Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ

Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ the Event

Before Burns: Scots Poets and the Classics

As Burns’ Night approaches – the annual international celebration on January 25 of Scotland’s best-known poet – it seems appropriate to honour two other of Scotland’s finest poets, Gavin Douglas (c. 1474-1522) and Allan Ramsay (1686-1758). Douglas was the first poet in the British Isles to provide a verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into the vernacular, while Ramsay was a Scots poet, translator, and collector of early Scots songs who was influenced by Douglas and in turn influenced Robert Burns. From medieval times to the present day, Scottish writers have turned to translating classical Greek and Roman texts to confront their fraught history and celebrate themselves as a people. Gavin Douglas’ 1513 translation of Virgil’s epic into vigorous, resonant Scots was a landmark achievement, admired and drawn on by later English translators, and yet it is now often omitted from literary histories. The Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, proved a serious threat to the vitality of Scottish literature, for patronage of the arts swiftly came to be centred in London. In the early eighteenth century, Ramsay sought to revive Scots as a poetic language in resistance to the increasing Anglicisation of literature in Scotland. In our seminar, I will give a quick introduction to the social and political circumstances in which Douglas and Ramsay wrote. Then, after a quick look at Douglas’s achievement, we will look closely at Ramsay’s rendition of a famous ode by the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC), a drinking poem for arousing cheer on a freezing winter night. In Ramsay’s spirited translation of this ode into the Scottish tongue, he adroitly engages with both Rome and England and with the local landscape around Edinburgh to assert a strong sense of independent cultural authority, at a time when Scottish national politics were particularly contentious. Douglas and Ramsay are important early champions of the Scottish language, writers who, by showing the enabling power of the word music of Scots, paved the way for Burns--and indeed for the dynamic literary and artistic scene in Scotland today.

Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ the Speaker

I was born and raised in Scotland. I was educated at the University of St. Andrews and then at the University of California, Berkeley, in Comparative Literature. I started Latin at age 11 because it was required at my high school. Not everyone liked that requirement, but the teachers were so engaging--one, an amateur actor, would skip about the classroom leading us in chants of Latin verbs! In university too my teachers were passionate and inspiring about Latin literature. I have taught in the Classics Department at Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ for eleven years. I am the author of several books on Roman poetry and many articles. My talk today comes from my book in progress, The Voice of the North: Scotland and the Classics.

Additional Resources

Ìý Scots Poets and the Classics Resources

Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ the Series

The Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder Retired Faculty Association (UCBRFA) presents the distinguished professors of the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ, aÌýlecture and presentation series featuring some of our finest professors andÌýtheir extraordinary research and scholarly work.