting a malfunction.

The obituary revealed something of MacDiarmid's personality through a telling detail: when he was listed in Who's Who, he had given "anglophobia" as his hobby. "This intense aversion to everything English was complemented in him by an equally intense love for Scotland." This was not a balanced position. It was passionate, even fierce, a commitment that left no room for compromise.

MacDiarmid had achieved institutional recognition that few poets attain. He was an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America, a doctor honoris causa of the University of Edinburgh, president of the Poetry Society, and professor of literature for the Royal Scottish Academy. Yet this recognition had not brought him peace with his own community. His autobiography had been so controversial that the inhabitants of his birthplace, Langholm, had once refused him official honors. Despite this rejection, "he wished to be buried in Langholm." The greatest Scottish poet since Burns, as the obituary called him, remained estranged from the place that had made him.

The recognition of Scottish literary figures in Dutch newspapers in 1978 was not unprecedented. Decades earlier, Dutch and Scottish cultural institutions had begun a conversation that would continue across the twentieth century. In February 1921, La Gazette de Hollande reported on an exhibition of modern Scottish art planned for Holland. The Nederland-Engeland Society, dedicated to promoting cordial relations between Great Britain and Holland, had invited the Society of Eight from Edinburgh to contribute a collection of pictures by modern Scottish artists. had supported the idea. Two years later, the exchange was reciprocated. "Two years ago an exhibition of Scottish Art was held in The Hague and Amsterdam under the auspices of the Netherland-England Society, and attracted considerable interest among public and press as the expression of a people whose national characteristics so closely resemble our own." The Dutch saw in Scottish culture something that reflected their own values and sensibilities. Now an exhibition of Dutch art opened in Glasgow, consisting of 119 paintings, 34 etchings and 18 works of sculpture.

Another major Scottish poet, Edwin Muir, had received obituary coverage in multiple Dutch newspapers in January 1959. Het Parool's obituary provided biographical detail: Muir was born in 1887 on the Orkney Islands, moved to Glasgow at fourteen, married the Scottish writer Willa Anderson in 1919, and lived in London, Prague, and Italy before teaching poetry at the universities of Edinburgh and Harvard in his final years. "Muir wrote extremely refined and simple poetry," the obituary noted. Together with his wife, he had translated Herman Broch and Franz Kafka. "His first poems appeared only in 1925. In total he published no more than six volumes of poetry, which however brought him great fame." Even a poet with a small body of work could achieve recognition if the work was good enough.

Poetry International served as a key mechanism for this ongoing Dutch-Scottish cultural exchange. The festival brought MacLean to Rotterdam in June 1978, where he performed his Gaelic poetry before a Dutch audience that could not understand the words but could hear the music. The festival's structure—with presenters providing translations and introductions—made Scottish poetry accessible to those who could not read Gaelic or Scots. Vera Illès's review in the NRC Handelsblad placed MacLean's voice within a larger constellation of minority languages, each one beautiful precisely because it was foreign, each one a different kind of sound that revealed something about language itself. The De waarheid interview, published two weeks after his performance, extended this engagement, allowing MacLean to speak at length about his work, his language, and his vision of poetry's social role.

Yet the interview also revealed the fundamental tension that MacLean lived with every day. He wrote in Gaelic, the language of the people he belonged to, yet most of those people could not read his work. He believed poetry should be for everyone, yet he knew of no one who had bridged the gap between poets and ordinary people except Burns, who had become so famous that he transcended the category of poet altogether. He attributed the problem to education and media control, structural forces beyond any individual's power to overcome. And still he wrote in Gaelic, still he insisted on the importance of social engagement, still he measured poetry by standards that demanded the poet's full moral commitment to the world's suffering.

MacDiarmid had faced a different but related problem. His poetry was admired in literary circles but remained a closed book for most Scots. His own birthplace had rejected him, yet he wished to be buried there. He had achieved every institutional honor available to a poet, yet remained estranged from his own community. He had tried to correct a clock that was running wrong, to revive a language and a national consciousness that had been suppressed. The Dutch newspapers that mourned his death recognized him as great, but they also documented the gap between his achievement and his reach.

In Rotterdam, in the summer of 1978, a Scottish poet stood before a Dutch audience and spoke in a language almost no one there could understand, and a critic heard in that incomprehensibility something beautiful—the sound of a language presenting itself at its most beautiful, precisely because it could not be followed word by word. That was not a solution to the gap between poetry and ordinary people. But it was something. It was a moment when the gap itself became visible, when the problem MacLean had named became real and present in the room.