A Disquieting Voice: The Scottish Poet Edwin Muir
By Stephen Wilson, one of our reporters abroad
“Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation,” thunders Edwin Muir in his poem 'Scotland 1941'. Judging by the poem, Edwin Muir seems to have lost patience with many prevailing images of a ‘romantic Scotland’ associated with dwelling in some scenic and idyllic paradise where local people live in a warm and friendly community and sing, dance, and feel at home.
Like many Scots, Muir felt exasperated with misleading and crude stereotypes of Scots who were thought to belong to a clan, wear a particular tartan kilt, and show prowess as a soldier. Unlike many Scots, Muir had the audacity to blatantly challenge this crude caricature of the Scots by arguing there were other voices in Scotland which deserve a hearing.. He understood the iconography often promoted by the Tourist industry commits a grave injustice to a much deeper, sophisticated and infinitely complex culture. There is not just one voice in Scotland but many! And Edwin Muir is one author who deserves to be heard.
I can suggest three reasons for reading Muir. Firstly, it is not without significance that he, along with his wife Wilma, were the first translators to translate the works of Franz Kafka into English. Secondly, his autobiography and work 'A Scottish Journey,' (1935) reveal the harsh reality of so many people growing up in terrible poverty, deprivation, and squalor in Scotland. Thirdly, in contrast to so much pretentious poetry his poems retain a raw honesty, integrity and beautiful simplicity.
Muir was his own man. He was not afraid to speak his own mind. He did not court popularity and acceptance. Unfortunately, Muir remains largely unknown abroad.
Poet Edwin Muir
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When people think of Scottish poets, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson spring to mind. Mention Muir and you are answered back "Muir Who ?" I feel Muir does not deserve this obscurity. So I think it is time to change all this!
I don't think it is any accident that Edwin Muir, from Orkney, along with his wife, were the first to translate the works of Franz Kafka into English. If you peruse the autobiography of Muir you'll find that Muir, like Kafka, felt like a complete outsider in Scotland after moving from a family in Orkney into the hellish housing conditions of Glasgow where some of his own siblings died from ill-health. Both Muir and Kafka were traumatized by their childhood and felt a terrible sense of displacement and vacuum. The deep alienation Muir felt was expressed in the following words-
He said, “I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about 200 years old. I have skipped 150 of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was 14 no time accident happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751 but 1901 and that 150 years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751 and remained there for a long time.” Muir then comments that since then he had became obsessed with time.
Muir and his wife translated the works of Franz Kafka into beautiful, straightforward and accessible prose. He persuaded the publisher Martin Secker to publish 'The Castle' in 1930, and ‘The Trial’ in 1937 as well as his short stories. The translations are not without faults because the translator's German was rather limited. But because Muir had such an affinity with Kafka in the sense of being an alien and outsider in his own county he was well qualified by experience to capture the strangeness of the human predicament.
You could argue that this task of rendering Kafka into English acted as a catalyst behind the Scottish Renaissance of the 1990's because so many Scottish writers such as Jame Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Ian Banks all acknowledge the influence of Kafka in their works. For instance, Ritchie Robertson states, “Alasdair Gray's Lanark comes helpfully equipped with an 'index of plagiarisms' which includes the image of a human shape outlined against a lit window, taken from the last chapter of 'The Trial' {page 11 of the I ntroduction to Klaus Wagenbach's biography of Kafka 2003}
Secondly, Muir is not afraid to fully look at the tragedy of Scottish history in the eye. He argued that the reformer John Knox robbed Scotland of the full fruits of the renaissance by helping to suppress the Scottish Gaelic language and culture not to mention the theater. For over two centuries the theater was banned in Scotland. Scotland was a country which along with Germany burnt the most witches in Europe as well as committed genocide against the Gypsies by ordering them to be put to death. The infatuation with Burns and Scott is no consolation for a subsequent impoverished identity. For the Scots were deprived of a vibrant theater as well as a more critical philosophical tradition.
The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre summed this loss up by stating that 'a non-philosophical culture' emerged from the 18th century where theology and philosophy were marginalized from Scottish life. He argues, “It is a commonplace that Hume aspired to deprive theology of its traditional centrality. It is less often remarked that philosophy, on a Humean view, itself becomes a less than central activity” {page 301, of 'Whose Justice ? Which Rationality?’ by Alasdair MacIntyre, 2001 edition}.
What are the implications of this? You have a situation where less people question reality around them because they know all the answers in advance! You have an already answer rather than questioning culture. In his work 'A Scottish Journey’ (1935) Muir identifies the deindustrialization which was afflicting Scotland in the 1930's which would continue to scar Scotland well into the 1980's and 1990's.
Muir's poetry—unlike much modern poetry—is not only simple and readily accessible. It can be profound and poignant. It can address many questions people seek to avoid. For instance,
in one poem you hear the voice of suffering refugees who are detained by a patrol. Muir had enormous empathy where he could put himself in the shoes of a refugee undergoing intense interrogation. In the poem, the refugee says the following:
“The interrogation began. He says
the whole must come out now,
Who , What we are, Where we
have come from , with what purpose,
whose country or camp you came to
plot or betray,
Question on question.”
The reader himself feels the agony of being interrogated as well as the absurd atmosphere of paranoia. The last lines are particularly haunting and reminiscent of Kafka -
“We are on the very edge.
Endurance almost done.
And still the interrogation
is going on.”
You might misconstrue Muir as being one of the darkest poets and authors around. But believe it or not, he wrote one of the most optimistic poems about the aftermath of a nuclear war called 'The Horses.' In this poem despite the mass destruction,in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the horses run up to the survivors ready to help humanity. The lines read:
“Barely a 12 months after
The 7 days war that put the world to sleep.
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence.”
In this poem Muir is critical of the relentless advance of new technology going as far as calling tractors 'dark sea monsters'. He writes,
“We had sold our horses in our father's time,
to buy new tractors.
Now they were strange to us,
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient
shield or illustrations in a book of knights.”
Muir excels at writing narrative poems! He represents one voice from Scotland that ought to be heard much more. His poetry is poignant, profound and perceptive.
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For further reading:
1. T.M. Devine ‘The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007,’ London: Penguin Books, 2006. This book is one of the most open-minded accounts on Scottish history and candid enough so as to be unafraid to pull punches. Devine quotes quite a bit of Muir's work 'A Scottish Journey' (1935) to describe the overall economic decline of Scotland in the 1930's.
2. Louis Stott, ‘Scottish History in Verse,’ Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing, 2013. You can read Muir's poem ‘Robert the Bruce’ as well as the scathing poem 1941.
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Whose Justice? Which Rationality?’, London: Duckworth, 2001 edition. MacIntyre expresses astonishment that such a false image of Scotland has managed to persist from the late 19th century to the present. His comments on the declining role of philosophy in Scotland and the world are still relevant. The prevailing anti-intellectual culture which prevails throughout Britain was partly inspired by Hume who saw philosophy as a kind of hobby comparable to collecting things like stamps or hunting.
4. Klaus Wagenbach, ‘Kafka,’ Translated by Edwald Osers. London: Haus Publishing, 2003 edition. The introduction by Ritchie Robertson mentions the strong connection between Scottish literature and Kafka.