Blossom and Bile, by Ronald Black
Uirsgeul (Glasgow 1991) was Christopher Whyte’s first published collection. It appeared just four years after he began writing his own work in Gaelic, although he had previously enjoyed many years of apprenticeship as a translator. More than a decade was to pass before the publication of his second book, An Tràth Duilich (Callander 2002), containing poems written in 1989 and 1990.
In the fevered pages of Uirsgeul Whyte plunges straight into the dichotomy that has given his poetry its most fundamental dynamic tension. This is clearly spelt out in ‘Gearan’ (‘Protest’), which he translated himself:
If God has marked me out for a poet,
struggling amidst the branches of this language
until a blossom breaks out, a miracle
on the harshness of a black and naked bough,
scattering its fragrance like a gentle phantom
wandering through the wooded labyrinth –
why was I also given heavy bile that incessantly torments me,
estrangement from the surface of the world,
always a foreigner, unwise, over-sensitive,
incapable of offering unmixed
loyalty to a person or a concept
because his core is treacherous, his pleasure
constantly shifting, who’d say in candid terms
how much his love burns, if he didn’t know
that that would be equivalent to a curse?
Here then are two Christopher Whytes, both of whom we meet constantly, in different moods, throughout Uirsgeul and ever since. Firstly there is the Whyte who has been given a divine gift (note “God”, “miracle”) to benefit humanity through the beauty of his verse (“blossom”, “fragrance”), expressing it in an idiom which he is still acquiring (“struggling amidst the branches of this language”, “the harshness of a black and naked bough”).
This first Whyte eagerly accepts the challenge, which clearly carries the universal power of myth: Christ, Jason, Ulysses, name your hero. But he’s constantly being pulled into the pit by the second Whyte, an anxious, confused young man from a middle-class Catholic background in the West of Scotland, whose education got it wrong about language and culture, whose religion got it wrong about sex, whose parents (he seems to say) got it wrong about practically everything, and who desperately wants to share all this with us in his verse, but is never quite sure if he really should, so he weighs and measures it carefully before serving it up.
In the original Gaelic of ‘Gearan’, two elements deepen the dichotomy. The “foreigner” with lower-case “f” is in fact a Gall with upper-case G – a Lowlander or non-Gael and thus a foreigner in his own land. And this is the key to the other element. Whyte seems to be filled with envy of the life and work of Sorley MacLean, whose loyalties to persons and concepts were clear enough. To those of us who know MacLean’s work in the original, our suspicion is confirmed by the Eimhiresque flavour of lasantachd a ghaoil, literally “the flaming passion of his love”.
Uirsgeul truly shows Whyte “struggling amidst the branches of this language”. He experiments with different verse-forms, including many which are traditional to Gaelic, but rejects rhyme. His lack of familiarity with spoken Gaelic leaves his verse unrhythmical to a startling degree. There is too much dictionary and too little diction. And in the fashion of the 1980s and 1990s he furnished his work with facing translations in English. Though this clarified the more difficult words and passages and broadened his readership, he has since given up translating himself.
But those who reached the last poem in the book, ‘Fontana Maggiore’, were awestruck at the degree of maturity which he had in fact attained. Here was the first Whyte in full flow, a Gaelic Robert Browning. It’s a description of a 13th century fountain in Perugia placed in the mouth of its sculptor, Giovanni Pisano. Its intention is clear. Whyte wishes to show that his beleaguered and inward-looking little language from the Atlantic seaboard can express the thoughts of an urban sophisticate who operates at the centre of civilisation and at the cutting edge of art. The key to originality is distance in time, place, subject and tone from the staples of twentieth-century Gaelic verse. The subject is sculpture, and the tone is that of a dominant majority culture, an elusive touch of humour being offered by Pisano’s self-satisfaction. In Whyte’s translation, it begins:
I have bound the waters
in a perfect circle of marble,
the colour of snow and roses,
a day gate to bridle and control
the upsurge from the deep,
the eternal, anarchic leaping of dark wells.
What the non-Gaelic reader needs to be told is that in these six lines Whyte achieves the rhythm and feel of good Gaelic verse. Right at the start there is an echo of aicill, a ubiquitous kind of traditional rhyme that subtly links the end of a line to the middle of the next, pulling the narrative forward (uisgeachan: chuibhreachadh). The second line, a chuibhreachadh an cearcall coilionta, has alliteration throughout. The end of the third line rhymes perfectly with the end of the sixth, but not in an obvious way (ròs: dorch). There is another touch of aicill between the fourth and fifth, where strictly it shouldn’t be (srian: riaghladh). And the sixth line, air sìor-leum ceannairceach nan tobar dorch, is rhythmically magnificent.
Thus there is convergence. On the one hand, Whyte has established a medium in which he feels comfortable: free verse, unrhymed, with longish regular-looking lines of three or four beats. On the other, this is beginning to be informed, involuntarily perhaps, by the morphology of the language and the prosody of its verse. A fluent speaker’s instincts have kicked in.
Christopher knows well that it is the first Whyte, not the second, who possesses that quality of universality which can make a good poet great. As in ‘Fontana Maggiore’, the first Whyte is marked by beauty, exoticism and a big image. Other such poems are ‘An Daolag Shìonach’ (‘The Chinese Beetle’), ‘Envoi’, and ‘Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria Malibran’ (‘From the Diary of Maria Malibran’). Usually Whyte is careful to place them at the end of a sequence, no doubt to whet the appetite for even better things to come, but the Malibran poem is curiously upside-down. Whyte’s ability to describe the world at length through the eyes of a female opera-singer in the Paris of 1830 is a huge step forward for Gaelic verse. He does not stop there, however. Enter the second Whyte, bilious, in italics, with a message for his readers, attacking them, justifying his alter ego’s choice of subject-matter, and ending, fortunately, with a wonderfully resonant couplet containing an echo of deibhidhe end-rhyme:
’s an leabhar ùr fa chomhair nan sùl ùr ac’,
a sgrìobh mi mu Maria Malibran.
(“while facing their new eyes is the new / book that I wrote about Maria Malibran.”)
I feel tempted to characterise this dualism as “Whyte & Mackay”, a bottle of which I have downstairs. Excellent stuff it is, with a whiff of Islay, just as in Christopher’s Gaelic. But the main point is that it’s a blend. Just as Sorley MacLean would be nothing without his Eimhir, all of the four poems I’ve just mentioned are bold statements of artistic aims or methods, and in all of them the second Dr Whyte – Mr Mackay if you like – pops up with his demons. His is the signature that makes a Whyte poem authentic. In ‘Fontana Maggiore’ he is Giovanni Pisano with his art, his enemies and his swagger.
No one knows better than Dr Whyte that his work must ultimately become a blend, and indeed it is this strong sense of movement towards well-visualised goals that makes it exciting. As he has written in ‘Boireannach air an Tràigh’ (‘Woman on the Beach’), one of his Budapest poems of April 2006 (my translation):
Poetry itself must be a target
for the attention that’s awakened, not the person
who composed it, or his suffering.
True poetry’s but a sign,
a whisper that leads us away
from the writer in another direction, a direction
that doesn’t depend on him, and where
we don’t need him either, just a way
of liberating words..
Ronald Black was for many years the Gaelic correspondent of The Scotsman, Edinburgh’s daily newspaper. He taught till 2002 in the Department of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh and is now a freelance writer and journalist, dealing mainly with Gaelic and Highland subjects.
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