It's time to embrace the legacy of this rebel poet

I joined some locals and tourists at Mingary Castle, just by Kilchoan village, and walked east with them for a mile, past the remains of crofts cleared in 1828, to stand beside a stream that leaped over rocks in the sun.

The burn, Allt Choire Mhuilinn, divides a sloping pasture where, higher up the field, two or three dozen cattle and their calves were lowing as we formed a circle to hear Taylor Strickland and Alasdair Whyte perform the poem Allt an t-Siùcar/The Sugar Burn.

The poem, a favourite at Mods and ceilidhs to this day, is by the most famous resident of this bit of land and perhaps of the whole peninsula. Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair farmed these fields, taught its folk, and fought its foes.

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A MacDonald of noble stock, he was the schoolteacher until his conversion to the Jacobite cause ahead of the 1745 rising led him to become a commander and Gaelic tutor to Charles, the Bonnie Prince.

A rebel and at times an outlaw, he was exiled far from Allt an t-Siùcar when he wrote his tribute to this tributary, “Where milk and honey burst forth/And waters run over sugar crystals”.

Alasdair Whyte sang first, channelling the poet’s sweet and sad nostalgia for a place that once was home, before Taylor Strickland read from his fluid translation that echoed the repeated words and cadences of the original – clear water ringing clear – in graceful meter.

Besides reciting the poem, Strickland shared a few of his thoughts on the provenance of the burn’s name. The name was puzzling, he pointed out, because sùicar had morphed from the Gaelic salach. The burn had originally been known as “the filthy burn” and was used as the village latrine.

Alasdair Whyte performs Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s poem Allt an t-Siùcar/ The Sugar Burn, (Image: NQ)

For Strickland, a native of Florida who stumbled upon Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair after falling in love with Scottish culture, the simple explanation that the poet wished to remember it fondly as a land of milk and honey does not fit the laddish qualities that Strickland found in his work.

He preferred to imagine the great poet drunk on sweet spirits, and pissing in the burn, turning it sugary thereby. This image had a kind of romance but left some of us nonplussed. Simple nostalgia seemed more believable.

That evening, both Strickland and Whyte performed again in Kilchoan village hall, where colourful pictures of Allt an t-Siùcar by the children at the primary school were displayed beneath the stage. Before the poetry, the packed hall was treated to an adorable performance of Brochan Lum and other Gaelic songs by children decked in tartan sashes.

The audiences’ hearts were warmed and they were not quite prepared for what came next. Strickland, in body warmer and flat cap, took the stage to read from his new collection Dastram Delirium which had rendered Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair in a way that was – there is no other word for it – openly erotic.

His translations, fine, graceful and free, evoked the poet’s delirious excitement about his one-time lover, Morag. Her rowanberry smile! Her seductive touches! Her pubic places! I felt a slight stiffening in the room – of backs, I hasten to add – by an audience not expecting their schoolteacher bard to be so lascivious.

The atmosphere changed again when Alasdair Whyte took the stage. A native of Mull, a scholar of place names and an artist and singer devoted to sharing Gaelic culture with every generation, the poems he sang were romantic in an entirely different way.

His set included songs composed by Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair after the Act of Proscription, when Highlanders were forbidden from bearing arms or wearing the plaid, and his voice carried the deep emotion of these Jacobite songs: anger and sadness, humour and hope.

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There were poems in the voice of Charles Edward Stuart, laments about the humiliations of the disarming and disclothing legislation, and rallying calls for another uprising. Indeed, there is a kind of yearning in these Jacobite panegyrics that is not unlike romantic love: Never shall you take Prince Charles/From us, till we’re a-dying.

To our souls he’s woven/Firmly waulked, and tightly locked.

Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair used similar words to praise both Charles and Morag, but the two different approaches to his poetry this evening perhaps reflect two romantic visions of Scotland and its suppressed language and culture.

In the US and throughout the world, people swoon for horny clansmen who find a lusty invitation in the eyes of gentle lassies.

The motif of the outlaw Highlander free from the constraints of society has been phenomenally bolstered, of course, by Outlander, but it can also be seen on the shelves of public libraries in America displaying hunky Highlander romantic fiction by the likes of Maya Banks and Suzanne Enoch, and on the cardboard cut-outs of topless men in kilts that are propped up outside the tartan tat shops at the top of Edinburgh’s High Street.

At the other extreme, there is Scotland’s sense of itself. Much of this nation’s romance is political. The yearning both for freedom and return, for a better fortune and the restoration of a former way of life, is all born of that odd contradictory desire for both wildness and familiarity.

Alongside this old antisyzygy is the desire for the disruptive process that will get us there, through one final push, one more uprising, one more second coming.

In one of Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s poems, A Song to the Prince, “he is coming” like “dog-tooth in the wind-storm seen”, the bit of rainbow seen by sailors in the wind that precedes a storm.

To transform the thought into the Scots of Hamish Henderson, this romance is both being at hame wi freedom, as well as the roch wind, from which change will come.

On the way back from the Sugar Burn, I talked with a local about why, after Prince Charles’s fatal misjudgement to stand and fight at Culloden, even neutral clans kept him safe. Loyalty and deep conviction of this kind cannot easily be expressed in terms of our own communities and culture.

But if we wish to understand it, historian and song collector John Lorne Campbell suggests that the poems by Alasdair and his contemporaries are among the best access we have to the thoughts of those who took part in “the most profound adventure in which this country has ever taken part”.

Taylor Strickland's book Dastram/Delirium is published by Broken Sleep Books, an independent publisher keen to promote minority languages in translation. It is a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice.