Central Park by peterjr1961 under a Creative Commons license

‘Lines to a Gentleman’ was penned in 1790 after Robert Burns was sent a free copy of a newspaper by an editor looking to use his poetry. In it, Burns thanks the editor for updating him on ‘French mischief’, ‘the drumlie Dutch’, ‘cut-throat Prussian blades’ and ‘How libbet Italy was singin’. It shows Burns took an interest in the international scene of the day. And in time, the international scene would come to take an interest in him.

The earliest printed translation of a Burns poem into a foreign language appeared in 1795, ‘Das Leben wär’ ein leerer Schall’, a German translation of ‘Green Grow the Rushes’. Germany, especially in the 19th century, had an affinity with Burns’s verse, and to this day German is the language into which he is most often translated. What was it about Burns that so appealed to Germany, a country that didn’t exist at the time of the poet’s death? In the late 1820s, Goethe and Thomas Carlyle corresponded on the subject of Burns. Germany’s national poet celebrated Burns’s use of folk songs, and was saddened that his country had ignored its own traditions. Following Goethe’s lead, German critics used Burns to bash contemporary German literature.

There was a divide, however, between those who praised Burns as an exemplar of ‘Heimatkunst’, or ‘regional art’, and others who saw him as (to borrow a phrase from Frederick Schlegel) a writer of ‘progressive universal poetry’. The divide seen in Britain, between those who praised Burns as ‘a heaven-taught ploughman’ and those who viewed his poetry as rather more sophisticated than that suggested, was repeated in Europe. In France, Victor Hugo wrote in 1866 to tell the poet George Métivier (known as the ‘Burns of Guernsey’) that he believed there were two kinds of poet: the universal (as exemplified by Homer) and the local (he cited Burns).

Issues of translation coloured the debate. In 1859, an article on Burns in the French periodical Le Magasin pittoresque lamented, ‘As almost all [the works of Burns] were composed in the Scottish dialect, we can only know them through translations: so we hardly manage to perceive their charm.’ In Italy nearly 30 years later, poet, critic and director-general of education Giuseppe Chiarini wrote an essay, ‘Roberto Burns’s, which addressed the impossibility of translating Burns: ‘When I come to making readers feel…the power of expression and of the sounds of the songs of the Scottish bard, neither I nor another more skilful than me could succeed.’

In Russia, 600,000 volumes of Burns translations were sold during the Communist years. Yet even in the USSR, where the Kremlin held Burns Nights, translation complicated what on the surface seemed a straightforward appreciation. Samuil Marshak, a poet and friend of Gorky, translated Shakespeare, Blake – and Burns. Any attempt to render the use of dialect into a Russian equivalent was spurned, while poems that reflected on Scotland’s place in the world and its relations with England were ignored. ‘Scotland’ was translated as ‘motherland’. Marshak’s Burns could not be described as a local or ‘Heimatkunst’ poet. The Soviet authorities were interested in an international Burns, and were not averse to nipping and tucking his work to make him so.

With a straight translation difficult, oftentimes what seems to have appealed to European readers through the 19th century and into the 20th was Burns’s politics – or at least, what was perceived to be Burn’s politics. Left-wingers and national groupings struggling for statehood adopted Burns as their own. ‘Trotz Alledem’, a translation of ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’, was taken up by the German left, and it is said Karl Liebknecht, a leader of the socialist Spartacus movement, sung it before he was executed in 1919.

At the same time, outside Europe, the British Empire, and the Scots who worked for it, was taking Burns to new parts of the world. The first Burns supper was held as early as 1812 in Calcutta by homesick soldiers. Burns came to signify all things Scottish for many toiling on foreign shores for the Empire. While European liberation movements claimed Burns’s poetry and his life for their own, outside Europe he was increasingly part of the culture of the British Empire; so much so it is said that there are said to be more statues of Burns around the world than anyone other than Queen Victoria and Christopher Columbus. It’s a dichotomy worthy of the famed ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’.

Burns’s reputation since the 19th century has, like many a great poet, dimmed and found its light again. In our nearest neighbour, England, for example, Burns has gone from having his own chapter in the 1957 edition of the Penguin Guide to English Literature to, half a century later, not finding a place in companion volumes concerning the Romantic period. On the other hand, in the Year of Homecoming, 3,600 Burns Night Suppers were held in 80 countries, with only a third of those taking place in Scotland. Burns continues to appear around the world often in the most surprising places. Take the artist Chiang Yee, who painted Burns in traditional Chinese peasant garb. Or the recent story (can it be true?) that Michael Jackson recorded an album of Burns songs before his death. Where next for Burns? In 2010, astronaut Nick Patrick took a book of Burns poetry on a two-week space mission. This volume completed 217 orbits of the earth and travelled over 5.7 million miles. Burns intergalactic?

Category: Robert Burns, Scots